On May 18, 2005, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed House Resolution No. 122, which commended the participants of a Black History Month program organized for the 104th General Assembly. The program included a tribute to the fourteen African American men who were elected to represent their districts in the state legislature in the 1870s and 1880s during the period of Reconstruction. Included in this historic group was William Calvin Hodge of Chattanooga, who was elected as a representative of Hamilton County in 1885. Over a century later, the 2005 Black History Month program for the Tennessee General Assembly, which celebrated monumental firsts, was itself organized by a historic legislator in her own right, Representative Tommie F. Brown.
Dr. Brown was both the first Black woman elected to represent the 28th District in the Tennessee House of Representatives and one of only sixteen Black women to ever serve in the Tennessee State Legislature. Before her career in politics, Dr. Brown was a trailblazer at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where in 1971 she became the first Black person to be appointed to a tenure-track position and the first Black woman to lead an academic department when she established the Social Work program in 1980. While Dr. Brown represents several historic firsts in Chattanooga, her legacy extends far beyond these achievements. Throughout her career, Dr. Brown’s work in academia and politics consistently focused on the power of unity and collective action to enact change.
Social Work and Community Organizing
Early in her career as a social worker in the late 1950s, Dr. Brown became active in the Chattanooga chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When students from Howard High School conducted sit-ins at lunch counters in Chattanooga in 1960, Dr. Brown ran interference behind the scenes. She, along with other social workers in the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, worked to find ways to protect the students performing the sit-ins in case they were arrested. When discussing this event decades later, Dr. Brown explained, “You’ve got to have people who play on different levels when you get involved in this kind of struggle.” While her actions made it clear that Dr. Brown was content to work wherever she had a positive impact, she was capable and willing to step into a more public role if she could make a difference. Dr. Brown’s experience in civil rights organizing and her observations of dynamic leadership within the Chattanooga Black community clearly influenced the subject of her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University.
Doctoral Dissertation on Black Leadership and Community Power
Brown’s 1984 dissertation for her Ph.D. in Social Work from Columbia University, titled, “The Struggle to Control Black Leadership: A Study in Community Power,” was a case study in Black community power and the leadership structures in Chattanooga in the 1970s. As a social worker interested in understanding and helping to manage community conflicts, Dr. Brown sought to study Black leadership and its impact on community decision making. For her study, Dr. Brown interviewed 86 respondents from Chattanooga about Black leaders in the city and the issues they helped shape. While the study identified a cohesive corps of sixteen leaders within Chattanooga’s Black community in the 1970s, the study also found that Black and white respondents had “differing perceptions of who these leaders were and on whose behalf they acted.” She observed a pervasive struggle between two leadership structures, one with grassroots support from within the Black community, and another created or sanctioned (and better resourced) by the city’s white community. Dr. Brown hoped that her research would be a springboard for developing strategies to bolster power within Chattanooga’s Black community by identifying ways for grassroots organizations to have more independent control of and access to resources. After completing her doctoral program, Dr. Brown maintained focus on the issue of community power, translating academic research into community activism.
Tennessee Black Leadership Roundtable
Dr. Brown put a unified and cohesive leadership system into action by establishing the Tennessee Black Leadership Roundtable. In September of 1984, Dr. Brown submitted a proposal for a statewide Black leadership network to the Tennessee Legislative Black Caucus. The entity formed from this proposal eventually evolved to be the Tennessee Black Leadership Roundtable, a multi-tiered organization focused on linking Black leaders across the state with each other so they could more effectively work to improve the quality of life for Black Tennesseans. The Black Leadership Roundtable hosted meeting summits to discuss which issues they wanted to focus on resolving and organized outreach to citizens and state legislators alike. They tackled issues such as voting rights, equity in college admissions, public health and education, and drug crises. Dr. Brown played a significant part in establishing the organization, but the success of the Tennessee Black Leadership Roundtable came from the participation and cooperation of Black leaders from across the state.
Brown v. Board of Commissioners of the City of Chattanooga
Taking on the systemic issue of Black political disenfranchisement, Dr. Brown’s work approached the issue from multiple angles. While a professor of Social Work at UTC, she engaged with Black leaders and legislators to coordinate communities at the state level. Locally, in Chattanooga, Dr. Brown was instrumental in using the justice system to challenge the city’s political structure. In 1987, Dr. Brown was the lead plaintiff of twelve Chattanooga residents who successfully filed suit against the Chattanooga Board of Commissioners for discriminatory voting practices. The at-large voting system that existed prior to the Brown v. Board of Commissioners of the City of Chattanooga lawsuit was a remnant of the Jim Crow era that made it almost impossible for a minority candidate to win a seat on the Board. In 1989, a federal judge ruled that this at-large system was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as it was designed to dilute minority votes. Thanks to the work of the plaintiffs, their attorneys, and the community that supported them, a new mayor-council system was implemented in Chattanooga. This new system established geographical voting districts within the city, allowing predominantly Black communities to participate fully in the electoral process.
UTC Special Collections is proud to steward and provide access to the papers of one of the city’s remarkable leaders, who devoted her career to giving greater voice and power to her community. In celebrating Black History Month, as with any heritage month, it’s common to emphasize firstness and to focus on the individuals who broke barriers. And while Dr. Brown’s career speaks to the monumental impact one person can have, her own work and legacy speaks profoundly to the necessity for developing community power and supporting collective action at all levels, from grassroots organizing, to city elections, to state-wide politics.
Support for “‘One of the Black Legislators’: Providing Access to the Tommie F. Brown Papers” is provided by an Archival Projects grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.