A plaque marking the 1960 bombing of civil rights leader Z. Alexander Looby's home
My mom and dad watched the whole Just Conversations video I moderated with Dr. Linda Wynn and Dr. Learotha Williams Jr. about the Morris Memorial Building. Then my dad called to chastise me for not putting the issue of a Nashville Civil Rights Museum in terms that politicians actually care about: money.
“Betsy,” he said, “no politician cares about history or what’s right. You have to show them the benefits in terms they understand.” OK, Dad. Jeez. You want to write my posts or what?
But I couldn’t shake what he said, so I did some research. The National Civil Rights Museum over in Memphis has 200,000 visitors annually. Sixty-thousand of those are schoolchildren. It takes up a city block. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum sees similar numbers. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta has 200,000 visitors annually, with 50,000 of those being schoolchildren. It looks like it might take up most of a city block, though it’s in a beautiful park setting that makes guessing its size from Google Maps a little difficult. It has multiple floors.
The historic downtown building could have been a civil rights center. Instead it's slated to become a hotel.
Around 145,000 people visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute each year. That building looks like it could fit about four 16th Street Baptist Churches (the church across the street from it) inside it. Even the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, N.C., sees 70,000 visitors a year — and that’s just in the old Woolworths.
Civil rights museums are big draws. Such a museum in Nashville, if these numbers held true for us, would draw about the same as the Tennessee State Museum. And these museums all charge admittance, unlike the state museum. But one thing about the state museum — it’s a hell of a lot bigger than the Morris Memorial Building, as are most civil rights museums.
Let’s assume that the Morris Building is going to be a boutique hotel. OK, fine. I’m pissed at Nashville being the King of Saying We’re Going to Do Something and Then Not Doing It. But we still need to stop embarrassing ourselves as a city by not valuing the movement we cradled. We should have a civil rights movement museum.
So then, we might ask ourselves, “Where would we put it?” Many other cities have their museums in or near civil rights landmarks — the Lorraine Hotel, the 16th Street Baptist Church, Woolworths. And we have such a civil rights landmark: Z. Alexander Looby’s house. And Z. Alexander Looby’s house, at 2014 Meharry Blvd., has a lot to offer as a place to build a museum around. It has historical significance. Looby was the most prominent civil rights attorney in Tennessee for most of his life. The movement offices were directly behind his building, on Jefferson. His house sits between historically Black universities Fisk, TSU and Meharry. And there’s only one other building on that end of the block. There’s a parking lot next to Looby’s house and a parking lot across the alley facing onto Jefferson, and — with the exception of one Meharry-owned building — the rest is all empty lots.
How easy would it be to get tourists and schoolchildren to that spot? Well, someone put an interstate right through North Nashville, so you could exit right off I-40 and be a measly three blocks away. Or if, by chance, you were staying in a boutique hotel in a historic building designed and built by Black Nashville artisans downtown, you could always hop on the 29 bus and it would take you right there.
Author Betsy Phillips’ Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control is scheduled for release via Third Man Books…
Putting the museum there would also exploit my favorite thing about Nashville — that you can just go and see where things were and are. You could go to the museum and learn about the organizing that was done at Clark Memorial Methodist Church, and when you were finished with your visit, you could walk across Fisk’s campus — where civil rights icon Diane Nash went to school — and over to Clark Memorial. You might see an exhibit on the damage that interstates in Nashville did to Black neighborhoods, and then you might look out the windows of the museum and see how the interstate cut through North Nashville. Maybe you see an exhibit about the 1990 student protests at TSU and you hear a recording of jeff obafemi carr talking about the rats and the plumbing that didn’t work and the conditions in the dorms, and then you walk outside and see a sign now talking about TSU being shortchanged billions of dollars over the years. You can make connections between then and now.
And putting the museum in North Nashville would center the Black community. So often the story of civil rights focuses on the sites of protest. This would put the spotlight back on the sites of planning and caring and community.
Oh shit, I already forgot my dad’s lesson. OK, forget all this nifty stuff. Let’s put it this way. Civil rights museums bring in about 200,000 visitors a year who pay between $15 and $20 to visit. Let’s say our museum isn’t that great and we only bring in 100,000 visitors who pay $15 a visit. That’s still $1.5 million. And those 100,000 people are going to need places to eat nearby. They might want to buy some souvenirs. If they’re kids, maybe they decide they want to attend Fisk or TSU, thus bringing their money to the city for the whole time they’re in college.
Nashville, we could do this. We should do this.
