Avon N. Williams, Jr.

Avon Williams was born in Knoxville in 1921, graduated from Johnson C. Smith University, studied law at Boston University and was admitted to the bar in 1948. He moved to Nashville in 1953 and joined Z. Alexander Looby's practice. In 1955 he and Looby filed Kelley v. Board of Education, a school desegregation case that ran for thirty years. In 1967 he represented the I-40 Steering Committee in a suit to keep the interstate from cutting through North Nashville. He died in 1994, and the downtown Tennessee State campus bears his name.

What the plaque says

Avon N. Williams, Jr. A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Avon N. Williams, Jr., was an attorney, statewide civil rights leader, politician, educator, and a founder of the Davidson County Independent Political Council and the Tennessee Voters Council. In 1950, as a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he and attorneys Z. Alexander Looby and Carl Cowan filed and successfully litigated McSwain v. Board of Anderson County, Tennessee, the first public school desegregation case in the state. Assisting in every school desegregation case statewide except Shelby County, he was counsel for the plaintiff intervenors in the Tennessee State University / University of Tennessee at Nashville merger suit. In 1979, under federal court order, UTN merged with TSU. Williams was elected to the state legislature in 1968, becoming the first African-American state senator from Nashville to serve as a member of the Tennessee General Assembly. He represented the 19th district for more than 20 years, serving as a member of the 86th through the 96th General Assembly of Tennessee.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee State Capitol — 0.2 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 0.3 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 0.5 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.
• Ryman Auditorium — 0.5 mi
  The 1892 brick tabernacle in downtown Nashville that was the Grand Ole Opry's home from 1943 to 1974, now a National Historic Landmark and working concert hall.

More markers nearby

• Edwin W. Craig — steps away
• War Memorial Auditorium Building — 0.2 mi
• Tennessee State Capitol — 0.2 mi
• Downtown Presbyterian Church — 0.4 mi