Every evening at sunset, Fannie Mae Crumsey gathered her grandchildren to her home on what is now M.L. King Boulevard to start their bedtime routine, which began with Crumsey leaning over her precious petunias in the front yard, carefully watering and weeding at each day’s end.
“They were her favorite,” Crumsey’s granddaughter Juanita Toney told the Chattanooga Times Free Press in an interview.
Looking back to the spring of 1980, Toney said she believes the purple, trumpet-shaped flowers saved her grandmother, who’d always been dedicated to saving others. The doors of her grandmother’s home were always unlocked, Toney said, and at the bus station people knew to send those with nowhere to go to her front porch.
“She was a God-fearing woman who loved everyone,” Toney said. “She was pro-Black but anti-nothing.”
Crumsey had been tending her plants when she screamed for Juanita, 9 years old at the time, and the other children to stay upstairs, hearing gunshots heading their way.