Hadley Park, 1912: The First Public Park for Black Americans

In nineteen twelve, Nashville opened a public park with a pool, tennis courts, and recreational facilities in the city's North Nashville neighborhood. It was not the city's largest park. It was not in the most prominent location. What made it historically significant was the reason it was built: every other public park in Nashville was, by law and custom, closed to Black residents.

Hadley Park was established specifically for African Americans in a city where the public facilities their tax dollars helped to fund were not available to them. The park was named for Lewis Hadley, a local benefactor who helped make the land available. Its opening in a neighborhood that also contained Fisk University and what would become Tennessee State University gave North Nashville a concentration of Black civic and educational institutions that would sustain the community through the decades of segregation ahead.

By nineteen sixty, the students who organized and executed the Nashville sit-in campaign were drawing on an infrastructure of institutions, social networks, and community resources that had been built in that neighborhood over fifty years. The American Baptist Theological Seminary where James Lawson held his workshops was nearby. The Fisk students who trained under Lawson walked from a campus whose Jubilee Hall had been built by the fundraising of nine singers in eighteen seventy-one.

Hadley Park is still a Nashville Metro park, still in the same location, still serving the same neighborhood. The first public park in the United States created for African Americans is not a museum. It is a park.