Dr. Everlena Holmes and How a 92 Year Old Keeps Us Informed

I was on Dr. Everlena Holmes’s email list before I ever sat in her living room.

That is the part I want you to understand first. For years, some of what I knew about what was actually happening in this city, a meeting, a decision, a fight over something most people never heard about, arrived the same way it arrives for everyone else on her list. By email. From her. Long before I ever thought to write about it.

So when I finally walked into her home in Glenwood, I was not meeting a stranger. I was meeting the person who had been quietly informing me all along.

The first thing you notice in her living room is that you are surrounded.

Family on every wall. Generations of faces looking back at you. African art set between the frames, color and carving and history, arranged by someone who knows exactly where everything belongs.

The second thing you notice is that she can barely sit still.

She has just gotten home from working out downtown with a group of other seniors. She is ninety-two years old. She moves through the room like a woman with somewhere to be, because she always is.

I came to ask her how she keeps people informed, what drives her to do it, and to learn more about the road that brought her here. I already knew the what. I have been on the receiving end of it for years. What I wanted was the why.

Because here is the thing I could not get over. Dr. Holmes keeps her community informed. Neighbors, readers, city officials, people who moved away years ago and still want to know what is happening back home. And she does it strictly through email. By hand. All day, every day. Since around 2014, when she came back to Chattanooga for good.

No platform or fancy software running in the background. Just her and the keyboard.

“The thing I enjoy most,” she told me, “is keeping you informed.”

I asked why she started. Her answer was immediate. “Because I felt people were uninformed. They didn’t know what was going on.”

But the deeper answer was not something she said. It was something she saw.

Years ago, before the email, she would ride through her own neighborhood and read it like a ledger of everything her neighbors had been denied. Streets that had never been paved. Corners with no signs. Trash dumped where someone decided it would not matter. People who had lived on the same block for years and did not know each other’s names. People who could not have told you who led their own neighborhood association, or how to get involved if they wanted to.

These were not poor neighborhoods because the people in them did not care. They were neglected neighborhoods. And the residents were paying taxes the whole time.

That is the wound underneath all of it. Dr. Holmes did not start informing people because information is a nice civic virtue. She started because she watched a community get treated as though it were invisible, and she decided she would not let it stay that way.

So she fixed it the only way she has ever known how. Directly. One name at a time. Add me to the list, people kept telling her. Add me to the list. And it grew, and it kept growing. Not just news about the city, but the neighborhoods, the state, the country.

It has gotten big enough that the system itself sometimes flinches. Just last week, she said with a chuckle, the sheer volume got her “blacklisted” by EPB for almost a week. She did not panic. She does not stop for that. She picks up the phone, makes a call, gets herself put right back online, and keeps going.

When I told her how amazed I was that she does all of this through nothing but email, she shrugged it off. It was simply something she wanted to do. People deserved to know.

“Knowledge is power,” she said. You cannot tell her you didn’t know. She made sure you knew.

She does not do it for money, and she wants that understood. “I’m interested in people having a better quality of life,” she said. To her this is not a hobby and not a job. It is an assignment. “We all have a God-given purpose for being here. I feel that I’m fulfilling mine now.”

To understand where that conviction comes from, you have to go back to Tuskegee, Alabama, and to three generations of teachers.

Her grandmother taught in a rural two-room schoolhouse warmed by a potbelly stove, the kind of school where you arrived early to gather sticks and start the fire before the children showed up. Her mother taught elementary school, later second grade at James A. Henry, and ran a two-room school of her own. Her father was a building contractor who became a vocational educator at Howard High School. As Dr. Holmes tells it, he died too young, in his sixties, after he was hit by a car.

She remembers walking to school as a girl while white children threw things at them from a passing bus. She has, in the fullest sense, seen this country. When I asked how it feels to be ninety-two, she waved it away. “I never think of my age,” she said. “I do until I can’t.”

Teaching people what they need to know is not something Dr. Holmes picked up along the way. It is what she is made of.

She built a career on it. She earned a doctorate, did postdoctoral work at Harvard, and rose through college administration into the dean’s office, eventually leading at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles before retiring in 2001. She has said she wanted that chair for a specific reason: in her field she almost never saw another Black, Latina, or Asian face in the leadership ranks, and she wanted students who looked like her to know the seat was theirs to take too. Then she came home to Chattanooga. And she went straight back to the grassroots.

I asked if someone had inspired this kind of work, some organizer she’d grown up watching. She shook her head. “No, this is my thing. Nobody’s ever done it, to my knowledge.” Newspapers do it. Radio does it. But not like this. “Not grassroots,” she said. “I’ve always worked at the grassroots level.”

She has the stories to prove it. Years ago she loaded her young son and a handful of other neighborhood kids into the back of her pickup truck and drove them through those unpaved streets and signless corners. The children handed out flyers explaining how a resident could get their own street paved, their own sidewalk built, their own sign installed. Things they were owed as taxpayers and had simply never been told.

That was the seed. That is exactly why she started the block leaders, a network of residents organized to keep their blocks informed and looked after, including junior block leaders pulled from the neighborhood’s own young people. It began in Glenwood and spread: Avondale, Glass Farm, Bushtown, Churchville.

“You have to take care of your own community,” she said. That is the whole philosophy. That is the entire thing.

And here is what she has spent decades trying to make her neighbors see.

Ask her about parks. She will tell you there is no park in Glenwood. None in Bushtown. None in Churchville. She can walk you through it block by block, the way someone recites a debt they are still owed. They took the old golf course. They took Lincoln Park, and now they say it sits in a flood zone where nothing can be built. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, North Chattanooga has the kind of park she says her own community has been asking for the entire time. “That’s what we need in this area,” she said. The vacant lots are right there. The land exists. The park does not.

Ask her about homeless veterans, and her voice sharpens. She talks about money that was supposed to build housing for them, and a process that somehow concluded there was nowhere to put it, in a city she can show you is full of empty land. She does not accept that. “Veterans shouldn’t be homeless,” she said. It goes out on her email all the time, because she is not going to let the people on her list pretend the problem is unsolvable when she can see the solution from her own window.

And then there is the meeting. When planners held a session about the future of her part of the city, what is now folded into the River to Ridge vision, Dr. Holmes showed up and found four or five people in the room deciding the fate of whole neighborhoods. “Where are the people?” she asked. She was told everyone had been notified. She knew better, because she had called them herself and they knew nothing about it. So she did what she does. She called her own meeting. She filled the room with neighborhood leaders and pulled in someone from Regional Planning, and she told them, in so many words, that nobody was leaving until the residents understood exactly what was being planned for their corner of the city and how their own input could change it. They worked for hours. Then they kept going, with sessions for the youth, the teens, the adults, the seniors. The plan that came out of it was strong enough that the city used it as a model for other neighborhoods.

And then nothing happened.

“It’s just unfortunate that nothing has been done,” she said.

Sit with that, because it is the whole stakes of her life in a single sentence. She did everything right. She found the people the system had skipped. She gathered them, informed them, organized them, and produced something good enough to be copied. And the city still did not move. That is what she is up against. Not ignorance. Not apathy. A machine that will take your plan, admire it, file it, and leave your neighborhood exactly where it was.

She informs anyway. Every single day. And this is where I have to be honest about my own stake in her work, because every time one of her emails lands in my inbox, it is proof of something I need to believe to do what I do. The grassroots way still works. One person, paying attention, telling the truth directly to the people it concerns, can still cut through a machine that would rather they never found out.

Her advice came plainly. If it is yours, do it. Make it a success. Make it represent your own beliefs, rather than jumping on another person’s star and trying to ride it. “You can’t ride that star.” Find the thing that is actually yours, the thing that is your purpose, and take pride in it.

She is, by her own account, trying to hand some of it off now. A two-year plan. Passing roles to people she trusts, keeping an advisory seat on the voter coalition she founded, lining up her next idea, a project she calls Finding Voices. But the email list is not going anywhere. “That’ll stay with me until I die,” she said. Until she can’t type anymore. And even then, she noted, there’s voice-to-text now.

It was Joan McClane, the journalist we profiled a few weeks back, who told me I had to sit down with Dr. Holmes because of the overlap of our work. There’s a rhyme in that I keep turning over. Joan spent a career breaking the stories this city needed to hear. Dr. Holmes has spent a lifetime making sure her neighbors had the information in the first place. One did it on the front page. The other does it from her living room, one email at a time, to people who trust her to tell them the truth. I have been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of both, and somewhere in that conversation I realized I had been taking notes on a peer as much as a subject. Two people, two eras, two tools, the same stubborn conviction that people deserve to know.

And here is the thing about sitting across from her. She does not spend that time talking about herself. She spends it pouring into you.

She told me to give this work my best. She commended the vigor, the resilience, the simple act of getting out there. She made a point of telling me that what she does and what I do are the same thing, and that it mattered.

I came to write about a woman who keeps a city informed. I left having been reminded, by the very person who has been informing me for years, that the work is worth doing and worth doing harder.

Her door, she wanted me to know, is always open.

For years, one of the most reliable ways to know what was actually happening in this corner of Chattanooga has not been a newspaper, or a city press release, or an app. It has been a ninety-two-year-old woman at a keyboard who decided her neighbors would not be the last to find out. I know. I was one of them. And she is the proof I come back to whenever I wonder if the work is worth it: the grassroots way still works, because it has been working in my own inbox this whole time.

Tomorrow morning, before most of the city is even awake, she will sit down at that keyboard and do it all again.

If you would like to be informed about everything from city government to national politics email: [email protected] and say “Add me to the list” and she will. Tell her The Blade Chattanooga sent you.

For nearly 123 years, one man’s life ran alongside the story of our nation — and “Uncle” Mark Thrash (1820–1943) saw more of it than almost anyone alive.

Born into slavery, Thrash went on to become a beloved fixture and longtime employee of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. He lived in a two-room log cabin that the United States Government built for him inside Chickamauga Park, Georgia, where he spent his days working around the grounds and sharing a lifetime of stories with anyone who would stop to listen.

And what stories they were. Thrash and his twin brother, Mark Anthony Thrash, were both swept into the Civil War, sent to fight for their young enslaver under the Confederacy. The brothers were separated for decades, until September 20, 1938, when they were reunited in Chattanooga during the 75th-anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Chickamauga. It was a fitting place for a reunion: the twins had witnessed that fighting with their own eyes on September 20, 1863, when they were 43 years old.

Thrash became a living link to a vanishing era. He was recorded as the oldest voter in our area, and on May 9, 1943, he told his life story over the airwaves on the CBS broadcast of “We the People” (WDOD). The press photograph featured here was taken in 1941.

“Uncle” Mark Thrash passed away on December 18, 1943 just one week shy of what is rumored to have been his 123rd birthday on December 25.

No multiple choice this time. Just your own words. Two readers wrote in, and we are grateful they did.

Jim wrote: “Chattanooga should be at the forefront of innovation: no anchors to the past, afloat in the present, and full-sail into the future.”

Carol wrote: “I want Chattanooga to become a city where my family and friends can visit and I don’t need to warn them of where not to visit as they explore. I want a city where my young students can be free to be themselves without fear of persecution of their color, language, and preferences.

Selfishly, I want a city my husband and I can explore without exorbitant parking costs.”

Thank you, Jim and Carol, for taking the time to share what you want this city to become. This is exactly the kind of conversation we hope to keep having.

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We say we want to be informed.

We subscribe. We follow. We turn on the notifications.

But what we choose to do with the information we consume is what matters most.

Being informed was never the finish line. It is the starting line. The good news is that the next step is small, and it is yours to take. Tell someone what you learned. Pass it down the block. Turn what you know into something a neighbor can use.

That is how a city takes care of itself. Not all at once, but one person deciding to share what they know with the people around them.

You are already paying attention. That is the hard part, and you have it.

Now go be the reason somebody else knows too.

— Marie

Previous Edition: How We Heal Chattanooga’s Divides