Jefferson Street Music District

Jefferson Street was the historic center of Nashville's African American community, with Fisk, Meharry and Tennessee State nearby. Interstate 40 was built across it in 1968, dividing the community and speeding its economic decline. In October 1967 residents formed the I-40 Steering Committee and sued the state; Judge Frank Gray Jr. ruled against them on November 2, the Sixth Circuit upheld him on December 18, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case on January 29, 1968. Many families who were displaced moved to Bordeaux. The Jefferson Street Sound Museum has preserved the music since 2011.

What the plaque says

Jefferson Street Music District From the 1940s to the early 1960s. Jefferson Street was one of America's best-known districts of jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues. Famous African-American musicians played repeatedly in the many clubs. Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix. Ray Charles. Fats Domino, and Memphis Slim performed here regularly. Nashville artists, many with hit records, made the district their home.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.5 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.6 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.8 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 2.0 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company — steps away
• Dr. Harold Dadford West, Sr. — steps away
• Bombing of the Z. Alexander Looby Home — 0.2 mi
• Desegregating Nashville's Lunch Counters — 0.4 mi