Colored (Negro) Department: Tennessee School for the Deaf (TSD)

In 1852 a petition to admit a Black pupil to the Tennessee School for the Deaf was refused. James Mason, born enslaved around 1840 and later Knoxville's second Black policeman, began teaching deaf children in his home in 1879. The legislature created a school for Black deaf children on April 4, 1881, with $2,500, and it opened with ten pupils lodged at Mason's house. The state rented a Dandridge Avenue house in 1883 and bought the property in 1885. Matthew Mann taught there until a 1901 law required teachers to share their students' race.

What the plaque says

Colored (Negro) Department: Tennessee School for the Deaf (TSD) In 1879 former slave James Mason began a school for deaf American Americans in his downtown Knoxville home. In 1881 the state assumed operation of the school, funding this site in 1833. Matthew Mann, an alumnus of the TSD white school, taught the first classes here, which for many years were conducted in a residence on 27 acres. The school building was added in 1841 under Department Principal Henry Edmunds. African American students lived and received instruction at this location until 1965, when TSD's Island Home campus was integrated.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 0.7 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Blount Mansion — 1.8 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 17 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 18 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• First African American Church — 0.5 mi
• Odd Fellows Cemetery — 0.8 mi
• Confederate Cemetery — 0.9 mi
• Island Home — 1.1 mi