Charles Frazier
Edith Taylor Langster
Frank Buck
James Lawson
Jim Sasser
John Roe (left) and Bill Harbison at the Nashville Bar Association annual meeting, 1980
King Hollands
Mark Gwyn
Winfield Dunn
James Lawson
Theorist, tactician of the American nonviolence movement
James M. Lawson Jr., who honed his expertise in nonviolent advocacy in Nashville, died in Los Angeles on June 9 at age 95. When he arrived in Nashville in 1958, his deep engagement with nonviolence was already well-developed. Maternal guidance in his childhood home in Massillon, Ohio, taught him to eschew violence, and Methodist molding that converted him into a Jesus follower required him to practice non-retaliation toward those who inflicted harm against others. These influences undergirded his embrace of pacifism through membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation while an undergraduate at Baldwin-Wallace College and informed his refusal to fight as a draftee in the Korean War. Though federally imprisoned, Lawson fulfilled parole obligations in India, where he taught at a Methodist college and immersed himself in studies about Gandhi. He also learned while in India about the Montgomery bus boycott, and after meeting Martin Luther King Jr. at Oberlin Seminary, Lawson transferred to Vanderbilt Divinity School and became a Fellowship of Reconciliation official in Nashville.
In meeting the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, president of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, Lawson learned of plans to fight racial segregation in downtown department stores. Lawson suggested that college and professional students from the four local African American institutions should make up the vanguard of protestors. To prepare them, Lawson conducted at various Black churches nonviolent workshops. Notwithstanding his expulsion from Vanderbilt and the violence and arrests visited upon movement supporters between February and May 1960, successful desegregation occurred in the city’s important commercial sphere.
Lawson’s nonviolent practicums also led students to participate in out-of-state Freedom Rides, voter registration campaigns and other civil rights activities in the American South. Lawson pivoted from Nashville to other historic involvements in Memphis and Los Angeles in peace and labor movements, all of which drew from his grounding in nonviolence. —Dennis C. Dickerson, Rev. James Lawson chair in history, emeritus, Vanderbilt University
Civil rights leader, advocate, community member
Sixty years ago, police arrested Vencen Horsley for disorderly conduct — one of several legal charges the Tennessee State University grad took for his central role in the Nashville civil rights movement of the 1960s. The incidents of beatings, spit, verbal abuse and harassment were too many to count, he told reporters years later, but Horsley endured, cementing his civil rights legacy — an integrated city and nearly universal respect for its heroes, many just teenagers and students organizing alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis.
He settled into a civically engaged, pleasantly routine life in Hermitage after the “necessary trouble” of his youth, counting the respect of neighbors, friends and politicians. Horsley continued to celebrate the history he made decades ago while anchoring communities like Mount Gilead Missionary Baptist Church and the Donelson Hermitage Neighborhood Alliance. He died on Dec. 12, just past 80 years old. —Eli Motycka
King Hollands
Civil rights activist, Edgehill neighborhood organizer
King Hollands was thrust into the civil rights struggle at an early age as one of 14 Black students to integrate Father Ryan High School in the 1950s following Brown v. Board of Education. In the 1960s, while a student at Fisk University, he joined the sit-in protests at Woolworth’s alongside activists like John Lewis. He served two weeks in jail for his part in the protests.
Hollands remained a vocal advocate for the Edgehill neighborhood throughout his life. He founded Organized Neighbors Edgehill, and in the 1970s he rallied residents to rebuke a massive housing complex in favor of rent-to-buy houses. He was also part of an informal Nashville civil rights veterans group, according to an interview with the Tennessee Lookout.
Hollands died at age 82, and hundreds attended his service at Fisk Chapel. Speaking to WKRN, his eldest daughter Kisha Turner said: “He was courageous in finding solutions to any matter that he had. He was well-loved and loved all in his area and in his neighborhood.” —Alejandro Ramirez
Metro councilmember, idea man, fixer, friend
Once upon a time, there was a small group of congressional staffers based in Nashville’s downtown public library. They used the library the way Superman used a phone booth: to transition into superheroes. They didn’t look like superheroes — there was no spandex — but they had superpowers. They protected everyone — especially the vulnerable — from a scary giant named Federal Government. They rescued you from trouble, fixed any snafu, even gave you free parking. No one else in the entire city, no matter how rich and famous, could do that.
The most remarkable superhero was Don Majors Jr., a man with many titles: Honorable, the Don, Major Don, Little Don, Coach and Councilman. No one ever called him The Donald. His job was “special projects,” handling the toughest problems. How did he do that? By convincing people that his ideas were their ideas. He was a horse-whisperer. Just by joking around, he got people to behave. He could talk the horns off a goat … and then reattach the horns. Don’s always merry, mischievous face had a goatee beard and a Santa Claus smile. His glasses could not hide the twinkle in his eye.
Don grew up near downtown, first getting indoor plumbing when Dupont finally — finally — broke the color barrier in Nashville with Don’s father. Don had a career at Dupont himself, and he and his beautiful wife Vallie lived in Hopewell. They moved to Parkwood, where he became a great baseball coach, breaking color barriers in the Dixie League and with the Sertoma Club when he helped rescue the Parkwood ballfield. Don then joined the Metro Council, and broke barriers for minority contracting. He took on powerful mayors and charmed them while disarming them. Don spoke truth to power, but always with a smile. He later moved to Whites Creek, where he played more golf with the Duffers. Don loved the game, the fellowship, and winning. He loved just thinking about golf.
If anyone doubts Don’s magic, ask who the most popular person was in the library office, the hero of superheroes. Someone once wrote that he didn’t know what heaven looks like, but he thought it looks like a library. I see Don Majors in there, putting on his golf shoes, getting ready to par the course. —Excerpt from a eulogy by former U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper
Jim Sasser
Senator, ambassador, advocate
A quiet dealmaker who often found himself at the center of the action, Jim Sasser was the sort of senator Tennessee sent to Washington for decades. He was not a stentorian orator or firebrand or attention-seeker, but was grounded in the details of policy, finding nuance and compromise and tweaks.
He was the Democratic Party’s nominee for Senate in 1976, defeating eternal gadfly John Jay Hooker. He was squaring off against Bill Brock, the Republican who’d defeated Al Gore Sr. six years earlier. Newly 40 years old, Sasser crisscrossed the state, visiting every single county seat and dropping by plenty of places in between. He won by 80,000 votes. He stayed 18 years in the Senate with a reputation back home for constituent service and on the Hill for his knowledge and dealmaking. That reputation earned him the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, through which he helped Bill Clinton pass his 1993 budget without a single Republican vote. He championed the Tennessee Valley Authority and advocated for the rights of the disabled, sponsoring the reauthorization of the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. “He’s probably the most important Tennessean that most people have forgotten about,” said former U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, no slouch as a policy-loving wonk himself.
Defeated by Bill Frist in 1994, Sasser was appointed by Clinton as ambassador to China in 1996 at a time when the People’s Republic was starting to exert itself as a power in the post-Cold War world. He was ambassador in 1999 when a U.S. jet inadvertently bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The American embassy in Beijing was besieged by rioters, but Sasser helped quiet and defuse what could have exploded into a major international situation between a superpower and a country making a play to become one. In the meantime, he even managed to secure two Chinese pandas for the Memphis Zoo. Jim Sasser died Sept. 10. He was 87. —J.R. Lind
Politico, attorney, doting grandfather
The first experience Dick Lodge had working on a political campaign resulted in the election of Jim Sasser to the United States Senate in 1976. His subsequent move to Washington to assume the role of Sasser’s legislative director resulted in meeting the love of his life, his intellectual and political soulmate Gina Tyler, who had just moved to D.C. to work with freshman Sen. Patrick Moynihan. They married in 1978 and moved back to Nashville; a graduate of the University of the South in Sewanee, Lodge received his J.D. in 1974 from Vanderbilt School of Law. He joined the firm Willis & Knight, but politics was in his blood. In 1983, he was elected Tennessee Democratic Party chair and headed the Committee of Southern States to create Super Tuesday; the first was held in 1988.
His longest professional tenure was with Bass, Berry & Sims, the storied firm he joined in 1985. He became a partner, headed their government relations practice and remained there for 33 years. Lodge had a booming voice, a commanding and calming presence and was a natural leader. Mayor Phil Bredesen appointed him the first chair of the Nashville Sports Authority, and he was president of Legal Services of Middle Tennessee and senior warden at Christ Church Cathedral. He volunteered his legal services to the creation of Thistle Farms and helped launch the Center for Contemplative Justice.
He is best remembered by family, friends and colleagues for his culinary skills, for the dinner parties he and Gina hosted, and as a mentor to young lawyers and aspiring office holders, a baby whisperer, a bird watcher, a road tripper, an outlaw country fan, and a teller of joyful stories about his four grandchildren. —Kay West
Frank Buck
State representative, ethics champion
For 36 years, Frank Buck — a Democrat who served his home county of DeKalb along with, at various times, parts of Smith, Cannon and Rutherford counties in the Tennessee House of Representatives — cut a distinctive figure in the halls of the state Capitol. The son of a tobacco and cattle farmer, he honored his rural roots with his brown leather vest, khaki pants and simple blue shirt, a far cry from the increasingly expensive suits that flitted around him. Elected at 29 after exposing a whiskey-for-votes scheme in his hometown, he never stopped championing ethics. As early as 1994, he pushed for massive ethics reform in the legislature, introducing a bill that barred lawmakers from accepting even a cup of coffee. It didn’t pass, but enough scandal and public attention laid the groundwork for a more comprehensive series of ethics laws over the next decade.
He was an old-school rural Democrat whose ability to deliver for his district and his unassailable incorruptibility left him in the legislature long after others of his ilk had been sent packing by political realignment. Respected on both sides of the House — aided, no doubt, by his occasional willingness to challenge the West Tennessee luminaries led by longtime Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, who dominated legislative Democrats — he was remembered by colleagues mostly for his often-lonely push to make the legislature a more respectable and respected place.
Still, he always said he was most proud of passing the lemonade-stand law, which exempted lemonade stands and similar kid-run dalliances from health department regulation. Frank Buck died Jan. 24 at 80 years old. —J.R. Lind
Winfield Dunn
Governor, statesman, party leader
Before 1970, Memphis dentist Winfield Dunn had never run for political office. A Republican hadn’t won the governorship in 50 years — and only three times since the end of Reconstruction. That didn’t stop him from defeating Democrat John Jay Hooker — Dunn’s campaign manager was a 30-year-old named Lamar Alexander, who earned a great deal of respect for shepherding the upset. Dunn’s win hinted that Republicans — a mainstay in East Tennessee for a century but largely inconsequential in the other two Grand Divisions — could compete statewide.
While governor, he introduced statewide kindergarten and worked with Democrats to raise the sales tax. Dunn (reminder: he was a Republican) wanted to raise it to 4 percent. Democrats wanted 3 percent. They split the baby. Dunn introduced a regional prison system and the Department of Economic and Community Development. He created a new state housing agency that helped middle- and low-income Tennesseans secure mortgages. He also, however, opposed a new medical school at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, which put him at loggerheads with the power base of his own party and U.S. Rep. Jimmy Quillen, who worked with legislative Democrats to fund it. Dunn also wanted to put one of his regional prisons in Morristown. The two moves made him deeply unpopular in East Tennessee, and for a Republican looking for statewide success, that made him essentially unelectable.
At the time, Dunn was unable to succeed himself as governor, though he did try again in 1986, losing to Ned McWherter. McWherter had helped Quillen in the med-school fight, and East Tennesseans had a long memory. Dunn, who later became a vice president at HCA, died Sept. 28. He was 97. —J.R. Lind
Edith Taylor Langster
Trailblazer, public servant
Edith Taylor Langster broke barriers for Black women in Nashville, and her dedication to serving the community was fierce from the beginning of her career. She grew up in North Nashville and went to Tennessee State University. Her work in law enforcement began behind the desk — as was common for women at the time. But she later became the first woman assigned to the Metro Nashville Police Department’s patrol division. She also worked for the Youth Services and Intelligence divisions.
“Thank you for being courageous at a time when women, particularly Black women, were not presented with such opportunities,” Davidson County assessor of property Vivian Wilhoite told The Tennessee Tribune after Langster’s death in the summer. “I am surely grateful to not only have known and served with you, but to also call you my friend.”
After 10 years with the force, Langster worked with groups such as the North Nashville Organization for Community Improvement and the Davidson County Democratic Women’s Club. She was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and a life member of the NAACP. From 1991 to 1995, Langster served as the Metro Council’s District 20 representative. She then won the District 54 seat in the Tennessee House of Representatives. She served as the House Local Government Committee chair and assistant majority whip during her 12 years in the statehouse. Langster later ran for and once again won a Metro Council seat — she represented District 21 from 2007 until 2015. —Nicolle S. Praino
Environmental policy expert, professor
Greer Tidwell loved the outdoors. The Nashville native was an outstanding early example of a modern environmental engineer, and he spent his career shaping environmental and conservation policy in his home state, his country and the world over. He served in the Tennessee Valley Authority and Environmental Protection Agency before founding his own environmental engineering firm — EMPE Inc. — and he was named regional administrator for the EPA over several Southeastern states during the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Tidwell earned Tennessee’s Robert Sparks Walker Lifetime Achievement Award for his efforts, and he shaped the next generation of conservationist minds as a professor of civil and environmental engineering at his alma mater, Vanderbilt University. His hobbies tended to be things that let him spend time outside, and he trained, showed and won competitions with countless bird dogs and horses over the years. He is survived by his wife Claudette and children Sharon and Greer Jr., as well as several grand- and great-grandchildren. His passion for the environment and engineering took root in his family; his son Greer Jr. is the deputy commissioner of Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation’s Bureau of Conservation, and Greer Jr.’s daughter, Brittainy Tidwell, is an engineer in Texas. —Cole Villena
Belle Meade mayor, community leader
Elizabeth Smith, always known as Peggy, was first elected to office in 1953, when the native Nashvillian served as president of her senior class at Harpeth Hall, which she had entered as a sophomore the year of its founding in 1951. After graduating in 1954, she attended Sweet Briar College, then Vanderbilt University. She married John Warner and moved with him to several cities for his medical training before coming home to Nashville with their three children.
Her leadership roles continued throughout her life — president of Junior League, Friends of Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, chairman of the Ensworth Board of Trustees, the Harpeth Hall Board of Trustees, co-chair of the Swan Ball, president of the Canby Robinson Society and president of the Cashiers (N.C.) Historical Society.
In 1998, after serving as a Belle Meade city commissioner, Warner recruited family and friends to support her campaign for mayor of the well-heeled city within a city. They enthusiastically donned bright-yellow T-shirts emblazoned “Peggy for Mayor” and canvassed the neighborhood to drum up votes. Not surprisingly, she won, and wielded the gavel with skill, grace and humor through her four-year term. —Kay West
Mark Gwyn
TBI director, committed law enforcement official
Mark Gwyn graduated from MTSU in 1985 with a degree in communications. He did not seek a job in public relations or journalism, but instead went home to McMinnville and took a job as a patrol officer with the police department. Three years later, he joined the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation as a special agent in the criminal investigation division, rising through the ranks all the way to the top: In 2004, then-Gov. Phil Bredesen appointed him TBI director, the first African American in the position.
During his tenure with the agency, Gwyn was particularly committed to uncovering human trafficking, and passionate about helping the victimized. As director, he played a pivotal role in the state’s fight against the illegal drug trade, particularly methamphetamine production, working closely with Gov. Bredesen’s Meth Task Force. He presided over high-profile cases such as the murder of Holly Bobo and the Waffle House mass shooting. Gwyn oversaw the creation of the Technical Services Unit and the Cyber Crimes Unit, and the state’s Fusion Center was brought to the bureau’s headquarters, housing programs like the statewide Sex Offender Registry.
Gwyn fostered meaningful friendships with colleagues in the field during his tenure and after his retirement, including David Rausch, the man who succeeded him in 2018. Gwyn is the longest-serving director in agency history. When he announced his retirement via an email to TBI staff, he signed off by saying: “We have come a very long way, and I am honored to have served in this capacity for so long. I hope I have left in part, a legacy that reflects the integrity, leadership and compassion that touches every facet of this agency. It was my goal to leave the Bureau better than it was when it was given to me.” —Kay West
Blogger, activist, life of the party
Trace Sharp always said she was from Hoots. Hoots is not on a map. Hoots might be Dyersburg or Dresden or Martin — or all of them, or none of them. Hoots was more of a state of mind. It was Trace’s all-encompassing term for those places in rural West Tennessee, usually north of I-40, flat and soggy land with hardworking people overlooked by Washington and then — as Tennessee realigned and the Democratic Party here became almost exclusively urban — by Nashville too. A newspaperwoman and disc jockey who spent her life talking to and talking for the people around her, she recognized something long before most anyone else: The Democrats were losing those people, her people, and, campers (she always called her readers and listeners “campers” when she was about to say something serious), without a change, Democrats would lose those once-reliable voters.
Guess who was right.
Trace was a mainstay of Tennessee’s bloggerverse when that was a thing, telling those truths under the Newscoma banner. She worked for a lot of hard-luck Democrats in statewide campaigns. She still believed Democrats could win in Tennessee, despite all evidence to the contrary. Trace loved dogs and cigarettes and beer — working for Mike McWherter’s campaign, she drank a considerable amount of Budweiser, due to that political family making its fortune distributing Anheuser-Busch — and conversation and debate and trashy TV. She hated cilantro, but she was too polite to tell me that despite me serving her numerous dishes featuring the herb when she and Stephanie, her partner of 30 years, joined me and my wife to watch True Blood. She was brassy and boisterous, and no one ever missed her when she sauntered into a room, her fedora atop her supernova of curls. She was caring and tough and fought endlessly for causes she cared about, establishing a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Weakley County.
She knew what she believed, but she listened too. She counted among her friends and admirers people with whom she deeply disagreed, because if nothing else, she was incredibly fun to be around, to argue with and to commiserate with — though she worked for plenty of lost-cause candidates, she was a happy warrior who loved the fight even when the outcome was inevitable. (She’d never admit the inevitability, because what’s the fun in that?) Trace Sharp died June 26. She was 58. —J.R. Lind
Advocate, environmentalist, devoted husband
John Harkey was a 1967 graduate of the Air Force Academy. Two months after marrying Kathleen in 1968, he left to fulfill his service obligations, spending two years in special operations flying in South Korea and Vietnam. In Nashville — where he moved with Kathleen to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology from Vanderbilt — his feet were firmly on the ground.
Aside from his wife and two children, Harkey’s passions were writing and the environment, which he merged in the publishing of environmental magazine The Cumberland Journal. To pay the bills, he founded and ran Harkey and Associates, which covered managed health care in the Southeast. He pursued his core values of healthy living and thriving communities through his dedication to organizations and nonprofits such as Walk Bike Nashville, Greenways for Nashville and, with Kathleen, Moms Demand Action, the national initiative fighting for gun safety measures.
While caring for Kathleen and after her death in 2023, Harkey was at work on a narrative about their love story, referencing the saved letters he and his young bride faithfully wrote daily to each other during the two — and only — years they spent apart. —Kay West
Charles Frazier
Former MNPS director, dedicated husband and father
Every child deserves a chance to succeed. That simple idea drove Charles Frazier through a lifetime of service to Nashville, where he’s remembered as a dedicated educator and community servant. Frazier spent nearly four decades at Metro Nashville Public Schools and helped establish several programs to serve students, ending his career as the system’s director in 1992.
But stepping out of the Metro schools office didn’t mean ending his commitment to young Nashvillians. In 1998, he worked with the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee to establish the Tapping Individual Potential program, which has awarded more than 1,200 scholarships for promising students to attend STEM camps, arts courses and other educational enrichment programs. He’s remembered as a dedicated husband to his wife, Barbara — the pair met while working at the same public school, naturally — and father to his beloved son Brian. —Cole Villena
Teacher, public health official, volunteer
When you’re the youngest of eight children, and your family is an institution in your hometown, in the Catholic Diocese and in multiple sectors of the community, you can be easily overlooked. Joan Seigenthaler didn’t give it a thought. She dedicated her professional career to service, teaching in Catholic schools in Tennessee, Ohio and Virginia, then spent 33 years in the Metro Public Health Department. In those decades, she demonstrated a special commitment to Nashvillians with special needs as a teacher in the day care program for individuals with severe developmental disabilities. She was subsequently its director. She also worked with mothers living in poverty as director of the WIC program, then was director of Jail Health Services, overseeing care for inmates at the Metro jail with kindness and compassion. She met her husband Dr. John Miller through the health department.
After she retired, she continued to practice unconditional giving through engaged and active volunteer work and perfected her legendary scratch-baked coconut cakes. —Kay West
Diplomat, naval officer, educator
“I cannot think of anyone who has done more to deepen the security ties between Japan and the United States than James E. Auer.” So wrote Yoshihisa Komori, editor of the English-language Japanese outlet JAPAN Forward. Auer was a U.S. Navy officer, Pentagon official and educator who spent his military and diplomatic career fostering cooperation between the two nations.
Especially significant was Auer’s work developing a bilateral defense relationship between the two countries as head of the Department of Defense’s Japan Affairs Office. He was honored not only by his home country but by Japan, which awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun, 3rd Class in 2008 for distinguished service to the state. Auer met his wife Judith while stationed in Tokyo in 1978, and she eventually convinced her Midwest-native husband to move to her home in Middle Tennessee. He continued his diplomatic efforts there and found a passion for education. Students at Vanderbilt University knew him as the founder of the Center for U.S.-Japan Studies and Cooperation and a seasoned instructor of courses about international relations, Asian studies and military history. —Cole Villena
John Roe (left) and Bill Harbison at the Nashville Bar Association annual meeting, 1980
Attorney, legal expert
John Roe Jr., a founding partner of Sherrard, Roe, Voigt & Harbison, died in February of pancreatic cancer. He was 77. In 1981, Roe founded the law office of O’Hare, Sherrard & Roe. In 2016, the firm added John Voigt and Bill Harbison as named partners. Roe was born in Springfield and grew up in Clarksville, then started his law career in Atlanta before moving to Nashville in 1974. Roe began a gradual retirement in 2019.
“John leaves behind the legacy of a wonderful family and a superb 50-year legal career,” says Tom Sherrard, a friend and business partner. “We were all the beneficiaries of his wisdom and leadership in establishing our law firm, which is truly a family for all of us. We will miss John terribly and mourn his passing, but we will celebrate our shared memories and remember the kindness he showed others.”
Roe’s legal expertise was real estate and tax law, and he co-wrote the Tennessee Condominium Act of 2008. Roe attended Davidson College and Vanderbilt Law School, where he graduated first in his class. Added Harbison: “John inspired generations in our firm and in our community with his keen intellect, warm humor, generous mentoring and adventurous spirit.”
Roe is survived by his wife, Jane Buchi Roe, and children Lillian Gilmer, John Roe and Alan Roe, plus stepchildren Marla Doehring, Hunter Connelly and Will Connelly, and 15 grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife Emily Hunt Roe. —William Williams
Remembering many of the irreplaceable Nashville figures we lost in 2024
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The veteran activist shows you’re never too old to fight for a just cause
From conspiratorial legislation to country stars hurling chairs, here’s our 35th annual list…
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