Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA)

Your next stop is 211 Seventh Avenue North. Look for the red door with Young Women’s Christian Association inscribed above. According to the organization, the “YWCA has been at the forefront of most critical social movements for more than 160 years—from women’s empowerment and civil rights, to affordable housing and pay equity, to violence prevention and health care.” However, the YWCA has also faced several difficult issues involving race in its history.

In its early days, the YWCA was a reputable boarding house for young women who moved to cities to find work. It later added classes, programs, and recreational facilities. Nashville’s YWCA first opened downtown in 1898, and this facility was built in 1909. The YWCA facility only served white women, but in 1919, an African American branch of the YWCA, called the Blue Triangle, was established. Funding was provided by local Black community groups and the national YWCA. In 1920, the Blue Triangle Branch of the YWCA purchased a three-story residence in the Black business district—the location of today’s Municipal Auditorium. Marian Hadley served as paid secretary and J. Frankie Pierce as committee chairperson.

Although Nashville began to desegregate lunch counters in 1960, other businesses and organizations, such as the YWCA, maintained policies of racial segregation. Just as student activists targeted hotels like the Hermitage Hotel and bus stations like Greyhound, they also targeted other private businesses and non-profits. This included the YWCA.

In 1961, the YWCA and its counterpart, the Young Men’s Christian Association, were faced with calls by the Nashville Christian Leadership Council to integrate—but they refused. Their cafeterias desegregated after the earlier sit-ins, however, residence halls, rec facilities, and swimming pools remained segregated at both Y organizations. According to historian Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters, the swimming pool represented an especially sensitive flashpoint of racial tension: “Pools were both physically intimate and also visually intimate. . . And there have always been fears, in terms of using swimming pools, about being exposed to dirt and disease of other swimmers. . . But the primary. . . cause for racial segregation was gender integration, that most whites did not want [B]lack men, in particular, to have access to white women in such an intimate public space.”

Although the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act guaranteed the desegregation of public facilities and the YWCA professed an interracial policy the following year, it took two years before full desegregation was achieved.

Continue walking down Seventh Ave. until you reach Church St. Turn RIGHT to stand in front of your next stop, the Doctors’ Building, now Homewood Suites.