The Morris Memorial Building is one of the oldest buildings in downtown Nashville, and is the last remnant of a once-thriving Black business district. Located on Rep. John Lewis Way, just past the state capitol, it’s sat empty for years. Now, there’s a new campaign to get the city to buy the building and convert it into Metro office space and a museum dedicated to the local Civil Rights Movement.
You’ve probably driven past it: There’s some weathering, and a couple graffiti tags, but with its tall, graceful windows and decorative stonework, you can imagine how grand it must have looked when it was first built back in the 1920s. The building was designed by prominent Black architectural firm McKissack & McKissack and housed a variety of Black-owned businesses, including Citizen’s Bank — the oldest Black-owned bank in the nation, which still has a branch here in North Nashville.
Rose Gilbert WPLN News A historical marker located on the north side of the building
The effort to buy and preserve Morris Memorial started under then-Mayor David Briley’s administration but petered out. Since then, the price of the building has gone down from $12 million to $6 million, although additional funding would be needed for renovation.
Over the past few months, a new preservation campaign has picked up steam, spearheaded by the Metro Human Relations Commission. The executive director, Reverend Davie Tucker Jr., said that the building is a crucial artifact of Black history in Tennessee.
“I think it’s the right thing to do for the city to make this investment into our collective histories and our past,” he said. “As the city has made this huge deal with the Titans, as the city is preparing now to dump this bunch of money into the fairgrounds, as the city is preparing to spend untold billions of dollars to create four new great neighborhoods on the East Bank, it’s long past time. It’s overdue.”
Tucker explained that the Morris building is also a site of religious history. It’s named for Reverend Elijah Camp Morris, the first president of the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., which is the largest predominantly Black Christian denomination in the country.
“So much of Christianity has come from our Eurocentric influences, but others have been practicing Christianity too. So not only does that building have local significance, but it also has a national Christian significance,” he said.
The building was home to the denomination’s publishing arm, which printed and disseminated things like Sunday school material and hymnals.
“It’s often been the other voice of what God might be saying at any given time,” Tucker added.
Rose Gilbert WPLN News The Morris Memorial Building was once home to the National Baptist Convention USA Inc.’s publication arm.
He pointed out that even the land on which the building was constructed has a painful historical importance. It stands in the same spot that was once occupied by the Commercial Hotel, which served as a slave market before Emancipation.
“Right where that building is now, Black folks were bought and sold as cattle,” he said.
Historian and writer Betsy Phillips says that terrible past makes the Morris Memorial’s history as an economic and religious hub for the Black community all the more remarkable.
“Everything in there was just like: ‘We’ve turned the spot where the worst thing that could happen to Black people was done and made it into a place that sustains Black Nashville,'” she said.
That reinvention, she believes, makes it the perfect place to host a museum dedicated to Nashville’s Civil Rights Movement.
“It’s all about: How have we transformed these places where a wrong is being done into places where people can thrive? I think that’s a perpetual question for the city.”
Nashville’s rapid growth and tourism boom have raised new questions about how to deal with inequality. Phillips expressed hopes that a renovated Morris building, and the memory of the people who designed it, built it and worked in it will serve as an inspiration.
“They did it. And we can do it too because they also were just ordinary, regular Nashvillians who saw what needed to be done,” she said.
Update: As of Friday, a benefit concert at the Ryman to support the preservation effort has been postponed.
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