Eugene TeSelle Papers

Eugene Arthur TeSelle (August 8, 1931 – March 1, 2018) was an American academic, church historian, and community activist. He taught at Yale Department of Religious Studies before becoming a professor at the Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1969. He wrote about the fact that Peabody College was the original site for an African American institution in his article “The Nashville Institute and Roger Williams University: Benevolence, Paternalism, and Black Consciousness, 1807-1910,” published by the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. TeSelle volunteered his time and expertise to many important community issues. In 1970, he helped form and lead the Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors, which was only the second organized neighborhood group in Nashville at the time. He worked on a comprehensive integration plan for Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools as a member of Concerned Citizens for Improved Schools. He was a board member of the Fair Housing Foundation of Nashville, serving as a liaison with the Civil Rights Division of the U. S. Department of Justice. He also was an organizer of the Nashville Peace and Justice Center.