Quote:
Originally Posted by Texcitement
Additionally, Nashville is NOT deep South and as such, never had the huge influx of black Southerners during its early development.
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Quick correction, there wasn't an 'influx' of Black Southerners to cities, they were already there; in fact, as with the US generally, most of the Blacks were there before most of the White folks.
The reason Nashville doesn't historically have as large a Black population (b/w 20-25%) as some other Southern cities: Memphis, Atlanta, etc., is because Nashville was horse country, not farm country. And you need less labor for a horse farm than for say a cotton or tobacco crop, ergo, fewer Blacks in the area upon Emancipation.
Additionally, Nashville has benefited from having had a chunk of its Black population be
relatively well-educated and well-heeled in part because slaves on horse farms were higher-skilled than those on plantations, and so you had a significant number of high-skilled Black folks and those skills were still lucrative after Emancipation. That also allowed the Black population in a city as small as Nashville at the time to found 3 Black higher education institutions founded b/w 1866 and 1912, which created a self-generating population of Black doctors, academics, etc., i.e. a middle and upper-middle class.
Nashville's location outside of the Deep South has nothing to do with it; if it did, Baltimore, Richmond, and DC would've looked very different all this time.
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