Sampson W. Keeble, 1833 - 1887

Sampson W. Keeble Historical Marker,
Broadway at Second Avenue, Nashville,
by Kathy Lauder

A bright, popular, and hard-working member of the Republican Party, Sampson W. Keeble was elected to represent Davidson County in the 38th Tennessee General Assembly, 1873-1874. He was the first African American to serve in the Tennessee state legislature.

According to the inscription on his tombstone in Nashville’s Greenwood Cemetery, Keeble was born in 1833 in Rutherford County, Tennessee. His parents were Sampson W. and Nancy (or Mary) Keeble, who were the slaves of H. P. Keeble of Rutherford County.

The future legislator seems to have gained a measure of independence early in his life. The Nashville Union and American (6 Dec 1872) stated that in 1851, when Keeble was 18 years old, he took a job as “roller boy” on the Rutherford Telegraph in Murfreesboro; by 1854 he was working as pressman for both the Telegraph and the Murfreesboro News, jobs he held until the beginning of the Civil War, during most of which, according to another story in the Union and American (7 Nov 1872), he fought in the Confederate lines. By 1866 Nashville city directories show that he had settled in Davidson County, where he worked for some time as a grocer and took other part-time jobs to support himself; family members report that he worked as a custodian in a law office, where he became interested in studying law. The attorneys in that practice, reportedly impressed by his enthusiasm for learning, supported him in reading the law. He was eventually able to pass the Tennessee bar, which in those days involved no written examination, but rather assessment and approval by a handful of legal professionals. Family members believe he attended Fisk University briefly, although the university has no record of his presence there.

Keeble eventually established the Rock City Barber Shop on Cedar Street and ran it for about 20 years. At that time barber shops were segregated: Keeble worked with other African American barbers, cutting the hair of white customers. During the same period he served as a member of the advisory board of the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company Bank and as treasurer of the board of directors of the Colored Agricultural and Mechanical Association. The 1870 Census showed “Keebles,” at age 38, to be a barber with real estate holdings of $4,000. Also living in the household at that time was Eliza Keebles, 35, whose occupation was identified as “keeping house.” From the names of children listed on Nancy Keeble’s tombstone in Mt. Ararat Cemetery, it appears that Eliza was Sampson’s younger sister. (Although much of that tombstone inscription is illegible, the children’s names listed there are S. W., Eliza A., George L., and Kitty.) Others in his 1870 household were Mary (age 65, probably his mother Nancy); Harriet Keeble (30), Sampson’s first wife; their children Hattie (8) and Samuel (4); and Kate Beckwith (22), a cousin.

In November 1872, riding the coat-tails of a sizeable popular vote for President Grant, Sampson W. Keeble, who was listed on the Radical ticket along with Philip Lindsley and James W. Ready, was narrowly elected to serve as Republican representative of Davidson County to the 38th Tennessee General Assembly, which convened on January 6, 1873. Grant was enormously popular among black voters, so Keeble picked up those votes, but he certainly won a number of white votes as well, from people who found his moderate political stance acceptable. Keeble was the first African American to serve as a member of the state legislature . . . and the last for some time – it would be eight years before another African American member was elected. The Nashville Union and American reporter who wrote the story on November 7, 1872, was ambivalent about Keeble’s victory:

The result of the election in this county is the complete success of the entire Radical ticket. Davidson county is the first to elect one of our colored citizens. Sampson W. Keeble is a barber by trade. He was formerly the slave of Hon. Edwin Keeble, of Murfreesboro. He was in the Confederate lines during the most of the war. Since the war he has resided in this city, and has deported himself in a becoming manner for one of his station. Of the other representatives elect we have Mr. Ready, an Irishman, Mr. Jeup, a German, and Mr. Lindsley, a native Tennessean. So that on this ticket we have three nationalities and two races. If our Legislature is intended to represent different nationalities or different races, then the elected ticket is a decided success. If, however, it is intended to represent the interests of the whole people of the State of Tennessee with all their varied and important interests without regard to race or nationality, we are inclined to believe that the public judgment will be that our radical and “independent” Johnson opponents could have improved upon their ticket.

During his term in the legislature, Keeble introduced several bills: one would amend Nashville’s charter to allow blacks to operate businesses downtown; a second would provide protection for wage earners (several of the later black legislators followed his lead in this area, introducing similar bills); and still another would appropriate state funds to help support the Tennessee Manual Labor University. Not one of Keeble’s bills received sufficient votes to pass into law.

Keeble served only a single two-year term in the General Assembly. He was defeated two years later in his second run for office.

In 1877 Keeble’s office was the site of a protest meeting of journeyman barbers, who initiated a strike for higher wages and more equitable working conditions.
As a result of his service to the community, Keeble was well known within the African American community. He was elected a magistrate in the Davidson County Court, serving from 1877 to 1882. His 1041-1022 victory was contested by his opponent, James W. Ready, his 1872 Radical Party running mate, and a recount did in fact give Ready a majority; however, the sheriff had already awarded Keeble the election and had issued him a commission. When Ready challenged Keeble’s election in county court, Judge John C. Ferris ruled that the commission could not be set aside once it was granted, so Keeble retained the seat through the remainder of the term.
Sampson Keeble ran again for the General Assembly in 1878 but was defeated by a Greenback party candidate, perhaps in part because the Democrats were gaining back their political supremacy in Nashville and Davidson County, and also because racial violence and poll taxes were beginning to intimidate black voters, who were not turning out for elections in their usual numbers.

By the time of the 1880 Census Sampson, now in his late 40s, was married to Rebecca Cantrell Gordon, a 29-year-old teacher, who had been educated in New York; they were the parents of three-year-old “Jennie” (Jeannette, who would later marry Benjamin F. Cox, Fisk graduate and head of Avery Normal Institute in Charleston SC) and one-year-old “S.W.” (Sampson W., Jr.) These were the only Keeble children who survived to adulthood. Several others, including a set of twins, had died in infancy. In the 1910 Census, Rebecca reports that only two of the six children to whom she had given birth were still living. Also living in the Keeble household in 1880 were Sampson’s widowed mother, Nancy Keeble (78), and two young relatives, Hattie M. Beckwith (18) and Maggie K. Smith (17), who were attending school in Nashville.

Keeble’s second wife Rebecca was the natural daughter of her mother’s slave-owner and was raised in her father’s household, with light duties as a household servant – a “foot slave” – and it is quite possible that she was educated along with the other children of the household. Delighted by this lovely and clever little girl, her father sent her to live with relatives in Staten Island, New York, and she received an education there that included lessons in music and Latin. After a bad experience in New York, about which descendants disagree, she returned to Nashville. Her readjustment to life in the South was difficult, but she was a woman of strong character, and she soon began to teach other African Americans, both children and adults, to read and write. Even after the Civil War, many people opposed the idea of educating blacks, and there were attempts to find and close black schools, which were most often make-shift workshops held in churches and private residences. Rebecca continued to teach, in spite of threats against her safety, moving from place to place to work with her students. Keeble descendants believe that Rebecca may even have taught Sampson to read, although it is likely, because of the publishing jobs he held with Rutherford county newspapers and his position with the Nashville law firm, that he learned to read much earlier. Both he and Rebecca were avid readers and particularly loved reading the Bible.

At some point during daughter Jeannette’s childhood, the family left Nashville for Marshall, Texas. However, they returned to Nashville a short time later when, as descendants tell the story, the passionately Republican Keeble “was run out of there for being a rabble-rouser.” Sampson Keeble was about 15 years Rebecca’s senior, and he died when his children were still quite young. She continued to work – she was a remarkable seamstress, and could knit, tat, embroider, and crochet expertly.

The last year Keeble’s name appears in the Nashville City Directory is 1886, when he is listed as a teacher. He died in 1887 and is buried with his daughter and son-in-law, Jeannette Keeble and Benjamin F. Cox, both Fisk University graduates, in Greenwood Cemetery on Elm Hill Pike in Nashville. The grave is on a piece of land that runs parallel to Spence Lane, directly across from the final resting places of publisher R. H. Boyd and James C. Napier, Nashville’s first African American city councilman and Register of the U.S. Treasury under President Taft. There is no sign of Rebecca’s grave, although Sampson’s mother Nancy is buried in the old Mt. Ararat Cemetery in Nashville, under a broken gravestone whose inscription is nearly illegible:

KEEBLE Born: 1805 Died: 1883
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
MA[RY] M
THE MO[THER] OF S. W./ ELIZA A. GEORGE L
KITTY [?]Y KEEBLE
BORN IN
CUMBERLAND CO. VA.
AUG. 20, 1805
DIED IN NASHVILLE
JAN. 16, 1883
LORD [?] CHRIST