Through the violence, uncertainty and chaos of the 20th century, the Black women of North Nashville carried on. They took their kids to school. They championed voting rights and desegregation. They built schools and institutions, went to work and organized gatherings. They cared for others in countless ways, and kept their community strong.
Now a new art installation in Elizabeth Park aims to honor their contributions.
The project started in 2018 with Art Against Violence, an initiative by advocate and author M. Simone Boyd (who has contributed to the Scene). Art Against Violence aims to inspire North Nashville to “reject apathy, take strategic action and fight violence with youth employment.” Boyd, with a Metro Public Works grant and a partnership with the woodworking-apprenticeship program Maple Built, employed community youth to create a wood mosaic of Curlie McGruder, the late March for Freedom organizer, voting rights activist and president of the local NAACP chapter. She was also an advocate for the students leading the lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides. The mosaic has hung in Elizabeth Park since 2018.
This year, the installation has extended to include an 18-month exhibition honoring four more Black North Nashville women: Nora Evelyn Ransom, Mary Louise Watson, Willie Mae Boddie and Juno Frankie Pierce. They and McGruder are five of the many Black women who defined a community known not just for its headlines, but for its care for others, says Boyd.
“As a writer, my work is centered around helping shift the negative narrative that I think surrounds North Nashville,” Boyd says. “There’s a lot of danger in a single story — the North Nashville I experience is very different from the North Nashville I see often in the media. I experience North Nashville as a place of love, care and community.”
Boyd conceived of the project during a walk around the neighborhood with two friends. “We just walked around and talked about our experiences with being Black women,” she says. That walk, Boyd explains, “solidified how while our neighborhood is changing, Black women have contributed to this community, and we need to uplift their legacy and their contributions.”
For the mosaics, Boyd initially chose three women who changed the political landscape of Nashville. In addition to McGruder, this included Watson, a major figure in school desegregation whose daughters were two of the first 16 students to attend integrated Nashville schools. Amid bomb threats and intimidation, Watson led the desegregation effort with kindness and grace. “You have to keep teaching that this is the better way — to love and respect everybody,” Watson told NewsChannel 5 in 2009. “Not just one, but everybody.”
There’s also a mosaic of Pierce, a suffragist and founder of the Tennessee Vocational School for Colored Girls in 1923. Politically savvy, Pierce fought for the right to vote as a way to leverage support for the school. Addressing the 1920 state suffrage convention in the Tennessee Capitol, she said: “What will the Negro women do with the vote? We will stand by the white women. … We are asking only one thing — a square deal. … We want recognition in all forms of this government. We want a state vocational school and a child welfare department of the state, and more room in state schools.” Though Black women were left out of the 19th Amendment, Pierce continued to advocate for the school, and the League of Women Voters of Tennessee successfully petitioned the General Assembly to pass a bill creating it in 1921.
But beyond the political advocates and leaders, there are women who maintain the fabric of a community in more private but equally important ways. This was the case for Ransom and Boddie, whom Boyd found through talking to community members about their families. Ransom moved from Murfreesboro to North Nashville in the 1940s, raised 11 children, and worked at St. Thomas Hospital for more than 30 years. She never drove, but was highly involved locally, serving as a senior usher at 14th Avenue Baptist Church and leading a social club, which held monthly gatherings.
Boddie (“Mama Boddie,” as she was often called) was equally active: She served as a cafeteria cashier in Nashville public schools, made popsicles for neighborhood children in the summers, and potty-trained “dozens” of local kids. She lived on 14th Avenue for 45 years. “The interstate was literally built on her street,” Boyd says. “Yet in the face of all that, she was still caring for the neighborhood and loving the community.”
Women like Ransom and Boddie don’t always show up in historical accounts; this makes them all the more important to acknowledge. Set against a world of bomb threats, lynching, riots and countless other adversities, their contributions are even more significant.
“Keep in mind that between 1879 and 1960, thousands of Black people were lynched in America,” Boyd says. “Yet these people like J. Frankie Pierce … what she was able to accomplish despite racial violence and systemic terror that was happening at the time … it’s just beyond me, and something I think we should be celebrating.”
“These women found a way,” Boyd says. “When people were being lynched, their homes were being threatened, they found a way to build a community in this place. And that’s what we will do — we will find a way to keep Nashville loving, caring and connected, despite all the challenges we’re facing.”
“I hope we uphold the legacy these women have entrusted us with — that North Nashville continues to be a place where people care for those who have less.”
