Greene E. Evans September 19, 1848 - After 1900
Greene E. Evans
from composite photograph of
TN House of Representatives,
44th General Assembly, 1885-1886,
TSLA Collection.
A member of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, he took part in their first U.S. concert tour in 1871-1872.
Green E. Evans was born into slavery in Fayette County. He was forced to move with his master from place to place throughout the South to evade the Union army but eventually escaped to become the servant of a Yankee officer in Alabama.
In 1866 he returned to Memphis, where he worked during the day as a porter at a railroad depot and attended school at night. After surviving an attack of smallpox, he quit work in order to go to school full-time. He entered Fisk University in 1868, paying his way by hauling gravel and laying sod; during the summers he taught in a schoolhouse he had built with his own hands. Evans was selected to be one of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers and traveled with the group on their first American concert tour to raise money for the university.
After graduating, he became mail agent for a steamship line. He worked in the wholesale coal and wood business in Memphis, and served as deputy wharf-master, census enumerator, and city councilman. Elected to the General Assembly in 1884, Evans introduced bills to repeal Chapter 130 of the Acts of 1875, to amend the public road law in order to allow for fair employment of African American workers, and, supporting a request by the governor, to provide for an Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction to oversee the education of black students. None of Evans’s bills passed into law. By 1900 he had moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he listed his occupation as a coal dealer. He died in Chicago in 1914, at age 64.