North Nashville is known for three HBCUs, a music legacy that predates Music Row, and one of the most painful stories of highway-driven displacement in Southern urban history. It’s the part of Nashville’s story that gets left out of the tourism narrative.
The HBCUs
Fisk University, Tennessee State University (TSU), and Meharry Medical College all anchor North Nashville, giving the neighborhood an educational and cultural density that few American urban communities of comparable size can claim. Fisk is one of America’s historically Black universities with the deepest cultural footprint, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who toured internationally to raise money for the university after the Civil War, are credited with preserving and spreading African American spirituals globally. Meharry is one of the country’s leading historically Black medical schools. TSU has produced athletes, politicians, and professionals across generations. These institutions have kept an intellectual and professional community in North Nashville through decades of disinvestment that might have otherwise emptied the neighborhood entirely.
Jefferson Street
Jefferson Street was, from the 1940s through the 1960s, one of the most significant Black cultural districts in the United States. Record stores, clubs, restaurants, and businesses created an economy that sustained itself. Jimi Hendrix played on Jefferson Street before he became Jimi Hendrix. Little Richard played here. The community built a music scene that was contemporary with but separate from the white-owned Music Row recording industry developing a few miles to the south.
The construction of I-40 in 1968, routed through the heart of North Nashville along Jefferson Street, destroyed this corridor. The decision was deliberate: a preliminary study had routed the highway near Vanderbilt University’s campus, but city officials changed course. Transportation planners documented options that would have avoided the neighborhood entirely, and those options were rejected. The economic impact was catastrophic: businesses that had survived decades lost access, residents were displaced, and the cultural infrastructure that had sustained the community was dismantled.
Buchanan Street Today
Buchanan Street has emerged as North Nashville’s current commercial main street, with new restaurants, bars, and shops beginning to populate it. The neighborhood has some of the most intense gentrification pressure in Nashville: proximity to downtown, a physical layout that’s appealing to developers, and land prices that have been artificially low because of decades of disinvestment. A 2025 NCRC report ranked Nashville as the most intensely gentrifying city in America for 2010-2020, and North Nashville is at the center of that story.
The Current Tension
The question North Nashville is living right now is whether its HBCU anchors, its remaining longtime residents, and its historical identity can hold as development pressure intensifies. The new NFL stadium, NFL-related development, and continued downtown expansion are all pushing investment northward. The people and institutions that survived the highway construction are now facing a different kind of pressure, and the outcome of that contest will define what North Nashville becomes.
Sources
- Felix Homes, “Up and Coming Neighborhoods in Nashville”: felixhomes.com
- Tennessee Tribune, “Gentrification in North Nashville”: tntribune.com
- Nashville Post, “Not a black-and-white thing; a green thing”: nashvillepost.com
- Visit Nashville, Nashville Neighborhoods: visitmusiccity.com
- Save Our Nashville Neighborhoods, citing NCRC 2025 report: sonninc.org/gentrification