Kwame Leo Lillard
Kwame Leo Lillard Metro Councilmember, freedom fighter
(This memoriam was published in the Nashville Scene on January 7.)
Kwame Leo Lillard, a pioneering community leader and political activist, died on December 20 at 81 years old. Lillard wore many hats during his life journey: civil rights activist, freedom fighter, cultural preservationist, mentor, advocate, baba, Metro Councilmember, spiritual leader, intellectual, Pan-Africanist and environmentalist.
Born in 1939, Lillard was ordained into a life of activism. It was his great-grandfather who the Lillard family credits with their lifelong commitment to justice. The elder Lillard, born into slavery, was reportedly buried alive for defending his wife from an assault by their slave master. Kwame Lillard’s refusal “to kneel” to injustice, he recounted years ago, was an ancestral inheritance passed down in the family for generations.
Lillard was a core member of the Nashville sit-in movement that produced a politically astute group of young militants — the “special forces” of the Freedom Movement. The group later assisted in the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and resurrected the Freedom Rides of 1961. Lillard became a hero of the Freedom Rides after Sheriff Bull Connor expelled Nashville activists from Birmingham and sent them to a Klan-populated area along the Alabama-Tennessee border. Lillard drove from Nashville to Alabama in the middle of the night and retrieved the group. The rescue mission allowed the students to return to Birmingham and revive the Freedom Rides.
Measuring Lillard solely by his role in the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, however, undervalues the depth of his activism, humility and humanitarianism. From the 1960s to his death, he was a master craftsperson, weaving together different strands of social activism. While remaining committed to progressive interracialism, he was entrenched in racial solidarity movements and championed Black cultural and political institutions. As the head of the African American Cultural Alliance, he was the architect of the city’s Kwanzaa celebration and the African Street Festival. Much as his father battled urban renewal, he too backed equitable development policies that preserved historic Black communities and institutions. In recent years, he helped defeat the mixed-use development plan for Fort Negley and organized against city officials’ attempt to locate a new police headquarters on Jefferson Street in North Nashville.
A decade ago, Lillard co-founded the Nashville Student Movement Legacy Foundation to retell the stories of the sit-ins. Even still, he was always looking forward and celebrating youth leadership. His motto of “never trust anyone over 30 years old” paid homage to young activists who were untethered to a managerial political class. The white backlash to racial justice and civil rights advancements was another concern of Lillard’s, best captured in his must-read essay published by the Urban League in 2010. Under the title “50 Years of Civil Rights, 1960–2010: So Little Gain, So Much Pain,” the piece indicted the city’s “political and economic elites” for perpetuating institutional racism and white supremacy. Dismantling systems of oppression, he wrote, requires “determination and steadfast commitment” — a daunting challenge that he believed young activists were best prepared to meet.
Lillard and the lessons he passed were an embodiment of public truth-telling, prophetic wisdom and resistance. He will be forever remembered as the freedom fighter who taught us — in the spirit of his great-grandfather — to never “kneel” to injustice. Rest in power.
