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- Course name
- History Univ 2655 Historic Black Nashville
- Institution
- Vanderbilt University
- Instructor
- [[User:Djsvandy|]]
- Wikipedia Expert
- Ian (Wiki Ed)
- Subject
- History
- Course dates
- 2020-01-08 00:00:00 UTC – 2020-04-15 23:59:59 UTC
- Approximate number of student editors
- 7
Students will write new articles and edit extant ones based on their coursework exploring the history of Black Nashville.
This interdisciplinary course will explore the African American experience in Nashville from its founding in 1779 to the early twentieth century. Using scholarly readings, local archival collections, and public history sites and infrastructure, the course will introduce students to a variety of research methods and sources for uncovering Nashville’s black history and will challenge some of the traditional narratives of black history and of the city. Given the abundance of local plantations such as Belle Meade, the Hermitage, Carnton, and Grassmere, many might consider Nashville a “typical” antebellum Southern locale. Although this course will explore the histories of African Americans who lived on those plantation sites (and their links to free people of color living in Nashville), it will also focus attention on Nashville’s significance as a riverine port city, connected to other similar ports from Canada to New Orleans, and, thus, privy to national and international information streams many other plantation areas were not. African Americans, free and enslaved, lived and worked in Nashville and created a diverse community that even before the Civil War owned businesses, organized churches and supported schools for its children.
After abolition, institutions like Roger Williams University, Fisk, Central Tennessee/Walden College, and Meharry offered higher education to the newly freed, and a short-lived newspaper, The Colored Tennessean (1865-66) contributed to that effort. As the Tennessee legislature moved to codify racial segregation after Reconstruction, African Americans in Nashville pushed back in a variety of ways, with a legislative lobbying campaign, editorials in black-owned newspapers such as the Nashville Clarion and the Nashville Globe, an organized streetcar boycott in 1905, and the incorporation of black transportation companies. During the epidemic of lynchings across the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—which included several murders in Davidson County—black Nashvilleans organized to protest, raise local and national awareness, and resist. Black Nashvilleans gained voting rights earlier in the twentieth century than the vast majority of African Americans in the South. The community’s economic and political strength and its important cultural institutions provided a crucial foundation for the civil rights activism of the second half of the twentieth century.
Throughout the course we will consider the problems of evidence and voice and familiarize ourselves with the range of primary sources available for research. In addition to Vanderbilt’s History bibliographer, Jason Schultz, we will also draw on local expertise from public historians, museum curators, and archivists in the community.
| Student | Assigned | Reviewing |
|---|---|---|
| Ellie Gmichael | ||
| Taramarie713 | ||
| Assata.senghora | ||
| Miniclipz |