Burton Dodson was 78 when Fayette County brought him back from St. Louis in September 1958 to answer for a shooting that accounts date to 1940 or 1941. The dead man was O. B. Burrows, a white man. Dodson was Black, and his trial had no Black jurors, because Fayette County drew juries from voter rolls that almost no Black resident could join. In April 1959 he was convicted of second-degree murder. Many Black residents argued that he could not have done it.
Two men in the courtroom
John McFerren and Harpman Jameson, both Fayette County men, attended the trial. Dodson's lawyer, the Memphis attorney James F. Estes, urged them to organize voter registration, and in Haywood County Currie Boyd started a league the same spring. In June and July 1959 Black residents lined up to register. In August, party officials barred them from the Democratic primary, saying a primary fell outside the Civil Rights Act of 1957. On November 16 the Justice Department sued the county's Democratic committee, which the University of Memphis timeline calls the first action in the country under that act.
The blacklist
In March 1960 the white Citizens' Council compiled a list of Black residents who had registered. Merchants were asked not to serve them, credit and insurance were cancelled, and some doctors withheld care. Landowners evicted sharecroppers, many from farms their families had worked for decades. The count runs from 257 sharecroppers to more than 400 families, depending on the account.
Shepard Towles, a Black landowner on Old Macon Road, let evicted families pitch army-surplus tents. When his well ran dry, Gertrude Beasley opened her land east of Moscow. Sources date the first tents anywhere from December 1959 to September 1960, and the University of Memphis puts the peak at about thirteen families with more than a hundred children, some in tents for over two years. Gasoline companies refused to sell to McFerren, who ran a grocery for blacklisted families. O. M. and Sara Lemmons, a white couple in Stanton, refused to join the boycott; Sara testified to the Justice Department, and their garment business later closed. A Black physician from Jackson, Dr. Etheridge, drove over to treat the sick. On December 28, 1960, shots were fired into the tents on Towles's farm, and one passed near an infant in Early B. Williams's tent. No one faced criminal action. The New York Post reporter Ted Poston carried the story north.
The decree and after
On July 26, 1962, a federal court barred the landowners from interfering with registration and voting; the University of Memphis timeline calls the settlement a consent agreement in which no party admitted guilt. Landowners then evicted sharecroppers for other reasons, such as mechanization. Viola McFerren, a founder of the league, wrote the county's first Head Start proposal in 1964, and in 1965 she was a plaintiff in the school desegregation suit filed for her son, John Jr. The Tennessee Historical Commission has put up a Tent City marker.
Haywood County's Black history continues at the Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School in Brownsville, the Haywood County seat, where Currie Boyd's league organized.