Your tour guide David Ewing is a nationally recognized expert on Civil Rights and helped locate the lost mugshots of John Lewis’ arrest for the lunch counter sit-ins and helped present them to Congressman Lewis in Nashville. Explore how Nashville was one of the most important cities for marches, arrests, and bombing stories. Learn about John Lewis and the African American student-led peaceful nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins to desegregate downtown eating establishments in 1960 in Nashville.
The Civil Rights Room in the Nashville Public Library is a space for education and exploration of the Civil Rights Collection. The materials exhibited capture the drama of a time when thousands of African-American citizens in Nashville sparked a nonviolent challenge to racial segregation in the city and across the South.
Follow in the steps of those who took a stand by taking a seat. The Civil Rights Sit-Ins tour was written and narrated by Fisk University professor Linda Wynn. The Downtown Civil Rights Sit-Ins tour begins at Chuch Street and Sixth Avenue North and ends at Rosa L. Parks Boulevard and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
The National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) officially opened to the public in January 2021. Discover the central role African Americans have played in shaping and creating all genres of American music. From classical to country to jazz and hip hop, NMAAM has integrated history and interactive technology to share the untold story of more than 50 music genres and sub-genres.Tours initially follow a weekend schedule and will be held on Saturdays and Sundays 11am-6pm.
Learn more about Black History at the Tennessee State Museum. The permanent exhibitions feature Black History from the early days of the state’s beginnings through the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movements in Tennessee. The current temporary exhibition, Ratified! Tennessee Women and the Right to Vote includes the stories of many African American women who helped American women gain the right to vote. The State Museum is featuring several free online events this month.
The Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum pays homage to important moments in both Black history and Music history through educational exhibits celebrating the musicians who created them.
The Motown exhibit is a re-creation of Motown’s first recording studio located in Detroit, Michigan, “Hitsville U.S.A,” highlighting not only the larger than life stars to emerge from Motown but the studio musicians who aided in creating a number of the most recognizable and celebrated songs of all time. Similar to the Motown exhibit, the Stax Records exhibit aims to educate visitors on the history of Stax Records through the stories and success of the studio musicians who recorded there. Unlike the Motown and Stax Records exhibits, the Sun Studio exhibit focuses less on studio musicians and more heavily upon the vast, diverse, and skilled artists who recorded there. Among the recording studio exhibits are displays that showcase the accomplishments of individual artists, such as B.B King and Jimi Hendrix.
This February during Black History Month get out, experience and support local black-owned businesses on one of Nashville’s oldest corridors for shopping, entertainment, and culture.
United Street Tours offers a series of 5-star rated, historical Nashville walking tours that are led and curated by locals. This Nashville walking tour is a fun-filled experience uncovering the empowering stories behind the key women and men of the civil rights movement. You will hear stories about history’s fiercest women and most courageous men.
Nashville Repertory Theatre presents August Wilson's Fences. Troy Maxson’s yard is his refuge. A sanctuary where, at long last, the grass is finally green. But it can always be greener, right? Troy’s story is both unique and universal — a portrait of the unsteady bridge between fathers and sons, and the wives and mothers who stand cheering for both sides while hanging their own dreams out to dry. A story strong enough to bear the weight of injustice and yearning and love, at its best and its most destructive. And it’s bigger — it’s more — than all of that. Fences is a lyrical, heartbreaking love song sung in August Wilson’s unparalleled poetry, about people whose hearts beat vast and deep.