Tennessean Opinion piece: Don't bury Fort Negley's history in commercial development - Friends of Fort Negley Park
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Tennessean Opinion piece: Don’t bury Fort Negley’s history in commercial development

Tennessean Opinion piece: Don’t bury Fort Negley’s history in commercial development

There is an overwhelming flaw in Mayor Megan Barry’s Cloud Hill project to redevelop the empty Greer Stadium.

It sits squarely on public parkland containing the most important African-American site in Tennessee’s and, arguably, our nation’s history.

In 1928, the Nashville Park Board purchased these nearly 50 acres from Judge John Overton’s descendants “to make of the land a public park.” In the center was the largest inland fort of the American Civil War.

Built by escaped slaves, it became their best way to protect their newfound freedom and a rallying point for regiments of the United States Colored Troops. Once-enslaved men were now taking up arms against their former masters.

No wonder this history was buried like the escaped slaves who died building Fort Negley. This was not the story that post-Confederate Nashville wanted told.

No wonder the Ku Klux Klan rallied here in the Jim Crow years following Reconstruction. Men of Color had learned to be soldiers and citizens here, the literal and physical symbol of Black freedom and equality.

For a century, Nashville minimized, marginalized, de-emphasized and ignored this sacred ground. Now the Cloud Hill Project, with the blessing of the mayor, proposes to bury half this history under 450,000 square feet of commercial development.

The 1970s decision to lease part of the park for Greer Stadium was a mistake in a long history of mistakes. The stadium and parking lots are an eyesore, but the hallowed ground beneath them has incalculable value.

Fort Negley is on the National Register, protected by historic zoning overlay, waiting on formal UNESCO World Heritage Global Slave Routes designation and is a National Park Service Underground Railroad location. The celebrated Equal Justice Initiative was one of the first to sound the alarm, working to protect Ft. Negley and acknowledge America’s legacy and responsibility in our struggle to end racial injustice.

Fort Negley is Tennessee’s most important monument in that struggle. Any other city in America would hold it as its emblem, the physical acknowledgment that the struggle for justice has been long in time, but heroes have walked that very ground.

Imagine teaching 19th-century history to Nashville’s African-American children and only having plantations as settings. That’s not right. Particularly when we have Fort Negley to tell the whole story. It would make the perfect first stop in Tennessee’s Civil War Trail, similar to the Old North Church on Boston’s Patriots’ Trail.

Nashville’s 13 million visitors could leave every year more informed about our complicated past after visiting Fort Negley.

Fort Negley has everything to become America’s greatest urban park – location, visibility, topography, history, history and more history, including the very graves from the American Civil War. If the hurried-up archaeology report doesn’t find graves, it’s because they’ve already been desecrated. Destroyed. Scraped away by callousness in an effort to dismiss the march of history.

Hundreds died and were buried here, uncelebrated in their time. They should be glorified in ours.

This is an unparalleled opportunity to repair our faults, value correctly our extraordinary past, learn what it teaches and use it to enrich ourselves, our nation and the world. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

Robert Hicks is an author and preservationist who lives in Williamson County.

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