Rebroadcast: Preserving Fort Negley’s past while planning for its future

The This Is Nashville team is off for Juneteenth. We are rebroadcasting our episode about Fort Negley, which originally aired on April 4. 

Nashville is developing a new master plan for Fort Negley, one of the city’s most significant and unique historical landmarks.

The fort was built during the Civil War by conscripted free Black men and women for the Union Army. The U.S. Colored Troops who defended Fort Negley during the war remained and settled Nashville’s first post-Emancipation Black neighborhood at the base of the hill. The Bass Street neighborhood was a thriving area until it was destroyed in the 1950s and ’60s to make way for Interstate 65.

Now, former Bass Street residents and their descendants are fighting to reclaim the narrative of the neighborhood as the city decides what to do with the space.

But first, WPLN’s environmental reporter Caroline Eggers tells us about how a project at MTSU will track temperatures around Nashville.

Guests: 

• Caroline Eggers, WPLN environmental reporter

•  Angela Sutton, director of the Fort Negley Descendants Project and historian at Vanderbilt University

• Jeneene Blackman, CEO of the African American Cultural Alliance

• Gary Burke, Civil War reenactor whose great-great grandfather served at Fort Negley with the U.S. Colored Troops