National Negro High School Basketball Tournament

Kean Hall opened in 1951 at a cost of $1.5 million and is one of the few Art Deco buildings on the campus. Students call it Kean's Little Garden, after Henry Arthur Kean, who played football at Fisk in 1916 and was Tennessee A&I's athletic director and football coach from 1944 to 1954. His Tigers won five national football championships. The hall was the home court for the school's basketball teams from 1951 to 1980 and hosted the national high school tournament from 1953 to 1964. It now houses volleyball and Air Force ROTC.

What the plaque says

National Negro High School Basketball Tournament ~1945-1964~ In 1929 Charles H. Williams established the National Negro High School Basketball Tournament, which was sponsored by the historically black Hampton Normal and Agriculture Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia. In 1945, under President Walter S. Davis and Athletic Director Henry A. Kean, Sr. the tournaments moved to Tennessee A&I State College. Between 1945 and 1953, the games were played at both A&I and Pearl High School. From 1953 to 1964, the tournaments were played in A&I's new Kean's Little Garden. For almost two decades, Tennessee A&I State University hosted this foremost basketball tournament for African-American players from across the South and the Midwest.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 1.3 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 — 2.4 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 — 2.6 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 — 2.7 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

• Lt. William McBryar, Buffalo Soldier Medal of Honor — steps away
• Tennessee State University — steps away
• Hadley Park — 0.4 mi
• Juno Frankie Pierce — 0.4 mi