As longtime readers know, I’m researching the three integration-era bombings that happened here in Nashville. I’m supposedly writing a book about it. The initial plan was for the book to be out in time for the 60th anniversary of the 1960 bombing of Councilman Z. Alexander Looby’s house. What’s the saying? People make plans and God laughs?
Anyway, there have been some delays.
But these delays have given me time to collect and think about certain kinds of data. For instance, I mapped the locations of every cross burning I could find in local papers from 1945 to 1960. And I learned a lot about cross burnings. In Nashville, cross burnings targeted not only Black families, but also white families who might sell their homes to Black people. They were also — like the fires at West High School (now West End Middle School) and Fort Negley — displays of white supremacist dominance in the city.
Also, in 1957, racist rabble-rouser John Kasper came to town to head up protests against school integration. In the lead-up to one of his resulting trials, he announced that he intended to call as witnesses a bunch of people who were on his mailing list. The papers printed their addresses. So I mapped those too.
I put these locations in this Google Map (embedded below), so we can all look at them together. Don’t worry, longtime white Nashvillians — I didn’t list any of the names of people on John Kasper’s list as I didn’t want you all to get distracted by worry of being embarrassed by your relatives. Also, you may notice a couple of weird outliers — locations that Google mapped as being out in Dickson or down in Antioch. In these cases, I think it’s because those addresses don’t exist anymore. We’ll talk more about that in a second.
I feel like I’m a pretty astute student of history, and while I might not be the most knowledgeable person about what actually happened, I have a pretty good grasp of the way that Nashville understands itself. So I'd thought that Nashville had pretty thorough residential segregation. In other words, that there were Black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, and those were always pretty clearly defined.
I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me a long time to realize that this couldn’t be true if part of the plan for desegregating Nashville schools in 1957 was to just let Black first-graders enroll in the elementary school closest to their houses. If white kids were going to their neighborhood schools, and Black kids were suddenly allowed to go to their neighborhood schools, and those were the same schools, then those kids must have been living in the same neighborhoods.
The mapping of Kasper’s followers also bears this out. A dozen of the addresses he supplied are located along Green Street and Wharf and Third Avenue South — right in the heart of Black South Nashville, near where Meharry Medical College had been before it moved, right near Tennessee Central College. At first I thought, well, maybe this neighborhood was transitioning from Black to white in the 1950s. But remember Mr. Perry who witnessed “Bob” going in Bob’s Hole? A white guy was living in this neighborhood when it was the nexus of Black Nashville social life at the turn of the century.
Civil rights icon Rip Patton (who passed away a year ago this week) also told me that his across-the-back neighbor when he was growing up was a white boy. Patton grew up a couple of blocks south of Swett’s — a neighborhood I had assumed was all-Black. So even as social and political segregation were pretty firmly entrenched in Nashville in the mid-20th century, residential segregation was not so clear cut.
Which brings us to the interstates. I feel like most of us have a pretty good understanding of the way that I-40’s route impacted Jefferson Street and the surrounding neighborhoods. If not, Linda Wynn has a clear and succinct recounting of all the sketchy bullshit here. Steven Hale also had a good cover story on it for the Scene back in 2018.
But if we hypothesize that Kasper’s followers and cross burnings were most likely to be in neighborhoods that were socially segregated but residentially mixed, where there was white unrest about desegregation, then look at those locations and the interstates. Places of high concentration of Kasper followers map surprisingly well onto where the interstates would end up. And the amount of locations of cross burnings that are now either under the interstates or right next to them? Add to that Briley or 440? What in the hell?
Listen, I feel pretty confident that I’m the first person to make this map. Until the rise of the internet and the existence of Newspapers.com, even finding this number of locations and collecting them into a useable list would have been onerous. I only had the time because I was failing to write my book. So I don’t think anyone from the state or the city back in the day sat down and said out loud: “See where this embarrassing stuff happened? Where these yahoos live? We’re going to use the interstate to cover it up.”
Going back to Wynn’s article, she relays how Dr. Edwin Mitchell in 1967 told the Chamber of Commerce that “super highways form concrete moats between Negro and white communities.”
And I think that’s what we’re seeing here — where it would have been obvious to any white Nashville powerbroker that moats were needed, because the boundaries weren’t clear or firm. In typical Nashville fashion, yes, it also hurt white people, much like how we closed all our swimming pools rather than integrating them.
But here’s the thing I keep sitting with, the lie I either was told or told myself: Yes, the 1960s were shitty and tumultuous, but after that, we started a rocky, uphill climb toward justice and equality (one we’re still on today). That’s not completely true. The placement of the interstates, whether intentional or not, meant that Nashville was segregating residential areas at the same time it was desegregating social and political spaces, putting up boundaries that weren’t supposed to be crossed.
And then we lied to ourselves and said that the boundaries had always been there.
