First Community Church

JohnEtta Hayes, born in Dechard in 1915, belonged to First Community for seventy-one years and served on its trustee board. In 1962 she petitioned the school board to desegregate Hume-Fogg Technical High School. She served on the executive council of Highlander Folk School and as assistant secretary of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council in 1959. She sat on a committee advising President Johnson and Congress on an equal opportunities study tied to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1966 she became the only woman on the fifteen-member Metro Human Relations Commission. She died in 2008.

What the plaque says

First Community Church In July 1932, the Rev. Wayman R. Horton organized the First Independent African Methodist Community Church. Instrumental in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement, the church's name was officially changed to First Community Church in 1966. The Rev. C.T. Vivian, who led the congregation from 1957 to 1961, initiated the building of this structure, which was completed in 1961. Civil Rights activist Johnetta F. Hayes, a life-long member of the church and the first woman to serve as president of the Nashville Chapter of the NAACP, was instrumental in the 1957 struggle to desegregate Nashville public schools. Continued The Rev. Vivian, a leading figure in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement, was a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. On 19 April 1960, after the bombing of attorney Z. Alexander Looby's home, he and Diane Nash challenged Mayor Ben West, which caused the mayor to affirm that Nashville lunch counters should be desegregated. On 10 May 1960, Nashville became the first major southern city to desegregate its lunch counters.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.3 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.4 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 — 1.6 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 — 1.8 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.

More markers nearby

• Desegregating Nashville's Lunch Counters — 0.2 mi
• Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company — 0.3 mi
• Jubilee Hall — 0.3 mi
• Bombing of the Z. Alexander Looby Home — 0.3 mi