The Tent Cities of Fayette and Haywood Counties in Tennessee were the result of early efforts to register African American voters in those counties between 1959 and 1962. When John McFerren of Fayette County and other activists began their voter registration drive, many of the potential voters were sharecroppers who were evicted from white-owned farms. McFerren and other activists created homes for evicted families in surplus Army tents on the farms of black landowners Shepard Towles and Gertrude Beasley which became known as Tent City. Black families lived in these tents from December 1959 until April 1963.

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Two years prior, on September 9, 1957, the Eighty-Fifth Congress of the United States enacted the first civil rights bill since 1875. The legislation encouraged the United States Government to initiate civil suits in federal courts where any individual or group was prohibited from voting due to their race. Local activist John McFerren of Fayette County and C.P. Boyd of Haywood County saw this legislation as their opportunity to get blacks on the voting rolls and in court trials as prospective jurors.

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McFerren and other Fayette County activists formed the Original Fayette County Civic nd Welfare League Inc. C.P. Boyd formed the Haywood County Civic and Welfare League. The main goal for both organizations was to initiate a voter registration campaign. Because local African Americans had been denied the right to cast votes in the August 1959 Democratic primary, the organizations in 1960 filed suit against the local Democratic Party. When their suit was victorious in court, many Fayette and Haywood County whites responded with economic reprisals against all local blacks. White merchants refused to sell goods and services to blacks. White physicians withheld medical care from black patients. White property owners evicted more than 400 blacks tenant families off their lands. White supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Council terrorized blacks in both counties.

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Tent City in Tennessee
Courtesy Special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries, Fair use image

 

In response, John McFerren, C.P. Boyd, and other activists set up surplus army tents on land provided by African American landowners Shepard Towles and Gertrude Beasley for now homeless families who had been evicted for attempting to vote. Those encampments later became known as tent cities of Fayette and Haywood Counties.

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By 1960, the Tent Cities in Fayette and Haywood Counties started to gain national attention. On November 18, 1960, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit against thirty-six landowners who had evicted their black tenant farmers. On December 14, 1960, the Justice Department filed suit against an additional forty-five landowners, twenty-four merchants, and one financial institution in Fayette County for violating the civil rights of African Americans. On July 26, 1962, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Malcolm McRae Jr., ruled that the landowners were permanently enjoined from engaging in any acts for the purpose of interfering with the right of any person to register to vote for candidates for public office. By 1962, many African Americans including most of those forced into the Tent Cities of Fayette and Haywood Counties had registered to vote and the encampments were disbanded.

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How would you like it if your family was kicked out of its home and forced to live in a tent for more than a year? This happened to thousands of people in Fayette and Haywood counties in the early 1960s, in a chapter of the Civil Rights Movement known as “Tent City.” Here’s what happened:

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In the 1950s, two-thirds of the people in Fayette and Haywood counties were black, but practically none of them were allowed to vote. In the spring and summer of 1959, many blacks in the two counties, along with black and white Civil Rights activists from other parts of the country, tried to change this by organizing a voter registration drive. This didn’t work either; when black voters turned up to vote in Fayette and Haywood counties on August 1, 1959, some of them were told that they weren’t allowed to vote because it was a “white primary.”

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At the time, most black people in this part of Tennessee didn’t own their own land, but worked as sharecroppers on white-owned farms, and lived in shacks located on those farms. When blacks filed a lawsuit to challenge the election, many white landowners evicted them from their property.

 

Meanwhile, many white businessmen began refusing to do business with black people — which meant black people couldn’t buy gasoline, buy groceries, or go to the doctor, in Fayette and Haywood counties (many began driving to Memphis for their services at that time.)

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One of the few black farmers who owned his land was Shephard Towles. When white landowners began evicting their black sharecropper families, Towles built a series of army surplus tents on his land (near Somerville) for these families to live in. (The tents were donated by people of both races). Within a few weeks there were hundreds of people living in Towles’ “tent city.” Soon there was another Tent City near the Fayette County town of Moscow.

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McFerren’s Grocery was an important center for Fayette County’s African-American community during the Tent City Movement.

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These families lived in tents for more than a year in conditions we would describe today as inhuman. (Dozens of families shared a single outhouse, for instance.) Fortunately for them, they received food and supplies from a local organization of black leaders known as the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League, from national organizations such as the National Baptist Convention and the NAACP, and from private donors all over the country.

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In 1962 a federal court made it clear that landowners could not use economic pressureand evict people as a method of discouraging them to vote. This, however, didn’t help the people living in the tent cities, since it didn’t force landowners to take their tenants back. It took years for many of the tent city residents to find places to live. A lot of them left the county and the state forever. Blacks in Fayette and Haywood counties weren’t really allowed to vote until the national Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enforced in the late 1960s.

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For more information on Tent City, click here for a webpage devoted to the movement that is produced by the Benjamin Hooks Center at the University of Memphis.

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