Juno Frankie Pierce

Before this school existed, Black girls the courts called delinquent were held in local jails, since white juvenile institutions would not take them. Pierce carried that problem to the capitol. In May 1920 she told the state suffrage convention, meeting in the House chamber, that Black women wanted a square deal: a state vocational school, a child welfare department and more room in state schools. After the amendment passed, the suffragists and the new League of Women Voters lobbied for the bill, and the legislature created the school in 1921.

What the plaque says

Juno Frankie Pierce J. Frankie Pierce was born during or shortly after the Civil War. In 1921, she founded the Tennessee Vocational School for Colored Girls and served as its first superintendent until 1939. The founding of this school was aided by the Negro Women's Reconstruction Service League and the City Federation of Colored Women's Clubs that she organized. Before the modern civil rights movement, Pierce led her club members in a march on city hall in protest of the city's segregated public facilities. J. Frankie Pierce died on March 28, 1954.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.9 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 — 2.1 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 — 2.3 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 — 2.4 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

• Hadley Park — 0.2 mi
• Tennessee State University — 0.3 mi
• Lt. William McBryar, Buffalo Soldier Medal of Honor — 0.4 mi
• National Negro High School Basketball Tournament — 0.4 mi