Claiming Place, Placing Claim: African American Life in Working-Class Nashville, Tennessee, 1861-1900

Abstract

This dissertation tracks the development of Black Bottom, a working-class neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee, from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. It examines the lives of African Americans, mostly refugees from slavery, who lived in Black Bottom during and after the Civil War and created one of the city’s first Black enclaves. In so doing, it argues for using space and place as analytical categories. Black Nashvillians claimed space by building Black Bottom into a neighborhood of labor, leisure, culture, education, and community. Attention to space offers insight into the lived experience of working-class African Americans and the opportunities and threats that urban life presented. The dissertation traces the racialization of place in a New South city by adopting the focused scope of a neighborhood study. White newspapers depicted Black Bottom as a slum and its residents as a danger to the entire city. The characterization of Black Bottom as a place of crime, vice, and disease was a crucial tool for those who sought to justify its policing, regulation, or even destruction. The dissertation also argues for the importance of space and place in the politics of Black claims-making and joins scholarship that has emphasized the collective nature of Black politics in the late nineteenth century. Claiming space brought tangible, real-world benefits for working-class African Americans. Black Bottom was a place where Black Nashvillians exercised freedom in the physical world, on porches and sidewalks, and in churches and dance halls. The physical space of Black Bottom enabled communal relationships among residents, which, in time, became a resource for Black claims-making. African Americans defended Nashville during the Civil War and claimed Black Bottom as their neighborhood. Later, the neighborhood defended the founding generation’s claims to the entitlements of wartime service.