Preserving Fort Negley’s past while planning for its future

Nashville is developing a new master plan for Fort Negley, one of the city’s most significant and unique historical landmarks.

George Barnard Wikimedia Commons

Soldiers at their stations in Fort Negley in 1864.

The fort was built during the Civil War by conscripted free Black men and women for the Union Army. The U.S. Colored Troops who defended Fort Negley during the war remained and settled Nashville’s first post-Emancipation Black neighborhood at the base of the hill. The Bass Street neighborhood was a thriving area until it was destroyed in the 1950s and ’60s to make way for Interstate 65.

Now, former Bass Street residents and their descendants are fighting to reclaim the narrative of the neighborhood as the city decides what to do with the space.

Before that conversation begins, WPLN News reporter Paige Pfleger explains an unintended consequence Russian sanctions are having on musicians.

Guests: 

• WPLN News reporter Paige Pfleger
•  Angela Sutton, director of the Fort Negley Descendants Project and historian at Vanderbilt University
• Jeneene Blackman, CEO of the African American Cultural Alliance
• Gary Burke, Civil War reenactor whose great-great grandfather served at Fort Negley with the U.S. Colored Troops

Resources and additional reading:

• Reconstructing a Lost Neighborhood: MTSU–Vanderbilt collaboration unearths African American history at base of Fort Negley
• WPLN News: Nashville’s first post-emancipation free Black neighborhood honored with ceremony and new research