Metro Pulse/Gamut/Beck Cultural Exchange Center

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Knoxville's impressive little African-American history museum looks to better things

by Mike Gibson

It's one thing to talk about slavery; it's quite another to hold in your own hands irons that clasped the wrists of African-American slaves circa 1850; to run a tentative finger across hard sanguineous links; to trace the crude, hammered lettering of the metal identification tags that hung from captive necks, on tarnished chain links still redolent of fear and sweat.

A collection of artifacts from the epoch of American slavery is one of the more visceral exhibits on display at the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, a vault of African-American history located in an old house on Dandridge Avenue in East Knoxville. Beck Executive Director Avon Rollins likes to show off a pair of 150-year-old wrist chains in particular, briefly locking up young volunteers with the admonition, "This is the first and last time you'll ever be in handcuffs, won't it?"

But other exhibits are just as enlightening, if less frightening. The tumbling, pleasantly musty two-story Beck building is home to, among many other things, African-American sports memorabilia; robes and other personal effects belonging to Knox-born African-American judge and law professor William Hastie—as well as his most famous student, the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; photos of local African-American civic and cultural leaders dating back to the latter part of the 19th century; original sketches from Knoxville's Joseph Delaney, one of the most notable black artists in American history.

Founded in 1975 after a bequest from James Beck, Knoxville's first African-American postal clerk, the Beck center is at once a museum, an educational outreach, a library, and a source of cultural pride not only for African Americans but for all Knoxvillians. The center now hosts thousands of visitors every year, Rollins says, only about half of whom are African Americans themselves.

The center has been in a state of flux since Rollins took over as director in January of 1999. Since his arrival, Beck has seen its leaky roof patched, faulty plumbing fixed, and the visitor count boosted to unprecedented levels.

And there's further evolution to come. Over the next two to three years, a still-pending arrangement with the Knox County library system should infuse the center with more than $1 million for renovation and expansion, to include up to 7,000 square feet of new exhibit and library space on the lot in back of the existing house.

"We still don't have adequate staff," adds Rollins, who keeps Beck running with only one other full-time employee, Marie Carter, and a handful of volunteers. "This is the kind of environment where you come in early, grab the vacuum, and empty your own trash."

A chatty, whimsical sort, with spottily graying hair and a trim moustache, Rollins was no stranger to local African-American concerns even before assuming the reins at Beck. A former manager in charge of minority economic development for the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1960s, Rollins was also a local civil rights activist. Many of the old black-and-white photos enlarged and preserved on the walls of the Beck house are graced with his familiar face, albeit framed with darker, suaver hair and holding sway over a trimmer physique. One of them is a shot that depicts Rollins with a group that includes jazz chanteuse Nina Simone and a well-coiffed Marion Barry, who would later become mayor of Washington, D.C.

"That was back when I couldn't hold my pants up," Rollins chuckles, tugging at his beltline as he notes some of the inevitable physical transformations of several of the 35-year-old photo's subjects. "I don't have that problem now. Marion dies his hair now—what there is of it—but he wants me to swear it's the original color."

Rollins et al. shouldn't have trouble filling any new space created by the planned renovations; many viable exhibit items are currently packed away, shelved in corners or tiny back rooms for want of space. In a room next to the William Hastie exhibit, there's a closet full of old Austin High School (originally Knoxville Colored High) and Knoxville College yearbooks, some of them dating to the 1890s.

The upstairs "research room" keeps an ever-expanding collection of books, magazines, and videos related to African-American history and culture, including black-produced movies from the early 1930s. Also available for listening are an abundance of audio- and video-taped home recordings, oral histories and recorded meetings and interviews with notable African Americans, local and otherwise. There are cassette tapes of speeches by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X from Rollins' own collection, as well as an interview with late Knoxville boxer and former heavyweight champion Big John Tate.

Rollins encourages young visitors to record their own interviews with grandparents and other relatives for inclusion in the archive. Beck volunteers are currently transferring the many hundreds of recordings to digital format.

Beck is a veritable treasure house of photographs, both portraits and group shots of notables such as local blues and jazz singer Ida Cox, who performed with the likes of Louis Armstrong circa 1930; Dr. James H. Presnell, voted Knoxville's "Bronze Mayor" (an honorary position) by readers of the black-owned Flashlight Herald newspaper in 1937; and Roots author Alex Haley, who called Knoxville home when he died in 1992.

Rollins was involved in bringing Haley to Knoxville for the 1982 World's Fair, during which the renowned author reportedly "fell in love with East Tennessee," eventually moving here in 1987. Rollins remembers Haley as "a very unselfish man, unselfish to a fault. You'd say 'You ought to come visit me at my church.' Lo and behold, there would come Alex Haley walking up to your church the next Sunday."

Another closet in the research room is stacked with musty maroon boxes of old photographs—yellowing pictures of now-demolished buildings, of long-abandoned neighborhoods, of countless African-American families and leaders and civic groups from decades past. Rollins recognizes most of them on sight, pointing out favorite photos like one of the old downtown Gem African-American movie theater, or of the so-called colored balcony set aside for black seating at the Bijou Theatre, ca. 1950.

"When I was a kid, going down Gay Street on Christmas, you could hardly move," he says of the days before mid-century federal "urban renewal" programs (facetiously referred to as "negro removal" by critics) decimated what was once a flourishing African-American presence downtown.

"Nowadays, you could take six shotguns out there...and not hit anybody. Every program that came along, you had a drastic loss in the quality and quantity of African-American business."

Some Beck exhibits are fun, more frivolous in character; in the main exhibit room downstairs, there's an assortment of African-American baseball memorabilia, autographed balls and bats and gloves, owned by the likes of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and even Satchel Paige, the astoundingly durable negro league pitching great who earned his chance to play in the major leagues when he was approaching age 60. Rollins isn't alone in his belief that Paige may have been—bar none—the most exceptional baseball player in history.

But Rollins' favorite room happens to be Beck's most magisterial, featuring the exhibit devoted to William Hastie. Born in South Knoxville, Hastie became the nation's first black federal judge when Pres. Harry S Truman appointed him to the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Philadelphia in 1949. There's an inspirational character to that exhibit, an unspoken promise that young African Americans can aspire to things that perhaps exceeded the grasp of their forebears remembered in these rooms.

When children visit Beck—as they often do, from local school, church and daycare groups—Rollins likes to choose a particularly gregarious volunteer, who he then instructs to lay hands on Hastie's judicial robes, in the hope that the departed jurist's spirit will somehow emerge, conferring its wisdom on the supplicant.

"I think you would be a good lawyer," he tells a boy who visits with a YWCA children's club. "I can tell, because you like to talk...You remind me of my wife, because she likes to talk, too."

With new funding and a new association with Knox County pending, Beck board members are conceiving new ways to expand the scope of the center in years to come. Some of the ideas that came out of a brainstorming session on design in late June include the possibility of constructing a theater or musical performance stage; of creating exhibit space for local artists; of including more audio-visual and computer exhibits, and of committing archival material to computer files.

Rollins hopes the board will take advantage of other efforts, such as those of the local Cultural Heritage Tourism Initiative, to promote Knoxville as a city that's both friendlier to and more solicitous of African-American visitors. He cites statistics that show that more than half the country's black population lives within a day's drive of the city. Tellingly, African Americans from other cities who find their way to Beck are prone to making return visits, or else to sending friends and relatives this way, with high recommendations.

Rollins asks each visitor, locals and tourists alike, to sign the Beck registry before leaving the premises; the book now collects more than 20,000 names every year. With a twinkle in his eye, he always tells the departing guests that "When you become great and famous, I can sell your autograph...then I can give the money to the Beck Center."