Professor Rev. Lex McKissack

Human stories are full of joy and pain, often being experienced in tandem. The variations of joy and pain are equally important to the symphony, it is impossible to have one without the other. In fact they enhance each other to create depth and bring to life the emotion of the human narrative that is too often only related in scholarly or stagnant form. We cannot change the pain. We cannot go back and stop it. We also cannot ignore it, or make excuses for it. We must acknowledge the painful moments and be grateful that the people who lived before us were strong enough to survive. Survival becomes triumph. 

William Alexius McKissack, or Lex for short, was the last of his family line born into slavery. He was the grandson of Dick and Anna and the son of Madison and Caroline. All of Lex’s children and grandchildren would be born free.  Lex was his parent’s oldest child. When freedom came he was a teenager. Although educating enslaved children was not illegal in Tennessee, it wasn’t practiced. Freedom meant Lex could be educated. The only education available to him would have been the freedman’s school in Spring Hill that was taught by Rev. Henry Eddy. The school was begun in 1865 in a barn. Eddy said students were eager to learn, with some walking five miles to school. By 1870 Lex was listed as an assistant teacher at the Spring Hill school. Lex later went to Central Tennessee College and became a teacher and a minister, both of which he practiced for the rest of his life. 

Teaching with Henry and his wife, Mary Eddy, was a crucible for Lex. It imprinted a love of God in his heart and a thirst for knowledge in his mind. Religion and Education became the cornerstones of his life.  His personal college graduation speech was entitled “The Bible and Education.”  Success wouldn’t have been easy. At the time Lex was attending and assisting at the Spring Hill school there were outrageous acts of violence being committed against freedmen and teachers in Maury County by the Ku-Klux Klan. One newspaper called the aggression perpetuated by the Klan as a “war against school teachers.” It was constant and incessant. When threats didn’t work. They pulled teachers from their homes and whipped them. They burned down schools. Teachers that were brave enough taught through it and some, like Julia Hayden, lost their lives. 

The Klan enacted sadistic operations on newly freedpeople, and on anyone  brave enough to help them. No one was safe from their wrath, not even ministers like Henry Eddy. Rev. Eddy wrote to a friend in March of 1868 “The Ku-klux Klan, a secret order, have sent me notice to leave country, threatening to hang me if I do not…The more danger attending, the greater the need that it be done…” Those brave words were reinforced in his monthly report to the Freedmen’s Bureau “The Kuklux have caused us some anxiety-aside from that, everything has been quiet. 

It is important to understand the root of the Klan’s anger in order to understand how pervasive it became. Their numbers were great. Eddy said “This Klan is very numerous, sufficiently so to overcome the cowardice of its individual members.” Confederate soldiers returning from war were filled with anger, resentment and loss of power. They blamed the entire upheaval of society on the freedmen, not their own actions. On top of that, black men got the right to vote when some former Confederate soldiers did not have that right. The former soldiers who were justifiably stripped of all their rights as voting “citizens” of the United States, took all their aggression out on the people they blamed for this. They tormented, tortured and killed. Empathy is important in history, however this is a narrative where empathy is impossible to feel. The KKK was founded by men filled with a dangerous bitterness and fury. The idea permeating the lost cause narrative that the KKK helped a lawless society rife with violence is preposterous. Educating children wasn’t criminal or violent.   

Lex saw consequential changes to society in his teenage years. His grandparents, Anna and Dick, too saw change. They experienced the creation and growth of our country. They lived through sixteen presidents, but even they only saw two constitutional amendments their entire lives. Lex saw three amendments before he was eighteen. He experienced slavery and freedom. He saw black men vote, and then Jim Crow. He went from being unable to read and write to teaching within just a few years. Lex was born during the twilight of slavery. He witnessed the triumph of the Civil War, and the dawn of a new society. He sent two sons off to WWI and his last years were lived as a madman rose to power in Europe. 

Each of Lex’s experiences in life built upon his narrative, but it also built upon Madison and Caroline’s and Dick and Anna’s. For their stories lead to his and Lex’s lead to the next. Human history is filled with triumph. Yet, triumph doesn’t exist without failure. Even though there are notes in the symphony that we would like to erase, they are necessary. Some notes are filled with darkness and others with beauty. The balance is perfection. For every coward in a mask, there was a child hungry to learn, a parent strong enough to send their baby off to uncertainty and a teacher brave enough to keep teaching.