Jefferson Street was the commercial spine of Black Nashville. Fisk University, Meharry Medical College and Tennessee State sat along or near it, and the mile and a half between them held groceries, barbershops, tailors, churches, restaurants and the nightclub circuit that made the street a stop on the chitlin circuit. In the 1960s the state of Tennessee routed Interstate 40 straight down it. Residents formed the I-40 Steering Committee and sued in federal court in October 1967, arguing that the required public hearings had not meaningfully happened and that the route had been chosen because of who lived there. Their lawyers were Avon N. Williams Junior and Z. Alexander Looby. They lost in the district court, lost again in the Sixth Circuit that December, and in January 1968 the Supreme Court declined to hear it. The road took 626 homes and 128 businesses, most of them Black owned, and left a line of dead end streets where North Nashville had been continuous, so that one neighbourhood became two halves facing each other across a trench. The clubs did not reopen. Jefferson Street is one of the most cited examples in the United States of interstate routing used to clear a Black district, and proposals to cap the trench and rebuild over it have been raised repeatedly since.
Getting there
36.1685, -86.8141
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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