[West Side Row dormitories, where most of the Cherokee and Chickasaw students lived]

Circa 1900, reproduction0
Edward East Barthell Lantern Slide Collection
Vanderbilt University Special Collections 

Fully integrated into university life, their indigenous status functioning more as nationality than race in Jim Crow Tennessee, Vanderbilt’s Cherokee and Chickasaw students lived and took their meals alongside a hundred other students in the West Side Row dormitories and dining hall.  Built in 1886 and 1887 with a bequest from Cornelius Vanderbilt’s eldest son, several of the structures are still standing on campus.  At the same time, the students were never anonymous.  In the late 1880s, William Wirt Hastings and William Pressley Thompson Law Class of 1889 were invited to give a Cherokee oration at the Ward Seminary, precursor to Belmont University.  According to William Thomas Ward, the Chickasaw students who prepped at Wall & Mooney spent much of their time in Franklin as objects of curiosity.  “We were the show,” he wrote.  Newspaper coverage of football star James Burney McAlester repeatedly referred to him as “the Indian.”  The junior class poet for the Class of 1897 referred to Joe Goforth and James Willoughby Breedlove as “two great ‘Big Injun’ braves / From the Indian Territory’s land of flowers—the Indian’s home and grave.”