I am on a committee that is working to save the Morris Memorial Building downtown. The idea is to have the city buy the building and dedicate it, in part, for a museum devoted in some scope to civil rights and the African American experience in Nashville.
The old address of the Morris building is 33 Cedar St. Before the Morris Memorial Building existed, that spot was the site of the Commercial Hotel, which was the home, in the 1850s, of Nashville’s largest slave-trading firm, Dabbs & Porter, and later, after Dabbs retired, just Rees W. Porter. How it worked back in the day is that Porter sold property — land, people, etc. — out of the office at 33 Cedar St. If he had more than a single person or two to sell, he took them to the north side of the Market House, and sold them out of stalls there. As best as I can tell, these stalls would have been roughly where the witness walls are now.
Porter’s ads are unsettling, both because of the sheer number of people he’s trafficking in, but also because of the language he uses. It might be easier if he was more obviously evil and the people he was selling were more clearly dehumanized. If you could feel a disconnect between him and them, at least you could kind of understand how he has this job. But instead, he seems to recognize the human value of these people and is still fine with profiting from their torture. In the June 5, 1855, edition of the Nashville Union and American, Porter was selling 93 people. One ad titled “Negroes Again” reads: “I have on hand twenty negroes, among them is an excellent Shoe and Book Maker, and several good Cooks. I also have 10 negroes consisting of two Families, that I can satisfy any gentlemen are as good servants as there is in the State.” One of the other ads says, “I have several Negro Women for hire the balance of the year, as well as 61 for sale.” In January, 1856, he’s advertising in the Republican Banner “that No. 1 cool Washer and Ironer, Vina the best cook I know of, warranted to suit or no sale.” Vina, who was presumably known around town well enough that including her name would incentivize her purchase. But it’s so ordinary. He’s selling himself as a lovely guy who keeps families together, and he’s selling these people as lovely additions to your household. This is all propaganda.
Meanwhile, people who had been enslaved reported that women and children were separated. Millie Simpkins, who had been sold at the Market House, reported that people were forced to take off all their clothes and roll down the hill so that potential buyers could see “that you didn’t have no bones broken, or sores on you.”
It’s hard to judge exactly where the most cursed spot in Nashville ought to be, but the stretch of street between the Commercial Hotel and the Market House is a good contender. Imagine losing your spouse and children and then being forced to roll around on the ground naked for the titillation of the sadists who were annihilating your family.
At the end of the 19th century, there were a couple of fires and the Commercial Hotel was no more.
On Oct. 21, 1925, The Tennessean had a two-page spread devoted to the opening of the Morris Memorial Building. If you’re an old newspaper person, you’ll appreciate that these two pages included only two stories about the building but a ton of ads about it. The plumbers — Herbrick & Lawrence — who put in the plumbing started their ad with: “The erection of this beautiful building as a heroic task fostered by a labor of love and it will stand as a monument to the past, present and future effort of the organization.” These are some lovely sentiments for a plumbing ad.
The Tennessean stated that the building had “two passenger elevators and two freight elevators, a chute for first class mail, a chute for mail of other classes, a waste paper chute, an automatic program clock system, a beautiful auditorium that will seat 600, a recreation garden, a cafeteria, a private branch telephone exchange and a sub-station post office, all operated by Negroes.”
The architects of the building were C.L. and Moses McKissack. In terms of fame in the architecture world, this is the equivalent of just letting drop that your architect was Frank Lloyd Wright. We have a number of buildings in town designed by McKissick and McKissick, and we don’t treasure them like we should. We should be bragging about them the same way Chicago makes hay of Wright.
But what I can’t get past, ever since I learned of the history of that spot, is that this place of great grief and evil — a place where Black families were destroyed and Black people sold off, the place where men like Rees Porter worked — was transformed by Black people into a place full of institutions that made life better for Black Nashvillians. There was a bank, as well as the offices and the print shop of the Sunday School Publishing Board of the National Baptist Convention. They had a garden on the roof! They were green before green was a thing.
This is the secular miracle: to turn this place of casual brutality and evil directed at Black people into a place where Black Nashvillians thrived. They took this fundamentally desecrated land and made it a place that was good for Black souls. They did it.
And so, how fitting to take this place of transformation and let it hold the stories of Nashville’s long civil rights movement, which is about transforming this whole city of casual brutality and evil into a place where we can all thrive.
Sometimes social justice in America seems impossible. Striving for it seems futile. But here, right in the heart of our city, is proof that it can be done. Of course we need to protect that and honor the legacy of the people who figured out how to do it.
I am completely biased about this, but I’m also stoked. I’ve traveled quite a bit doing research for my book (which, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, will be out next spring), and every city I’ve been to where these great confrontations of the civil rights era happened have museums and archives and guides to neighborhoods where things happened.
We have one piece of that in the fabulous Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library downtown. But imagine a Nashville where you start your day at the Morris building looking at artifacts and displays, then you walk along the public square, past the steps where Diane Nash confronted Mayor Ben West, and you take in the witness walls. We don’t know exactly where Bob Renfroe’s tavern was, but you’d been within feet of it on this walk. You come up Church Street, past the Presbyterian Church (used as a hospital during the Civil War), past where Sarah Estelle had her ice cream saloon in the 1830s — also walking through the parts of downtown where the sit-in protests happened and into the downtown library, where you have access to the sources and scholarship that has preserved these stories.
You’d learn about it, go see where it happened, and then end up in the Civil Rights Room, where you can process what you’ve just experienced and where you’d have resources to learn more. It would be so glorious.
Nashville, if there’s anything we should have learned from the Fort Negley fiasco or the “let’s put a second downtown out in Bells Bend” or from the current beauty of the city cemetery, it’s that sometimes the things we love can be saved. We can save the Morris. And we should.
