As a 12-year-old, Rev. Margreat Smithson remembers going downtown with her mother — Momma Boddie, as she was known around North Nashville — for what was always a special trip. In the days before malls and big box stores, downtown Nashville was a bustling shopping district and the destination to grab a bite to eat at one of the many lunch counters.
But not for everyone.
“We always wanted to say, ‘Mom, we want to go in and eat,'” Smithson says. The Woolworth lunch counter, like all downtown businesses in the 1950s, was segregated. “And she had such a sad look on her face, but yet a determined look. She says, ‘No, baby, we can’t go in there. We can’t eat in there.'”
Linda Wynn’s family did go inside the Woolworth, but only to shop.
“One could go in and spend their money for goods, but you could not spend your money for a service,” she remembers. “And certainly being able to partake of a meal or purchase a fountain drink was a service. So that was the irony of the whole thing. You know, your money is good enough for one part of the store, but not good enough to sit at the welcome table, if you will.”
Library of Congress A group of African American men and women sit at a lunch counter in Nashville to protest segregation in 1960.
But starting on Feb. 13, 1960, African American students from Fisk, American Baptist College and Tennessee A&I — as Tennessee State University was known then — decided to challenge this norm. They walked into the Woolworth, along with Kress and McLellan’s, sat down at the lunch counters and demanded to be served just like their white counterparts. Many were jeered and beaten.
Listen to the full episode on This Is Nashville: Remembering the Nashville sit-ins
Civil rights icon John Lewis was arrested at the Woolworth for the first time on the very street that now, six decades later, bears his name. He and his fellow activists would spend weeks in jail.
As desegregation efforts intensified, Black Nashvillians boycotted downtown stores altogether. By May, six of the downtown lunch counters were open to anyone. It was a win for civil rights, even if it represented only a fraction of the city’s businesses.
Even so, being allowed is not the same as being welcome. As much as Smithson had longed to eat at the Woolworth lunch counter, she didn’t end up going after all.
“I just didn’t have the desire to go in there,” she remembers. “I think it part of it was, I never forgot the look on my mom’s face that she was trying to give us the best that she could. And she could not do that one simple request: go into Woolworth’s and eat.”
Preserving history
The sit-ins were really only the beginning of the fight for equality in Nashville. This building will forever be synonymous with that struggle even if that history became less and less visible as the years went on.
After Woolworth shut down in 1993, Dollar General eventually moved in, and after that, the building sat empty for years, until Tom Morales came along.
“It was in a really bad repair,” he says.
Morales is something of a serial restaurateur. His company, Tomkats, revamped the Loveless Cafe and Acme Feed and Seed. Back in 2015, he set his sights on the old Woolworth building.
“We kind of crawled through every space in there trying to figure out how we could bring it back to the day that John Lewis was arrested,” Morales recalls. “We even found white-only bathroom signs. And I mean, it was a chilling discovery walk through that building.”
These were echoes of the past, and Morales had a plan. He wanted to resurface this history and put it on display in a new restaurant called Woolworth on Fifth. His company spent about $2 million meticulously recreating the lunch counter and the period-specific feel of the space, using photographs from the Nashville Public Library as reference. They even found original Woolworth stools from the 1960s on eBay.
It was a huge endeavor. But he felt that preserving this history was important.
“I spent most of my adult life trying to save history and buildings in Nashville that I saw as a child that were significant,” he said.
The Woolworth building was certainly one. But even after all of that, Woolworth on Fifth closed down after only two years, just before the pandemic hit. In 2021, the building made the annual “Nashville Nine” list of endangered properties.
Brian Mansfield, with Historic Nashville, Inc., says that wasn’t because the building itself was in danger, but that the history could be.
“Historically, the most important thing that happens in that building happens really in the space of about one year,” he says. In the grand scheme of things, that’s less than a hundredth of the time this building has been standing. But that year — 1960 — is one of the most transformational moments in this city’s history.
And so, for whoever the next owners would be, Historic Nashville suggested they bring in a scholar “with a specialization in the Civil Rights Movement or Black Freedom Struggle, a trained historic preservationist, and a conservator who can assist with the identification and care of the building’s remaining historic elements.”
Mansfield says that “well intentioned people with a passion for history” can make mistakes with important site like this.
“For instance,” he explains, “the last thing that you want to do is stick a bunch of historic items into a window front display, because the sunlight will bleach those things out, and then you destroy them even while you’re trying to show the historical significance.”
So the new owners would be challenged, from the very start, to do right by this space.
A new beginning
Steve Haruch WPLN The window display at the Woolworth Theatre, featuring original stools.
Today, the old Woolworth building is home to a theater. And right out front, there is exactly what Mansfield says shouldn’t be there: two stools, from the original lunch counter, in a window display.
“We wanted it to at least do some kind of a tribute to the lunch counter and the sit-in,” says Joe Bravo, the vice president of operations for the newest iteration. The window display also includes an old Woolworth sign, and a trench coat, similar to one John Lewis wore, hangs on one of the stools.
“We weren’t in the in the business of creating a historical place of interest — that was not in our business plan,” Bravo explains. “But when you take … a building like this, you then have a responsibility to cultivate that history. You know, my goal is to make sure that these stories keep being told.”
The remaining artifacts, like the original wood railing, help ground those stories. (The Woolworth Theatre uses the pattern in the railing as its logo.) Down in the building’s sub-basement, Bravo has found what he believes to be an old whites-only water fountain, which he hopes to have restored.
On the second floor, Bravo walks down a long corridor with his hands out, indicating where a lunch counter once stood.
“And this is the backsplash,” he says. It’s made of white tile, and it stretches about 40 feet in total, with a repeating cornucopia design.
“This was one of the original items, and we wanted to preserve it, even though it’s been beat to hell,” Bravo says. “We wanted to make sure that when people walk by here, they could see it. So we’ll be adding some plaques.”
At the far end of where the counter once stood, Bravo stops in his tracks. This spot is something you might recognize from the documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble.
“Right here in that video, you can line up the corner of the wall, you can line up the railing,” Bravo says. It was in this exact location that John Lewis and one of his fellow activist were beaten for challenging segregation.
“That got me,” he says. “When I watched that, it gave me chills, because I walk through here every day.”
Bravo is certainly trying to preserve the history, but the Woolworth Theatre has also made changes to this space. Down on the main floor, there used to be another lunch counter. This is where Morales and his team had built the replica counter that was a centerpiece of the Woolworth on Fifth restaurant.
“It was not where the original lunch counter was,” Bravo says. “So it really needed to be ripped out. We had to redo it.”
That choice caught Morales’s attention.
“I called raising hell when they started ripping out stuff,” he says. He estimates there was $1 million worth of work in dumpsters when he went to see what was going on. Morales was angry that after he had put in so much work to restore the building. The new owners showed, as he puts it, “total disregard coming in after us … just ripping out for no good reason that I could see, other than it made it easier to build a stage maybe.”
Conservation and controversy
The interior design of the space is not the only concern.
Last year, the Woolworth Theatre came under scrutiny when they hosted a private screening of Candace Owens’ film The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM. The event was sponsored by the conservative media company The Daily Wire. Its co-founder Ben Shapiro has argued, among other falsehoods, that systemic racism does not exist. Attendees at the event that night included Kid Rock and the rapper Ye, who made antisemitic comments around this time.
Having an event like that, in a place like this — a location with such a strong tie to the civil rights movement and its current iterations — seemed a bridge too far for many. But Joe Bravo doesn’t exactly see it that way.
“Well, I don’t really comment on private events,” he says. “The one thing I will say is, this is an inclusive space. There are going to be people that we agree with and there are going (to be) people that we disagree with. But one of the things is, in being an inclusive space, that means you’re welcoming to everyone.”
This has not always been a space that was welcoming to everyone, and changing that did not come without struggle. So whatever business prints 221 Rep. John Lewis Way on its business cards — now or in the future — the old Woolworth building will forever be connected to what happened here in 1960.
Linda Wynn is with the Tennessee Historic Commission. She says it’s vital we don’t forget.
“That history of that building still remains ever present, certainly in the minds of those who were here,” she says. “Unless we keep the history and the narrative of this story alive, it becomes lost on the younger generation. And I fear with — if I dare go here — the banning of African-American history … the generation coming after this will know absolutely nothing.”
Steve Haruch is the senior producer of This Is Nashville. Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @steveharuch.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM