Nashville Sit-Ins

Long before 1960 this was a Black congregation with its own record. Black members made up about half of Nashville's First Baptist by 1834, worshipped separately as the First Colored Baptist Mission from January 1848, bought a house on Martin Street in 1852 and incorporated in May 1866. A December 1893 fire destroyed the Spruce Street church, and a new building on Eighth Avenue North was finished in 1895. The charter dropped the word Colored in October 1965. In March 1972, pushed out by urban renewal, the last of six historic Black churches downtown moved to James Robertson Parkway.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee State Capitol — steps away
  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 — 0.3 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.
• Ryman Auditorium — 0.4 mi
  The 1892 brick tabernacle in downtown Nashville that was the Grand Ole Opry's home from 1943 to 1974, now a National Historic Landmark and working concert hall.
• National Museum of African American Music — 0.4 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

• Avon N. Williams, Jr. — steps away
• Edwin W. Craig — steps away
• Tennessee State Capitol — steps away
• War Memorial Auditorium Building — steps away