Greene E. Evans September 19, 1848 - October 1, 1914
Greene E. Evans
from composite photograph of
TN House of Representatives,
44th General Assembly, 1885-1886,
TSLA Collection.
Greene E. Evans was born into slavery on the Degraffenreid plantation in northern Fayette County, Tennessee. When he was eight years old, his name appeared on an 1855 inventory of B. B. Degraffenreid’s property, along with the names of his mother, Adelia, and several of his siblings. [The inventory called him “Green,” but in adulthood he typically signed his name as “Greene,” with a final “e.”]
Evans later told an interviewer that his father was the slave of “the richest man in Fayette County,” who owned “over 50 slaves” (Ward, p. 22). The slave schedule of the 1850 U.S. Census named Baker Boswell Degraffenreid* as the owner of 74 slaves; in fact, before he gave slaves as gifts to some of his children in the 1840s, he owned more than 100. Although Alfred Evans’s wife and children lived on the Degraffenreid property, it is likely that Alfred himself was the slave of neighbors – probably Degraffenreid’s son-in-law Elijah L. Evans.
The story of Greene Evans’s experiences during the Civil War appears in several contemporary sources, so one can assume it was a tale he told many times. In their early teens when the war began, Greene and his brother John purportedly followed their master across several Southern states, dodging Yankees “from March 1862 almost to the end of the war” (Ward, p. 22). Eventually, he said, they contrived a way to escape, lashing their trunk to a pole, which they carried between them on their shoulders, until, having hiked for 38 miles, they came around a corner and ran smack into a squad of Yankee soldiers. The two terrified boys were, to their great surprise, welcomed by the soldiers. One of the officers made Greene his personal servant, taking him back to Indianapolis with him after the war and helping him find a job in the Bates Hotel, where the youngster, still in his teens, paid a large portion of his salary to a man who would teach him to read. (Note that the story never tells what happened to John, whose whereabouts continue to be a mystery.)
It is challenging to match this story to the known facts. After B. B. Degraffenreid died in 1855, Adelia Evans and several of her children became the property of Degraffenreid’s daughter Agnes Fleece, while Greene and his brother John went to Sarah and her husband Dr. Solomon Green. The Greens were kind-hearted people who treated their slaves with consideration. In the late 1850s Dr. Green, who had fallen seriously into debt, chose to move his household, slaves and all, to Memphis. The conditions of Degraffenreid’s will were very clear – no family member could split up slave families or take them more than a short distance from the home plantation, and none of his daughters’ spouses could use their wives’ inherited resources to pay off personal debts. An 1860 Supreme Court ruling ordered the Greens’ slaves to be returned to Fayette County, where they would have been under the control of Degraffenreid’s son Henry, a man known to be excessively cruel to his slaves, beating them violently for every transgression and even rubbing salt into their wounds.
So who was the “master” Greene and John Evans followed across the South until close to the end of the war – a fearful Henry Degraffenreid, running from the Yankees, or Solomon Green, eluding his creditors? It was unlikely to have been Henry, who, for all his cruelty, was no coward. He joined the 154th Tennessee Infantry and marched off to defend the Confederacy, dying in the Battle of Stones River during the first days of 1863. Therefore, we must look more closely at the Green family. It is likely that the kind-hearted Sarah, who did return the field hands to the home farm, persuaded Henry to let her keep the two Evans boys as household servants – she may have figured that these bright, inquisitive youngsters would be sure to arouse Henry’s violent temper. According to a post-bellum petition filed by a creditor hoping to recover some money owed to him by Solomon Green’s estate, the Green family, with a few slaves, had moved from Memphis to Mississippi “in 1861 or 1862” (probably about March 1862, shortly before Memphis fell to Union forces). Solomon Green died in Mississippi, intestate, sometime in 1863. Thus, probably that very year, whether by design or accident, the boys ended up on their own, soon encountering the protective Union officer in Selma and finding themselves free.
Greene Evans seems to have altered a few of the details of this story in his frequent re-tellings – either to protect the Green family or simply to embroider his own legend. Whatever the truth may be, in 1866 he returned to Memphis, where he worked during the day as a porter at a railroad depot and took classes at Tade’s Academy at night. After contracting smallpox and enduring a lengthy period of recovery, he quit work in order to attend school full-time. In 1868 he entered Fisk University in Nashville, paying his way by working as a groundskeeper on the Fisk campus, hauling gravel, laying sod, and performing other strenuous tasks. During the summers he returned to an area of West Tennessee near the Mississippi border, where he taught school in a primitive schoolhouse he had built himself. Most of the timbers he cut and dragged from the nearby woods, or (at least once) “borrowed” from a neighbor who had been unwilling to sell it to him.
His first appearance by name in census records was among a group of Fisk University residents in 1870. This particular census page reveals a great deal about African American education during the first years after the Civil War. Except for S. Stephenson (a white teacher, 35, born in Ohio) and M. Duckett (a chambermaid, 35, black, born in Mississippi), everyone else was identified simply as “Scholar.” Although some of the students listed on this page were in their 20s, a surprising number were much younger, many 12 to 16 years old. About one-third were described as “black”; the rest (including Evans) were dubbed “mulatto.” Eight were girls, all quite young (12, 15, 17, and 18). Of the 29 students listed on the page, 17 came from Tennessee, eight from Mississippi, and one each from South Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and Alabama.
Early in his college career, Evans was selected to be one of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers. He traveled with the group on their first American concert tour in 1871-1872 to raise money for the university. Described by one writer as “sober, industrious, and politically-minded” (Anderson, p. 36) and by another as “decorous, fastidious, and enterprising” (Ward, p. 81), he sang bass with the group. Because of his commanding presence and disarming sense of humor, he was often the one chosen to explain the group’s mission to audiences whenever the director was not present. He left the group the following year, probably after a falling out with the group’s leader.
Freedman’s Bank records for Greene Evans from the years 1872 and 1874 reveal additional information about his family. In 1872, while he was still a student at Fisk University, he listed his father as Alfred, his mother as “Ardilla” [it was Adelia], and named brothers John and Samuel and sisters Lauretta, Valley, Eliza, Martha, and Emanda [Amanda]. By 1874, when he listed his residence as “on the river,” he had graduated from Fisk and was back in Memphis working as deputy wharf-master, an important political post he would hold from 1874-1876. Over the next few years he also served as a city councilman (1877-1880), census enumerator (1880), and mail agent for a steamship line (1881-1882). Ironically, the council seat to which he was elected in 1877 had previously belonged to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave trader and Ku Klux Klan leader.
The 1880 Census, somewhat difficult to read because of bleed-through from the opposite side of the page, showed Greene E. Evans (31) to be married to Anna G. and working as a schoolteacher. They lived at 25 Allen Ave., their home until they moved to Chicago in 1892. Evans was also the census enumerator for Memphis District 142, so we can not only see a sample of his elegant handwriting on these pages, but can also note again that he spelled his name with a final e.
The Memphis Board of Health Birth Register for 1882 (p. 260, file #5536) lists the birth of a daughter on December 4, 1882, to “Green Evans and ___ Evans,” at 25 Allen Ave., Ward 5. Although many of the infants were named in the register, the name of the Evanses’ daughter was not recorded. By the time of the 1900 census, the daughter had left the household, perhaps to marry or to attend college; no indication of her name has yet surfaced.
By 1884 Evans was running a coal and wood yard on DeSoto Avenue, often running quarter-page ads in the Memphis city directory. He and William A. Feilds, the two black Memphians elected as state representatives to the 44th General Assembly in 1884, became the targets of a scornful sketch in the Memphis Daily Appeal, titled “Who They Are – Sketches of the Recently Elected Senators and Representatives from This County and District.” Feilds fared slightly better than Evans, whom the writer characterized as an arrogant dandy:
GREEN EVANS takes third place in the torchlight procession. He is a mulatto, about thirty-two years of age, wears a mustache, parts his hair in the middle, and runs a wood-yard down on Elliott street. When he is not engaged in selling stove wood he is at work on a composition or recitation for the Lyceum Society, of which he is a member. Evans is considerable of a swell in colored circles, and really has some respect for himself. He picks his associates among those of his own peculiar shade, and, in consequence, is called “stuck up” by the blacks. Evans began his political career as deputy wharfmaster, and afterward tried to be register of Shelby county, but was unsuccessful. He will now paralyze the country by the flow of oratory which he has been cultivating at the Lyceum, and which has not suffered any diminution by being occasional [sic] uncorked at conventions.
In the legislature Evans introduced five bills, the first two of which were intended to protect working men and women. HB 99 sought to limit the garnishment of a worker’s wages to his current, not future, wages. The second bill, HB 156, calling for apportionment of roadwork “among all able-bodied men” was an effort to amend the public road law to ensure the fair employment of African American workers. HB 447 was Evans’s attempt to repeal Chapter 130 of the Acts of 1875 (one or another of the black legislators endeavored unsuccessfully to pass such a bill in nearly every session). HB 514, in support of a request by the governor, was an effort to provide for an assistant superintendent of public instruction to oversee the education of black students. (Leon Howard had tried to pass this bill during the previous legislative session, as well as to repeal Chapter 130.) Evans’s fifth piece of legislation, HJR 108, was a resolution urging a certain cabinet appointment. Greene Evans’s much touted oratorical skills seem to have failed him in the legislature, for none of his bills was successful. Of the four African Americans in the House that term, only Samuel McElwee would see any of his bills pass into law.
In 1891 or 1892 Greene Evans moved his wife Anna and their ten-year-old daughter to Chicago, Illinois. The 1900 and 1910 city directories listed him as a coal dealer, living at 2917 Wentworth Avenue, which today lies beneath the Dan Ryan Expressway. Evans died in Chicago on October 1, 1914. His death certificate listed his age as 64, but he was probably closer to 66.
*The B. B. Degraffenreid family was at the heart of a tragic event in Maury County in March 1835. A tornado still referred to as the “Degraffenreid storm” hit the western part of the county, killing Degraffenreid’s second wife, Sarah, and four of his sons, as well as several people on a neighboring farm.
KBL 11-30-2010
<><><><><>
Based in large part on the research of John W. Marshall, Memphis, TN, author of The Early History of Mason (1985) and Mason: A Glimpse into the Past (1991).
Sources:
Anderson, Toni P. “Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus,” The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers
and Christian Reconstruction, 1871-1878. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010.
Cartwright, Joseph H. The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976.
“Disfranchising Laws.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Nashville: Rutledge
Hill Press, 1998.
McBride, Robert M., and Dan M. Robinson. Biographical Directory, Tennessee General Assembly, Volume II (1861-1901). Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives, and Tennessee Historical Commission, 1979.
Memphis City Directories: Boyle-Chapman, 1874, 1876; Sholes, 1877-1885; Weatherbe, 1883; Dow, 1885-1892; Polk, 1891-1892.
Memphis Daily Appeal, November 13, 1884.
Pike, Gustavus D. The Jubilee Singers and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars.
New York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham, 1873.
Scott, Mingo Jr. The Negro in Tennessee Politics and Governmental Affairs, 1865-1965: “The
Hundred Years Story.” Nashville: Rich Printing Co., 1964.
Tennessee General Assembly. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Tennessee.
Nashville: Tavel and Howell, 1881, 1883.
Ward, Andrew. Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers Who Introduced
The World to the Music of Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
------- “Evans, Greene (1848-1914).” BlackPast.org: Remembered and Reclaimed.
http://www.blackpast.com/?q=aah/evans-greene-1848-1914
Whitson, Mrs. L. D. Personal Sketches of Members of the Forty-Fourth General Assembly of
Tennessee. Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1885.
Work, Monroe N. “Some Negro Members of the Tennessee Legislature During Reconstruction
Period and After.” Journal of Negro History, Vol. V, January 1920, 114-115.