Tennessee Testimonies Project
The Tennessee Testimonies Project is an oral history project that builds on the long, but often understudied, history of democratic formation and community organizing in the state, with particular attention paid to religion, economics, and labor.
In her 1989 commencement address at Oberlin College, the eminent philosopher Audre Lorde imparted, “Learn to use what you feel to move you toward action. Change, personal and political, does not come about in a day, nor a year. But it is our day-to-day decisions, the way in which we testify with our lives to those things in which we say we believe, that empower us” (Lorde). Centered on Lorde’s concept of testimony here, the Tennessee Testimonies Project collects in-depth oral histories of how organizers on the state level see the commitments and challenges of their work through the lens of faith.
When Tennessee gained statehood in June of 1796, it bridged the East Coast with the wilderness of the western frontier. As a gateway for early American expansion, Tennessee embodied the hopes, contradictions, and democratic zeal of the new nation. It stretched over 400 miles from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. However, the land was not a blank slate. Cherokee tribes populated Eastern Tennessee, while the Chickasaw inhabited the western region, among other Native Americans in the Southeast with longstanding ties to the area. Tennessee’s founding 1796 Constitution enshrined slavery into law, custom, and public consciousness. By the turn of the 19th century, enslaved people constituted approximately ten percent of the population, concentrated mainly on the plantations in Middle and West Tennessee.
President Andrew Jackson, who had previously represented Tennessee as a Congressman and Senator championing the expansion of suffrage for non-landowning white men, signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In response, thousands of Cherokee, led by Chief John Ross residing on the Tennessee-Georgia border, petitioned Congress, pursued Supreme Court litigation, and opposed the Treaty of New Echota. The treaty was an infamous deal that erroneously claimed a faction of Cherokee had ceded their land in the Southeast to the U.S. Government for five million dollars. After being tasked with enforcing this treaty, General John Ellis Wool resigned and Brigadier General R. Dunlap reportedly “declared that he would never dishonor the Tennessee arms by aiding to carry into execution at the point of the bayonet a treaty by a lean minority against the will and authority of the Cherokee people” (Nance 12-13; Foreman, 272-273).
Under new leadership in 1838, federal troops forced Cherokee tribes into emigration camps throughout the South and violently moved the thousands of people to Oklahoma, referred to as the Trail of Tears (Nance). Christian missionaries in Tennessee offered competing theological responses, turning to Scripture to both justify and challenge the forced removal of Native Americans (Graber). As this ecclesiastical discord demonstrates, biblical interpretation has long served as the tumultuous terrain for deliberating, delineating, and discerning the moral and political boundaries of labor, land, and citizenship in Tennessee.
As the Wendland-Cook Program links faith and action, it is essential to note that these questions did not unfold solely in sermons, speeches, and soliloquies. Rather, the debates on work, property, and democratic rights emerged from and within local social movements aimed at challenging racial and economic injustices. For example, in the fall of 1856, African Americans who were enslaved iron workers liberated themselves and other prisoners throughout West Tennessee (Dew). Though the state ultimately suppressed the rebellion, movements like the iron workers’ revolt played a significant role in destabilizing and defeating the Confederacy and with it, chattel slavery in the American South, the institution it was fighting to uphold (Cimprich, 25). In East Tennessee, small farmers formed armed resistance to challenge hostile Confederate rule, following the 1861 vote in which East Tennesseans rejected secession (Fisher). These stories remind us that workers and those on the margins in Tennessee have long organized around and fought for labor and civil rights.
Today, as a state, we sit at yet another crossroads. The imbricated problems of labor, housing, and citizenship continue to animate our daily lives, places of work, and public discourse. As political pundits sell and frame these issues along national party lines, we risk losing and obscuring our local context, complexities, and communities. In that vein, this archive draws our attention to the ways local organizers have collaborated across and beyond manufactured divisions to advocate for environmental justice and build worker cooperatives. These stories complicate and expand hidden expectations about what values we can engage and evoke in public discourse. Critical Theology here offers a helpful way to deepen and advance civil dialogue by confronting the religious beliefs and experiences that inflect our political and economic metanarratives.
Countless Tennessee writers and activists have theorized and organized for social change and, in so doing, raised essential topics, themes, and lines of inquiry in the study of religion. The Tennessee Testimonies Project seeks to document these stories through recorded conversations with local leaders and organizers who draw on faith for inspiration, community building, and personal refuge amid and beyond the struggle for justice. With the belief that agency is an essential and sacred part of our shared humanness, this archive approaches labor as an overlooked expression and barometer of agency, foregrounding how individuals and communities make meaning of work, responsibility, and solidarity. By documenting these perspectives, the Tennessee Testimonies Project creates a unique archive of lived theological reflection and social practice.
Advancing the Wendland-Cook Program’s long-standing commitment to study religion, economics, and ecology, the Tennessee Testimonies Project explores how embedded, entrenched, and evolving religious understandings of labor shape and undergird our most contentious and pressing moral and democratic dilemmas. Through this work, the Wendland-Cook Program stands as the only center in the country dedicated to bringing labor, religion, and agency into sustained conversation through ethnographic engagement with local organizers and community leaders, preserving their testimonies for future scholarship and public understanding.
We embark on this journey with the belief that Tennessee is not only an object of historical discourse but is also a site of theological meaning-making. We invite you to be part of it.
As ideas, questions, and criticism surface, please reach out to Phil Scholer at Philip.b.scholer@vanderbilt.edu
