Tiffany Herron graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2020 with a master’s degree in creative writing. Photo courtesy of Tiffany Herron.
Tiffany Herron spent her time at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga consumed by a piece of Chattanooga history that seemed to have largely faded from public memory.
“Why aren’t more people talking about this?” Herron recalled asking. Even lifelong Chattanoogans she spoke with knew little about it.
Her curiosity about a group of women who earned the collective name “the Chattanooga Five” led her deep into UTC’s resources. She spent hours in the UTC Library, traveled to New York City for research, interviewed attorneys and family members, and pursued a project that led her far beyond the classroom.
The research eventually opened the door to documentary filmmaking. Herron served as a co-producer for “How to Sue the Klan: The Legacy of the Chattanooga Five,” which earned the category of Outstanding Short Form Documentary at the 40th Midsouth Emmy Awards in February.
In April, the documentary was nominated for a 47th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Award in the Outstanding Regional Documentary category.
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Born and adopted in Hawaii, Herron moved with her family several times before landing in Chattanooga in 2002. After completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in parks and recreation at Clemson University, she enrolled at UTC in 2018 to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing.
A tour of downtown arranged by former UTC English Professor James Arnett introduced her to the Chattanooga Five.
On April 18, 1980, three Ku Klux Klan members attacked four Black women—Viola Ellison, Lela Mae Evans, Opal Jackson and Katherine Johnson—in a drive-by shooting on downtown Chattanooga’s MLK Boulevard.
The gunmen shot four of the women with shotgun pellets. Broken glass injured another woman, Fannie Mae Crumsey, in her home. Though all five survived, they faced a long fight for justice.
The location of the shooting was the last stop of the tour and just a block away from UTC’s campus.
“Of course, with me being the oldest student in the class—even older than the tour guide—I was like, ‘What? 1980? That doesn’t sound right,’” she recalled. “It sounded like something that would happen in the Jim Crow era.”
The story of the women stuck with her. When Herron had to create a literary magazine for a class the following semester, she returned to the Chattanooga Five, convinced their story deserved more attention.
“I think the theme was contemporary southern women,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to write about this because I think this would be perfect.’ I started researching and I found the attorney, Randolph McLaughlin, who had represented the women in the civil case.”
From left: Opal Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Viola Ellison, Attorney Betty Lawrence Lewis and Lela Mae Evans. Photo by Randall Higgins.
The gunman involved in the Chattanooga Five shooting served only six months of his nine-month sentence. The other two men in the car were not charged.
Following days of riots, the women filed a federal civil lawsuit with McLaughlin, a New York lawyer. The case marked his first major legal battle and the first time plaintiffs sued the KKK in civil court.
In 1982, a federal jury found the United Klans of America and several individual Klansmen liable for the attack, awarding the women $535,000 in damages. The judgment helped force the Klan out of Chattanooga and marked a significant civil rights victory.
To understand the case fully, Herron knew she needed to speak with someone who had been there. She tracked McLaughlin down and interviewed him by phone in the UTC Library.
The content became too much for the magazine’s limited word count and “it just wasn’t fitting.”
She went in another direction with the project, but the Chattanooga Five burned in her mind. She applied for UTC’s Scholarship, Engagement, the Arts, Research, Creativity and Humanities (SEARCH) Award—a $1,000 grant that supports graduate and undergraduate students pursuing original scholarship.
“I applied and I got the SEARCH grant,” she said. “I went to New York City and I interviewed Mr. McLaughlin.”
Suddenly, Herron found herself staring up at a high-rise in the heart of Manhattan. With rented equipment from the UTC Library, she nervously began the interview.
“Mr. McLaughlin is a small man, but his character is huge,” she said. “I’m nervous, so I didn’t hit the record button … I missed the beginning of the interview.”
The interview, though, went well. On a whim, she invited McLaughlin to Chattanooga.
“He said, ‘Absolutely,’ and I’m like, ‘Great, I’ll set it up,’” she said. “But I was thinking, ‘My thousand dollars is gone. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for that.’”
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Back on campus, Herron worked with UTC faculty and staff to turn her research into something the community could experience—a public event at the Bessie Smith Cultural Center on MLK Boulevard featuring McLaughlin.
Carolyn Runyon, the director of Special Collections at UTC, helped Herron create posters and advertise the event. Dr. Susan Eckelmann, the director of Africana Studies at the time, gathered funds.
“I was able to fly Mr. McLaughlin in, get him a hotel and reserve the Bessie Smith … it was great,” she said. “It was February of 2020, which is Black History Month.”
Community members packed the venue and students from across campus attended. Among them was a particularly meaningful guest.
“We were in this hall—standing room only—and the only living survivor, Opal Jackson, comes in with her family.”
Prior to the event, Herron conducted interviews with the victims’ family members, including Connie and Sonya Rollins—Jackson’s daughter and granddaughter. She also met with Crumsey’s granddaughter, Juanita Toney.
She described her connections with them as “fate stuff.” To her, it felt like she had known them “all my life.”
“I’m digging into people’s families who don’t owe me anything,” she said. “Fannie MaeCrumsey was a pillar in her community. These stories need to be written down. The only way people are going to hear about them is if Juanita tells you. The only way you’re going to talk to Juanita is if you know her.
“These stories are so much bigger than that.”
Tiffany Herron (left) and Karen Estes Last, painter of a Chattanooga Five mural on MLK Boulevard. Photo courtesy of Tiffany Herron.
Herron soon saw the scope of interest in those stories.
She had just defended her thesis, which focused on finding her biological family. She graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic, with few plans for what to do next.
Soon after, she received an email from Jon Meacham, a Chattanooga native and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who authored biographies on Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and George H.W. Bush.
Meacham had seen coverage of Herron’s research and wanted to learn more about the case. During their conversation, Herron mentioned that she had a paper copy of the civil trial transcript McLaughlin had mailed to her—hundreds of pages she had no practical way to scan on her own. Meacham offered to help, arranging for students at Vanderbilt University to digitize the transcript and return it to her.
The next person to reach out was John Beder—a movie producer and director who recently moved to Chattanooga from Colorado—in search of a story about his new home.
“He said, ‘I came across this story and every time I look at something, your name is attached to it,’” she recalled. “Because I’d been on the radio, the TV for the news and the newspaper—and I put my phone number and email address on everything.
“I wanted people, if they knew these women, any of them, I needed them to contact me so I could maybe hear their side of everything.”
Herron met with Beder at Coolidge Park, where he asked the question that would take the story out of her own hands and put it into someone else’s and would thrust the story of Chattanooga Five into a completely new light: “Well, I think this would make a really cool documentary. What do you think about that?”
“John Beder … I could tell just from talking to him,” she recalled. “Either he’s a really good actor or he’s just a kind person. He’s wanting to do this for the right reasons. That was the first time I was sort of like, ‘This needs to be given to the right person because I don’t want to exploit people.’”
Herron trusted Beder’s vision. The families of the women, most of whom were looking for ways to share their loved one’s story, trusted the project as well.
A month after their meeting, Herron received yet another unexpected email. Beder asked her to join the project as an assistant producer. At the time, Herron had already laid much of the groundwork the documentary would need.
“I’m like, ‘What does an assistant producer do? I don’t know,’” she said with a laugh. “He said, ‘Exactly what you’ve been doing. The research, the contacts, helping get locations for interviews.’”
After adding several more producers, the team hit the ground running with traveling and interviews, but they noticed a gap. They needed another voice and they needed more funding.
Benjamin Crump, a nationally known civil rights attorney, stepped in.
“He heard the story and he watched what we had of the film,” Herron said. “He said, ‘Yes, I want to be a part of that.’”
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Click here to watch “How to Sue the Klan: The Legacy of the Chattanooga Five”
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“How to Sue the Klan” wrapped in December 2023 and immediately hit the festival circuit, winning several awards before its debut in February 2024.
After a seven-day showing in a New York City theater, the documentary became eligible for an Academy Award. The film also won an NAACP Image Award, and PBS aired it as part of the documentary series “Reel South.”
“Because it was on PBS for two months, we were eligible for an Emmy Award,” Herron said. “John reminded us that five years ago, we were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if just a couple of college students saw this film? And now you are qualified for an Emmy.’”
Herron attended the awards ceremony in Nashville alongside her husband and several of the film’s crew members—including Crump, who accepted the award and spoke on behalf of the film.
Herron picked up a trophy for Beder, who couldn’t attend the ceremony. Before shipping it, she had to make a quick stop.
“I went to see Ms. Opal. She’s going blind and she’s 93 now … She’s holding the trophy and (her family) is taking pictures of her,” she said. “I’m like, ‘This means a lot. This means a whole lot.’
“We let Sonya, then Juanita and the Crumsey family take pictures as well. I thought, ‘What good is it if we can’t share this success? The people whose lives were really affected by this’ … It got to John with a lot of love.’”
Opal Jackson holds the Emmy Award trophy with her daughter Connie Rollins (back left), granddaughter Sonya Rollins (back right) and Tiffany Herron. Photo courtesy of Tiffany Herron.
Since joining a class tour as a new UTC student, Herron learned a lot about being a thoughtful researcher, a documentary filmmaker and her role in her community.
She also answered her own question of “Why?”
“These women deserve credit. They deserve acknowledgment,” she said. “The bigger thing was that they experienced death threats.”
Despite the team hiring a private investigator, Herron said several people connected to the case could not be tracked down.
“I’ve never had a death threat,” she said. “I have never been so scared for my life that I am not going to talk about anything. I would like to think that if I was scared, I would talk about it and that I would stand up.
“That’s not this situation … I learned quickly that the only reason these family members talked to me was because I was sincere. I had to look at the bigger picture for myself as far as filming in that I feel as though I fell into this situation. It was not something that I went and sought out.”
Co-producers Nicole Brown (left), Jazmine LeBlanc and Tiffany Herron pose with awards earned by How to Sue the Klan during a celebration of the documentary’s regional Emmy win on Saturday, April 18, at White Duck Taco in Chattanooga. Photo by Clara Paulson.
Herron credited UTC with being the platform that helped her discover her capabilities and confidence. UTC’s Special Collections proved a valuable resource during the documentary’s production.
Runyon remembered Herron coming to her as a student with the “incredible story.” Herron later returned with the other filmmakers to go through film negatives from local newspapers.
“We scanned a couple of hundred scans of stuff that might be interesting to them that they had chosen,” Runyon said. “We spent a lot of time just poring over these images that we had, trying to see what they could piece together.”
Runyon beamed over how much she enjoyed watching Herron’s project “snowball” from a research project to an award-winning documentary.
“Tiffany is really the embodiment of what we hope as a University—to produce students who are engaged citizens working in their communities,” she said. “What Tiffany has done is she has leveraged her degree here at UTC to go on and continue to use some of UTC’s resources that are open to alums and community members.
“We were thrilled as Special Collections to be able to support that in a small way.”
Herron encouraged students, especially those at UTC, to make use of those resources and to broaden their ideas of what it means to be a researcher.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” Herron said. “I think that having this experience, being at UTC, expanded my world so much. My view became 10 times bigger just because of this one little thing.”
The City of Chattanooga declared February 26 as Chattanooga Five Day. The City’s Director of Policy Planning and Implementation Dylan Rivera (right) delivered the proclamation to the Emmy celebration event at White Duck Taco.
Learn more
Photo gallery courtesy of Tiffany Herron
“How to Sue the Klan” won the Outstanding Short Form Documentary category at the 56th Annual NAACP Image Awards.
