Nashville Attorney, Jonathon Fagan, outlines essential reasons to support Watkins College of Art, an institution founded on principles that transcend race, gender, and class.
“I wanted to say something to the group about why I, neither a student nor alumni, have chosen to be involved with this effort. It may seem strange, but I have reason to fight for you. I am a lawyer, and therefore long-winded, but, please, bear with me. I’ll make it as brief as I can, and my hope is that knowing this will give you all a greater appreciation for just what an institution you find yourselves a part of now, in this moment. In so doing, I think I’ll be touching on a few points that were made in the meeting this evening.
The year was 1877, and the Federal government had given up on Reconstruction in the South following the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureaus that had protected former slaves from the KKK were closing, and the Confederate aristocracy was once again taking back its power in government, leaving poor former slaves at the mercy of Jim Crow laws. Public Trusts were being offered up to the State of Tennessee in droves, their white donors now comfortable in the fact that the state government was now safe in Jim Crow hands. Sam Davis, the boy hero of the Confederacy, now had a public trust and museum in his name, in which only “discrete white males” could only be its state-appointed trustees. Monuments such as those in Charlottesville, Virginia were being built by private donors and offered up to state public trusts in order to assert the renewed power of the former Confederacy. Everywhere, public trusts were being used to assert white power.
Enter Samuel Watkins, a man who had participated in the slaughter of the Native Creek Indian Tribe with Andrew Jackson, ending at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, where Jackson found a bloody infant crying among the dead men, women, and children on the battlefield. Yes, Samuel would have taken part in that. He had then become a prosperous capitalist. Could it have been guilt and shame which drove him to do what he did that year? Concern over the plight of so many of the former slaves who worked in his brick factory? We do not know, but yet he descended the stairs of his residence on 6th avenue one night in 1877.
He was in his mid-80s at this point, nearly deaf and blind, a near-billionaire by today’s standards, and would use the help of a Mr. Fuller who rented the grocery store below him to help him write his contracts each evening until around 9 o’clock, but tonight was different. He informed Mr. Fuller that he did “not want to make any more money.” He wanted to fund an institution for poor people to get an an education, as “he had suffered greatly from ignorance and the lack of an education.” And so he made a will and two subsequent codicils.
He did something very curious for the time, though. He opened enrollment to “every man and every woman.”
I want to focus on what the document did NOT say. It did NOT say, “every white man and every white woman.” This omission would have been glaring at the time because no other public trust document at that time left that “white” part out in the South. It was deliberate. The institution that bore his name would not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or class. In 1877. In the South.
Nowhere have I found evidence of discrimination in enrollment at Watkins throughout its history. Nowhere have I found evidence of “Whites Only” bathrooms or water fountains or any other facility ever being at Watkins in any of its locations, so standard elsewhere throughout the South.
I cannot stress how unique that was in the context of its time. His institution transcended race, it transcended class, and it transcended gender, in an effort to stamp out ignorance. THAT is the history of the institution you fight for today and in which you find yourself in this moment. I am not sure that Belmont even truly knows it’s own past or present, and it certainly hasn’t dealt with it. I firmly believe Belmont needs to do that before it ignorantly proceeds to subsume an institution it doesn’t understand.
Samuel Watkins, on the other hand, was an individual who had faced his history, as we must all face our history, and was determined to change the future for the better.
Some will say that the mission of Watkins is now far afield of what was originally intended as a traditional writing and technical school. To that I counter: The art produced by Watkins students and faculty today breaks down those same barriers of race, gender, class, and many more, makes its audience face them, and nothing could be more basic to its benefactor’s intent, more so even than its original curriculum.
Nashville has lately forgotten so many salient parts of its history and the underlying reasons for the institutions it has. Watkins is one of its finest and most enduring.
It’s very real history is worth knowing, and, therefore, worth saving.”
Jonathon Fagan, Attorney At Law
1350 Rosa L. Parks Blvd
Nashville, Tennessee 37208