From Fayette County to Memphis: Tennessee’s Long Struggle for Voting Rights
written by Rev. Stuart J. Mitchell III and James Paley
In 1969, The New York Times described the Fayette County Movement as “the longest sustained civil rights protest in the nation.” The movement encompassed a series of civil rights struggles that unfolded in Fayette County from 1959 into the early 1970s. One of its defining chapters was the effort to register Black residents to vote, which led to what became known nationally as “Tent City.”
Because African Americans dared to register to vote, many were evicted from the sharecropper homes where some families had lived for generations. Hundreds of people were forced into makeshift “tent communities” that were erected on donated land, with some families remaining there for more than two years. Black citizens who attempted to vote were systematically blacklisted by the white power structure and denied access to milk, fuel, groceries, medical care, and other necessities required for daily survival. At the time, Fayette County, which was predominantly Black, was widely recognized as one of the poorest counties in the United States.
In 1965, Jim Paley and Stuart J. Mitchell were students at Cornell University and spent the summer as volunteers with the Cornell–Tompkins County Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Fayette County, Tennessee (also known as the West Tennessee Voters Project), led by Professor Douglas F. Dowd of the Economics Department. We were part of a coalition of students — primarily from Cornell, along with several other colleges and universities — who traveled to West Tennessee to support African Americans organizing to exercise their right to vote for the first time.
Our work focused primarily on voter registration and organizing “freedom schools” that helped sharecropper families understand and demand their constitutional rights. We also participated in sit-ins at segregated restaurants, integrated public swimming pools in Memphis, and joined demonstrations against racial discrimination, including a major campaign that successfully helped integrate the segregated school system in Covington, Tennessee.
Despite threats to our physical safety — and despite the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi the previous summer — we believed it was important to stand in solidarity with disenfranchised Black residents of Fayette, Tipton, and Haywood Counties.
Both of us were arrested and spent time in a segregated jail during that summer on charges such as “tailgating” and attempting to integrate a segregated sandwich shop. We witnessed church bombings, cross burnings, beatings of fellow civil rights workers, road rage, and acts of intimidation that were commonplace in West Tennessee during that era. More than 60 years later, Tennessee once again stands at the center of a national struggle over political representation, voting rights, and the meaning of democracy itself.
We were young, white, middle-class students in 1965. We lived with sharecropper families whose generosity far exceeded their means. Our organization paid host families only a modest stipend, yet they gave up their best rooms in their homes. We witnessed firsthand the extraordinary courage, determination, and moral strength of Black families struggling to break the legacy of enslavement, segregation, and institutionalized racism.
We believe that our presence offered some encouragement and solidarity to the communities in which we lived and worked. But the truth is that we benefited far more from the experience than we contributed. The lessons we learned in West Tennessee shaped our lives and careers. Both of us went on to careers in community and economic development, advocating for low-income families struggling against exclusionary systems that deny access to housing, healthcare, education, employment, and wealth-building opportunities.
The decades-long Fayette County voting-rights struggle was one of the precursors of the modern Voting Rights Movement before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We sought to make West Tennessee a proving ground for the expansion of democracy. It is now becoming a testing ground for its retrenchment.
During the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Black citizens were threatened, economically punished, and terrorized for attempting to register to vote. National attention focused on protecting the fundamental right of African Americans to participate in the democratic process. Today, the tactics have changed, but the underlying struggle has not.
We are now witnessing a new assault on voting rights — not through literacy tests or poll taxes, but through increasingly sophisticated forms of partisan gerrymandering and voter dilution. Recent Supreme Court decisions have substantially weakened federal protections that once helped challenge racial vote dilution and discriminatory redistricting practices.
African Americans are often still denied access to the ballot box. District lines are manipulated in ways that can render those votes politically ineffective. Citizens may cast ballots, but carefully engineered electoral maps can dilute the collective strength of minority communities and diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice. At the same time, new efforts requiring burdensome proof-of-citizenship documentation and other voting restrictions continue to fall disproportionately on poor and marginalized communities.
At the center of today’s controversy is Memphis and Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District — the state’s only majority-Black congressional district and historically its only Democratic-held congressional seat. Tennessee legislators have now voted to dismantle that district and divide Memphis among three Republican-leaning districts. Critics argue that the purpose is unmistakable: to dilute Black voting strength and secure a 9–0 Republican congressional delegation from Tennessee.
Memphis and the 9th Congressional District are not merely political boundaries on a map. They represent generations of struggle, sacrifice, and courage by citizens who risked everything for full participation in American democracy. We experienced that courage firsthand in the sharecropper families of Fayette County, Tipton County, and Haywood County.
In 1965, we traveled to West Tennessee because democracy itself was under assault. What is happening in Tennessee today should concern every American, regardless of political party. When elected officials choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives, democracy itself is diminished.
The lessons of Fayette County remain painfully relevant today. Democracy requires more than the formal right to cast a ballot. It requires fair representation, equal political voice, and the continued vigilance of citizens willing to confront injustice when it reappears in new forms. The struggle for voting rights did not end in Selma, Memphis, or Fayette County. It continues today. And history will judge whether we as a nation will remain silent when democracy is once again placed at risk.
Additional Resources:
Jim and Stuart encourage readers to consult and share these additional resources to learn more about the history of the Fayette County Civil Rights Movement and its connection to the present voting rights crisis.
Distinguished New York Times reporter David Halberstam chronicled the civil rights struggles unfolding across West Tennessee. Folk singer Pete Seeger memorialized the struggle in his song “Fayette County,” capturing the dignity, hardship, and aspirations of African American families fighting for full citizenship and human dignity.
Renowned children’s book author Alice Faye Duncan and Memphis native wrote Evicted: The Struggle for the Right to Vote. It was published in 2022 and chronicles the historic Tent City civil rights protest. “I wrote Evicted to give students in Tennessee and across the nation an understanding of this valiant American history that must not be forgotten. May you remember with urgency to never repeat past misdeeds. March ON!” Alice Faye Duncan’s carefully researched book was illustrated by Charly Palmer, a graphic designer, illustrator and fine artist. “I found it hard to read the stories of the Tent City and even harder to paint. I can’t imagine what it was like for them to live in those hard times.”
Daphene R. McFerren, Executive Director of the Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change posted an article on May 12, 2026 “Louisiana v. Callais: I am the first generation in my Family that Could Freely Vote. Will I be the last?” This poignant and personal testimony frames the issues we must address during the upcoming congressional midterm elections. In 1959, Ms. McFerren’s parents, John and Viola McFerren, as well as many other disenfranchised African Americans established a voting rights/civil rights organization, the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League. Cornell students and others from northern states traveled to Tennessee to provide support and aid to the League. Jim, Stuart, and the other volunteers rallied together at the McFerren Grocery and Oil Company, the McFerrens’ store. Those gatherings and camaraderie provided the foundation of the voting rights movement. Ms. McFerren’s first person analysis of the “Callais” decision could be a platform from which to resist and remedy the blatant racism exhibited by the decision of the State of Tennessee legislature to gerrymander the Ninth Congressional District.
The Rev. Stuart J. Mitchell III has spent more than six decades working at the intersection of civil rights, social justice, ministry, and community economic development. Raised on a small dairy farm in rural New York, he entered Cornell University expecting to return to farming or join his father’s rural insurance business. A life-changing summer in West Tennessee redirected his life.
In 1965, at age 21, Mitchell volunteered with the Cornell–Tompkins County Committee for Free and Fair Elections, also known as the West Tennessee Voters Project. After graduating from Cornell in 1966, Mitchell entered Colgate Rochester Divinity School. He began serving rural congregations and migrant farmworkers in 1967, earned his Master of Divinity degree, and was ordained a United Methodist elder in 1970. Mitchell subsequently helped build what is now PathStone Corporation, a community-development and human-services organization serving low-income families and communities across several states and Puerto Rico. Today, as president of SJMIII Consulting Services LLC and CEO emeritus of PathStone, Mitchell continues to assist nonprofit, faith-based, and community organizations with governance, leadership, strategic development, and social and economic justice initiatives. His life’s work remains rooted in lessons first learned from the courageous people of West Tennessee.
James Paley has devoted much of his life to advancing civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity. His involvement began in 1960, when he picketed a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, in support of the movement to desegregate lunch counters. As an undergraduate at Cornell University, Jim continued his civil rights activism. In 1965, he joined other students in Montgomery, Alabama, to welcome Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the marchers completing the historic Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march. Later that year, Jim participated in the West Tennessee Voters Project, headquartered in Fayette County. Jim’s experiences in Tennessee—particularly witnessing the courage of African Americans confronting entrenched racism and political exclusion—deepened his lifelong commitment to racial equality and the fundamental rights promised to all Americans. Following his graduation from Cornell, Jim taught elementary school in the South Bronx for seven years. He later earned a master’s degree in education from the City College of New York and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. For more than four decades, Jim has served as executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven. Under his leadership, the organization has expanded affordable housing and homeownership opportunities for low- and moderate-income families. His career in community development reflects the same commitment that shaped his civil rights work.