This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter at nashvillebanner.com/newsletters.
When the Tennessee legislature pulled the plug on the state’s Human Rights Commission last year, the transition did not go smoothly.
In the year since, the office that took on its responsibilities has hired fewer than half of the staff the commission had and has closed a fraction of the cases.
While the Attorney General’s Office says the results are commensurate with a transition year and the office’s new approach to the work, former commission staff members say it’s a deliberate dilution of the agency’s 60-plus-year history.
The commission, which had overseen discrimination complaints against employers and housing providers across the state since the Civil Rights era, was dismantled by state lawmakers in the spring of 2025, with the Attorney General’s Office tabbed to assume its responsibility and funding for its 30 full-time positions, effective July 1, 2025.
When the commission abruptly ended last summer, there was insufficient logistical planning, officials said. The state permanently closed satellite offices in Memphis, Chattanooga and Knoxville. Without movers or a plan, one commission employee asked others to send their laptops and keys back to Nashville via FedEx, but the outpost offices themselves were more or less abandoned, and remaining equipment was pillaged by other occupants of the state office buildings.
While three members of the commission’s staff joined the AG’s new Civil Rights Enforcement Division, which was formed to replace former agency, many went on weeks-long leave knowing their jobs would soon disappear.
An unknown number, but estimated to be in the hundreds, of open discrimination cases were lost in the process and never reopened. The state ultimately ended its partnerships with federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, losing funding and online databases that had once housed commission cases.
Former commission employees blame the legislature for the abrupt, disorganized takeover and abolition of the body.
“We begged the legislators, ‘Hey, we get it. We understand this is what you want. We understand it’s going to pass. We get it. Please give us transition time so we can wind this thing down,'” former commission operations manager Lynn Cothren told the Banner, adding that commission staff saw the writing on the wall but “wanted to protect as many cases as possible” as the commission came to an end.
Cothren, who came to the commission after a career of activism, including two decades working with Coretta Scott King, believes the Republican-led state legislature wanted to do away with the commission under the guise of reorganization and ultimately planned to reduce or discontinue civil rights investigations, allowing the AG’s office to absorb the funding.
“I think they’ll quietly quit doing the work,” Cothren said. “I don’t have any faith that they’ve made a real commitment.”
Those in the AG’s office acknowledge the upheaval but say the rocky handoff was due to commission’s disorganization.
Now, a little over a year since the commission was shuttered and the AG’s Civil Rights Enforcement Division took over, statistics show that substantially fewer cases were opened and resolved under the new office, though settlements were of higher value.
The Banner reviewed the commission’s annual reports from fiscal years 2018-24, which are published through the University of Memphis despite being removed from the state’s website, and found the commission closed between 278 and 424 cases each of its past seven years, compared to the 22 closed by the AG’s enforcement division between July 1, 2025- July 21, 2026, meaning the office closed less than 8% of the cases closed by the lowest of commission’s most recent years.
In each year tracked by the Banner, the commission or enforcement division received around 1,500 complaints from Tennesseans. On average, from 2018-24, the commission opened between 279 and 542 cases per year, indicating the office determined those complaints were within its jurisdiction and attempted to investigate. By comparison, the enforcement division opened 122 cases.
Enforcement division officials told the Banner that they deliberately opened fewer cases and involved attorneys earlier in the process in an effort to target only viable cases. In a nutshell, the AG’s office says it is focused on quickly processing more legally enforceable cases, rather than opening and resolving as many as possible.
Asked about the statistics, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, while pointing to his time at the U.S. Justice Department, said he was proud of the work the enforcement division has done in its inaugural year.
“I started my career as a civil rights prosecutor at the DOJ, and learned firsthand the importance of showing up for people facing discrimination,” Skrmetti told the Banner.
“When the General Assembly gave our office this responsibility, we didn’t just stand up a new division. We built a place for Tennesseans who needed someone in their corner,” Skrmetti continued. “In just one year, this team got to work standing with Tennesseans facing discrimination in employment, education, housing and public accommodations. I couldn’t be prouder of this team and the passion they bring to this work every day.”
Enforcement division officials told the Banner that the office would likely close more cases in future years, describing months of cleanup after the commission, which, for example, lacked a centralized case database because it had relied on its federal partnerships for some of that base-level file storage. The team did not begin closing cases until this spring, which contributed to the low number of resolved cases.
Another factor, they say, is how many old and open cases the commission maintained, including at least one dating back to 2018, which the enforcement division claims to have mediated and closed this summer. While around 100 open cases were refiled under the new office, the enforcement division says it was unable to identify the actual total number of open cases lost in the shuffle due to the lack of an independent commission database.
Enforcement division officials also noted that in the first 22 closed cases, their staff won more than $120,000 in settlements, a higher amount per case than the commission, which in 2024 reported $53,000 across 279 closed cases. Enforcement officials also assessed around $6,000 in fines payable to the state, primarily from noncompliant housing providers.
As the enforcement division heads toward its first sunset hearing later this month, the office has hired 13 people, despite receiving commission funding that previously covered 30 positions. Staff did not provide information on how much money from the commission budget was left unspent in the last year and, when asked what will become of the remaining money in future budgets, were unable to provide information.
Even with growth, enforcement division officials say not to expect the same volume of cases or staff, because they are focused on a more attorney-centric process, meaning fewer cases will be opened and not as many investigators and other staff are hired, since each case has an attorney assigned.
Cothren believes the goal was always to reduce the effort and funding the state spends on civil rights complaints, which he says is a disservice to people who face discrimination. He said the commission wasn’t perfect, but the enforcement division isn’t trying.
“They’re paying a few attorneys. They’re doing little work. And this is what we said would happen,” Cothren said. “Maybe someday, the legislature will change enough to see they’re not doing the work and build a better version of an independent body,” like the commission.
The enforcement division’s sunset hearing will be Aug. 19.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.