Nashville Slave Market

You are now at the historical marker for the Nashville Slave Market on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Dr. MLK Jr. Blvd., outside the Music City Central transit station. During the decades preceding the Civil War, this space was the center of Nashville’s slave trade. Slave brokers lined this thoroughfare each week to offer prospective buyers access to enslaved Blacks whom they could buy, sell, or trade. One antebellum-era newspaper clipping featured an announcement for a Saturday auction that read: “Negroes for Sale. I will sell, at auction, to the highest bidder for cash, at the Court-yard in Nashville.” This particular auction resulted in the sale of a 26-year-old woman and her children: a boy around 8 years old and two girls, ages 5 and 3.

The slave trade was a central feature in the development of Nashville, as the city became the second largest slave port in the Volunteer State. This area was also home to businesses that supported enslavement in Tennessee. The slave trade played a crucial role in the city’s economic development during the nineteenth century, but this growth came as the result of emotional trauma for the Black families forced to endure and witness it.

Millie Simkins—a formerly enslaved North Nashville resident was sold in this space. In the late 1930s, she shared her memories as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives Project. Simkins recalled the slave broker stripped enslaved men and women of their clothes and required them to roll down a nearby hill to demonstrate that they did not have “broken bones or sores.” Simkins also talked about her own story, “My first mistress sold me because I was stubborn, [so] she sent me to the ‘slave yard’ at Nashville . . . . I was sold away from my husband and I never saw him again.”

While Nashville’s slave brokers often boasted of not breaking up families, it was not uncommon to see children as young as seven years of age being sold individually or in groups. In the decade before the Civil War, a slave broker named Rees W. Porter frequently boasted of having an ample supply of “Fancy Girls” to sale—young African American women of mixed ancestry who were used as concubines. The business of buying and selling enslaved men and women would continue in this space until the Union’s occupation of Nashville in 1862 during the Civil War.

Turn RIGHT and walk east on Dr. M.L.K. Jr. Blvd. until you reach Third Ave. North. Along the way you’ll pass National Baptist Convention/Morris Memorial Building. The only remaining building from a once vibrant African American business district, Morris Memorial was home to prominent African American architecture firm McKissack and McKissack. Cross Third Ave. North and enter Public Square Park at the northwestern corner near the Witness Walls public art installation.