The Mink Slide and East 8th Street

East 8th Street, south of the courthouse square, was the center of Black Columbia long before 1946, and the stretch called the Mink Slide was its business district under segregation. Mt. Lebanon Missionary Baptist Church began in 1843, when seven Black worshippers who had been allowed only the balcony at the white First Baptist Church formed their own congregation; historians call it the oldest National Baptist church in Tennessee. The A.J. Morton & Son funeral home dates to 1891, and First Missionary Baptist and Holy Comforter Episcopal stand nearby.

On February 25, 1946, a Navy veteran, James Stephenson, stepped between his mother, Gladys, and a white store clerk who was berating her over a radio repair, and the scuffle put the clerk through a window. That night a white mob gathered at the courthouse, and Black residents, veterans among them, assembled in the Mink Slide and shot out the streetlights. When four patrolmen came in, all four were wounded. State highway patrolmen then swept the district, firing into buildings, searching homes without warrants and taking some 300 weapons; more than 100 Black residents were arrested. On February 28 officers killed two prisoners, William Gordon and James Johnson, saying the men had seized guns, and an all-white jury absolved the officers of wrongdoing.

Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP defended the 25 Black men tried in Lawrenceburg, where an all-white jury convicted only two.