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Sampson W. Keeble, 1833 - 1887

A popular barber and an enthusiastic 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 elected to serve in the Tennessee legislature.

Keeble was born in 1833 in Rutherford County, Tennessee.  His parents were Sampson W. and Nancy 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.  In 1851, when he 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 he apparently fought on the Confederate side.  By 1866 he had settled in Davidson County, where he worked for some time as a grocer and took other part-time jobs to support himself; he later 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 Negro 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.”   It is not clear whether Eliza was Sampson’s wife, sister, or other relative.

In November 1872, riding the coat-tails of a sizeable popular vote for President Grant, Sampson W. Keeble was narrowly elected to serve as Republican representative of Davidson County to the 38th Tennessee General Assembly, which convened January 6, 1873.  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. 

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.  At some point during his time in Nashville, he attended Fisk University briefly and also worked as a custodian at a law firm.  The attorneys in that practice, 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 assessment by a handful of legal professionals.

As a result of his efforts, Keeble 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, and a re-count gave Ready a majority; however, the sheriff had already awarded Keeble the election and 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.

In 1877 Keeble’s office was the site of a protest meeting of  journeymen barbers, who initiated a strike for higher wages and more equitable working conditions.

Sampson Keeble ran again for the General Assembly in 1878 but was defeated by a Greenback party candidate, probably because the Democrats were gaining back their political supremacy in Nashville and Davidson County, and because racial violence and poll taxes were beginning to intimidate black voters. 

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, head of Avery Normal Institute in Charleston SC) and one-year-old “S.W.” (probably Sampson W., Jr.)  These were the only Keeble children who survived to adulthood.  Several others, including a set of twins, died in infancy.  Also living in the Keeble household in 1880 were Sampson’s widowed mother, Nancy Keeble (78), and two teenagers, Hattie M. Beckwith (18) and Maggie K. Smith (17), who were attending school in Nashville.

Keeble’s wife Rebecca was the daughter of her mother’s slave-owner and was raised in her father’s household, believing she was white.  When she was still a young child, her father sent her to live with relatives in Staten Island, New York, and she was educated there, eventually becoming a teacher of young children.  Attempting to obtain a teaching position when she returned to Nashville as an adult, Rebecca learned for the first time that she was black.  Her adjustment to this new reality was difficult, but she was a woman of strong character, and she soon began to teach in Nashville’s African American schools.  The Keeble descendants believe that Rebecca may even have taught Sampson to read, although it is likely, because of the publishing jobs he held with newspapers during his teens, 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.” 

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, 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 William H. Taft.