The Nashville Slave Market

Millie Simpkins, interviewed for the WPA Slave Narratives, remembered Cedar Street. Her first mistress sent her to Nashville's slave yard for being stubborn, and she was sold away from her husband and never saw him again. Groups bound for Mississippi walked with their ankles fastened together while the traders rode. Memphis was Tennessee's largest market, but by 1850 Nashville had no fewer than eight slave-trade brokers. Tennessee's 1827 ban on interstate trading was widely flouted and was repealed in 1854.

What the plaque says

The Nashville Slave Market Preceding the Civil War, this space, stretching from the intersection of 4th Avenue, North and Charlotte Avenue to the Public Square was the center of the slave trade in Nashville. The slave brokers that lined this thoroughfare provided prospective buyers reliable access to enslaved blacks whom they bought, sold, or traded for their own use or resale in other areas of the Deep South. Prior to the Civil War, slave auctions were comon occurrences at these brokerage houses, the marketplace, courthouse, and often produced scenes where enslavers dehumanized, valuated, and commodified people of African descent. Continued This area was home to the institutions that were an integral part of the enslavement in Tennessee: banks that loaned planters money needed to buy the enslaved; hardware stores that provided farming tools, clothing, and firms that protected the planters' investments in their enslaved human chattel. The slave trade played a vital role in the city's economic development during the 19th century. This growth came as the result of daily, weekly, and constant emotional trauma for the families who endured the slave trade.

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

• Morris Memorial Building — steps away
• Nashville Inn — steps away
• Tennessee State Capitol — steps away
• The Hermitage Hotel — steps away