On Jefferson Street, city planners and vandals vie for control of a symbolic underpass and its public art

Four decades ago, the city carved a swath of interstate across Jefferson Street, the symbolic center of African-American life in Nashville. As in similar cities across America, the project essentially bisected the neighborhood. The completion of I-40 tore the Jefferson Street community apart and divided Fisk University and Meharry Medical College from TSU. In its wake, it left a symbolic scar to mark the spot—a dark, forbidding underpass that residents say they're reluctant to cross after dark.Today, the underpass may literally be the place where Jefferson Street's past and future meet. Late last month, organizers of the Jefferson Street revitalization project announced a grant that will include creation of murals on the walls and columns of the I-40 overpass—part of a larger project that would attempt to make the neighborhood whole again. But this positive development is being shadowed by a perplexing act of vandalism that strikes repeatedly at an earlier effort to improve the area—and it directly attacks Jefferson Street's storied history.

Back in the day, Jefferson Street was hopping. Stretching from the Cumberland River to Tennessee State, it was a mecca for African-Americans migrating northward from the grinding poverty of sharecropping in the Black Belt of Alabama or the Mississippi Delta. Clubs lined the busy street, drawing headliners from the top of the music charts: Ike & Tina Turner, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Etta James. The pre-"Purple Haze" Jimi Hendrix famously frequented the scene. African-American travelers stayed at the Ritz Hotel, one of the few hotels that welcomed black guests in the Jim Crow South. The post-war economy was booming, and Jefferson Street's restaurants and shops swarmed with college students from nearby Fisk, Meharry and TSU.

Among the teenagers drawn to the colleges in the North Nashville neighborhood were the core group of students who faced down Nashville Mayor Ben West over desegregated lunch counters downtown in 1960. They would come to be known, of course, as the Freedom Riders, boarding buses in 1961 to head into the heart of Dixie to test federal laws desegregating bus waiting rooms and other public areas.

In June, a mural depicting the Freedom Riders was dedicated on a concrete wall where Jefferson Street passes underneath I-40. The mural was designed by Michael Cooper, a Franklin artist who creates wall art across the country and throughout downtown Nashville, and local high-school students painted it. It is one of the most visible public art projects in a long-term effort to revitalize the Jefferson Street neighborhood.

Since then, however, the mural—which shows a map of the route the Freedom Riders took and portrays their likenesses—has been defaced three times. Twice, the black faces of the Freedom Riders were sprayed with silver paint, making them appear inhuman, alien and eerie, as if the vandals were trying to blot them out. The third time, in late October, the map was tagged with a gang sign.

"I've been painting murals for 20 years and this is the first time something like this has happened," Cooper tells the Scene. Graffiti artists may tag an underpass dozens of times, but will leave a mural alone, "like a professional courtesy," he says.

"Somebody's sending a statement, as stupid as it is," he says. "Just stop it."

The latest defacing came at a time that was otherwise cause for jubilation on the street that passes Jubilee Hall. The Jefferson Street revitalization plan, which includes $1.5 million in grants from the Tennessee Department of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as private and other public funding, would turn the grim underpass into a well-lighted and colorful arcade, reconnecting the sundered halves of the neighborhood.

Nashville's EDGE Planning, of which former Titan Eddie George is a founding partner, won the contract to create both the Jefferson Street underpass project and the landscaping for the new African-American Museum at Jefferson Street and Rosa Parks Boulevard.

"One of the reasons we were awarded this grant is not just a beautification process but a social process as well," says EDGE President John Haas. Michael Cooper agrees that the underpass project has the potential to restore more than sightliness.

"Once something like that happens in a neighborhood," Cooper says, "the pride takes off and the whole area changes." It becomes an "urban icon," he explains.

Fisk senior Quincy Jackson, from Washington, D.C., was roaming Jefferson Street on TSU Homecoming Saturday working on a class project. Along the way, he stopped to admire and take pictures of the Freedom Riders mural.

"We need things like this mural to keep our history alive, not just lost to history books," Jackson says. He was bewildered as to why anyone would deface it.

He's not alone. According to Clarissa Cate, a spokeswoman for the Metro Police Department, no tips about the vandalism have been left on the police department's Crime Stoppers hotline. Organizers of the underpass project confess they worry about whether the new murals will receive the same treatment as the current one. They seem reluctant to discuss possible subjects for the new murals that might have a political dimension, such as the historic downtown lunch-counter sit-ins.