Efforts are underway in Nashville to memorialize four Black community leaders that lawmakers say played pivotal roles in the development of Johnson City.
In an impassioned speech Monday night, Jonesborough Alderman Adam Dickson â the townâs only African American alderman â addressed the East Tennessee State menâs basketball teamâs decision to kneel for the national anthem, calling on people to âlisten with the desire to at least acknowledge, if not understandââ each other.
âWhat I would hope that we all could gather is that, as beautiful and as wonderful as this flag is and what it represents, there is a sad truth: Not everybody has been free under that flag, and that is just a reality that I would hope we would at least attempt to comprehend,â Dickson said. âAnd so you have a group of young men (who), whether right or whether wrong, did what they did because of a young man like Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia â the same age as most of them. Trayvon Martin was just a few years younger than them. Tamir Rice was the same age-range as them.
Former Jonesborough Alderman Ernest McKinney was âan advocate of education for allâ â spending his life teaching in various Washington County schools and serving as chairman of the Washington County School Board, the first African American elected to it.
McKinney, who died in 2009, was also the first African American alderman in the town of Jonesborough, elected on the same night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Already a historical giant with an undeniable and lasting legacy in the town (the McKinney Center for the Arts is named for him), McKinneyâs family and the town of Jonesborough wanted to add to his legacy by establishing the Ernest McKinney Scholarship Fund.