A portion of downtown Nashville with a distinct history will soon get a new historical marker. The low-lying area that’s south of Broadway and along the Cumberland River was once known as “Black Bottom.”
The marker, recently approved by the Metro Historical Commission, will go up at the corner of 4th Avenue South and Korean Veterans Boulevard, in what is now mostly known as SoBro.
More: Historical markers are everywhere in America. Some get history wrong.
The new development is bringing fresh attention on local history and how place names and reputations form — and that was the subject of a Curious Nashville question about Black Bottom in 2016. WPLN News found some disagreement over the meaning of the name and evidence that it referred both to the flood-prone geography and that, later, it became a racist pejorative.
You can revisit that story and find the full text of the historical marker below.
Curious Nashville: How The ‘Black Bottom’ Neighborhood Got Its Name — And Lost It
Black Bottom historical marker description
Named for the mud from frequent floods that darkened the streets, the Black Bottom neighborhood was home to a diverse mix of poor and working class African American and immigrant communities throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was often portrayed as an area of vice with brothels, gambling dens and saloons. During the Jim Crow era, many White residents left the area for the new streetcar suburbs, leaving African American residents in tenements such as Freedmen’s Flats.
Black Bottom was an African American cultural center with institutions such as Taylor & Company Funeral Home, Hubbard and Millie Hale Hospitals, Pearl School and St. Paul A.M.E. Anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston lived here briefly with her brother, Dr. Hezekiah Robert “Bob” Hurston, a 1913 Meharry graduate. In 1934, she described Black Bottom as “tough” and claimed its jook section inspired the Black Bottom dance. In the 1950s, urban renewal destroyed most of the neighborhood.
