10/04/2026
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1053998397340912&id=100081922839542&mibextid=Nif5oz
Jimi Hendrix played this room. Now it's an off-ramp. Teddy Acklen opened the Del Morocco on Jefferson Street in Nashville in 1935, hired his cooks away from a plantation house, and served Black folks off china upstairs with Jackie Robinson sitting at one of the tables. Tennessee ran Interstate 40 through the middle of it in 1968, and you drive across that dance floor every time you take the exit.
There is a place on the eastbound ramp off Interstate 40 in Nashville, right where the concrete bends down toward Jefferson Street, where you could stop your car and be sitting in the middle of somebody's dance floor.
Not near it, in it. The club was called the Del Morocco and it stood at 2417 Jefferson, and tens of thousands of cars a day now pass through the space where its front door used to open.
There is no sign telling you what the ramp is made of. So start with a man who is in almost none of the books, and work forward from there.
His name was William Sousa Bridgeforth and everybody called him Sou. He was born in March of 1907 outside Athens, Alabama, on a farm of two hundred and eighty acres that his grandparents had come out of slavery and bought themselves, and he grew up walking behind a plow on it.
Think about what that ground was. Two hundred and eighty acres, in Alabama, owned outright by people who had themselves been owned, in a state that had spent the previous century making sure they never could be.
His parents died when he was eighteen, and he went up to Nashville and laid brick alongside his uncle, a man named Nick Stuart. In 1932 the family sold the farm, and Sou took his share of what those acres were worth and bought a pool hall at Seventeenth and Charlotte.
That is the sentence to sit with. Freedom land, turned into a room with a door on it, because no bank in Nashville was going to lend a Black man in 1932 the price of a room.
He opened two more pool halls, and in 1939 he opened the New Era Club. By the fifties it was one of the places a Black act played in the South, spoken of in the same breath as the Regal in Chicago and the Apollo in New York, and if you came through Nashville and you could sing, you played Sou's room.
Etta James played it. Little Richard came through town and stayed over at the YMCA, because no downtown hotel would have him, and he named the New Era decades later as one of the places he went.
And Sou, with money coming in for the first time in his life, spent it on the strangest possible thing. He bought baseball teams.
He owned the Baltimore Elite Giants and the Nashville Stars, and he bought the Birmingham Black Barons around the time a young Willie Mays left them for the majors.
He put a nineteen year old pitcher named Charley Pride on his bus. Sou remembered the boy sitting up all night while the rest of the team tried to sleep, quietly working at a guitar.
That is what a grandson of enslaved people did with two hundred and eighty acres of Alabama. He turned it into a room, the room into a payroll, and the payroll into a bus with a boy on it who would go on to sell seventy million records.
Four blocks over, at 2417 Jefferson, another man was running the same arithmetic. Theodore Acklen was born in 1908, and the genealogy records show his family name was actually Lilly, so he went through life carrying the surname of one of the wealthiest slaveholding families in Middle Tennessee while a census taker in 1940 wrote his occupation down as night club proprietor.
Everybody called him Uncle Teddy. He had come up running numbers, because that was what was available to him, and in 1935 he opened the Del Morocco.
Then he hired his cooks away from Belle Meade, the old plantation house out on the west side of town. Read that twice, because the people who cooked for white Nashville's grandest table were brought across the city to cook in a Black-owned dining room, for Black customers, upstairs in a room Teddy called the Blue Room.
Jackie Robinson sat at one of those tables, and so did Roy Campanella. Teddy's son kept the photograph of the two of them leaning over dinner in street clothes for the rest of his life.
Count Basie came in after his own show and stayed until it got light. So did the Temptations, and so, some nights, did Aretha Franklin.
Downstairs there was a stage, and in 1962 the house band had a guitar player in it who had just come off the base at Fort Campbell.
Nashville called him Marbles, as in he had lost his. He roomed on the second floor of the beauty parlor next door, above the hair dryers, and people who were in the room remember him running his cable a good thirty feet out into the crowd so he could play from inside it.
His mother had called him Jimmy. The world would come to call him Jimi Hendrix.
Thirty feet of cable, out into a room a man built out of nothing but his own hustle, on a street where none of it was supposed to be possible. Hold onto the length of that cable, because it is the only measurement of that room anybody ever bothered to write down.
Jefferson Street held most of Nashville's listings in the Green Book, the guide a Harlem mail carrier named Victor Green started printing in 1936 so a Black family driving through a strange state would know which hotel would take them and which kitchen would feed them.
By 1962 it was circulating more than two million copies a year. Green wrote back in 1948 that there would come a day when the book would not have to be published, and that shutting it down would be a great day.
He died in October of 1960 without seeing it. His wife Alma kept it going.
In July of 1964 the Civil Rights Act passed, and the final edition, ninety-nine pages, told its readers the news outright and carried listings for white hotels that had never been open to them.
The book handed over its own customers on purpose. That had been the whole point of it since page one.
Alma Green closed it in 1966, and the promise had been kept.
Now here is where the version you have been shown goes wrong. The line that killed Jefferson Street was drawn before any of that, on a map by 1957, seven years before the Act, and it had nothing to do with where anybody chose to shop.
But that is not the hard part. The hard part is that there was another route.
The first path plotted for Interstate 40 through Nashville would have followed Route 70S and the Louisville and Nashville railroad tracks, then run into downtown between Broadway and Charlotte Avenue. It would have destroyed very little.
It also ran near Vanderbilt University, near Baptist Hospital, near Centennial Park, and out toward Belle Meade, where the white money lived.
So it was dropped. The historian Benjamin Houston went into the archives on this and laid it out in his book on Nashville, showing that a second route along Charlotte Pike then gained ground, partly because it avoided the park and the hospital, and partly because a widened road there could be used as a physical wall between the white and Black sides of the city, which was a thing planners in Nashville and elsewhere did on purpose in those years.
Then, sometime in 1955 or 1956, something changed. Houston is honest that the record of what happened next is murky.
What is not murky is where the pen ended up. The final route ran along Charlotte, then veered hard north at 39th Avenue, just before Centennial Park, crossed 28th Avenue, went through Hadley Park, and cut Jefferson Street in half around 25th.
Hadley Park was one of the first public parks in the South built for Black citizens. The road took a third of North Nashville's park land with it.
And when it reached the neighborhood, it did not simply pass through. It ran between Jefferson Street and Scovel Street, parallel, under two hundred feet away, for more than a mile.
Federal law then required a public hearing on the economic effects before any of this could be built. Nashville held one on the fifteenth of May, 1957, in the Davidson County courthouse.
Notice went up in the main post office and five stations, and the station serving North Nashville sat, in the appeals court's own later description, in a white neighborhood.
The notice announced the hearing for the fourteenth. It was held on the fifteenth, and nobody has ever explained that either.
The morning was recorded. The machine picked up the men on the platform, because the platform is where the microphones were, and it did not pick up many of the questions from the floor.
So the official proof that Nashville consulted its Black citizens about the road contains the officials and not the citizens.
Ten years later, in October 1967, with the bids already advertised, about thirty people from North Nashville put their names to a lawsuit.
Among them were Dr. Edwin Mitchell, an economist at Fisk named Flournoy Coles, Inman Otey and Curlie McGruder. They were businessmen, ministers, teachers and professors, Black and white together.
Their lawyers were Avon Williams and Z. Alexander Looby, whose house had been bombed in 1960 while he was asleep inside it.
They asked for ninety days, ninety days to talk it through, move a ramp, save a block. The state highway commissioner said no, and so did the United States Department of Transportation.
Judge Frank Gray heard them for three days at the end of October, and the record ran to five hundred and thirty-eight typed pages. The 1957 transcript was produced and accepted, and the lawyer who had certified back in 1957 that the economic effects were considered could not be asked a single question about it, because he was dead.
Gray ruled against them, and the Sixth Circuit heard the appeal in December. Those judges wrote that the Jefferson Street business district would be gravely affected, that a park used mainly by Black residents would be destroyed, and that many Black-owned businesses would have to move or close.
Then they wrote that routing highways belongs to the executive branch and not to judges, and they affirmed it. The Supreme Court refused the case on the twenty-ninth of January, 1968.
About a hundred and twenty-eight businesses came down or were forced to move, which was close to eighty percent of every Black-owned business in the city of Nashville.
Twenty-seven apartment buildings went, and more than six hundred homes. Around fourteen hundred people had to find somewhere else to sleep.
The Christian Science Monitor sent a reporter in June of 1968. He found that people who had lost their homes could not locate any vacant housing they could afford, and that many of them were moving in with relatives.
He also wrote down the phrase North Nashville was using for the road. A white road through black bedrooms.
Now the money, because this is the part that never gets said. When Jefferson Street came down there was no law in this country requiring anyone to help those people move, so a person whose property was taken was owed its market value and nothing else, and a tenant who rented was owed nothing at all.
Congress finally added relocation payments in the Highway Act of August 1968, after most of the Nashville land was already bought. Then look at how that law actually ran.
In the first fifteen months it was in force, federal highway projects displaced roughly thirteen thousand five hundred homeowners across the country. Two thousand and eighty-five of them received a payment.
Tenants did worse. Of ten thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine displaced in a twelve month stretch, nine hundred and thirteen got anything at all.
And in the first decade of the interstate program, clearing the right of way destroyed more low and moderate income housing than the federal government's entire public housing program managed to build.
The Del Morocco closed in 1967 and was demolished in 1968. Uncle Teddy Acklen died in Nashville in 1981.
The road reached the New Era in 1968 too. Sou Bridgeforth moved it half a block, to 1114 Charlotte, and lost so much business that he had to shut the doors for a week or two.
He called it a scuffle, which is the same word he used about being eighteen years old and orphaned in Alabama.
Then he opened back up, and he ran that club until 1995. He was eighty-eight when he stopped.
He died in July of 2004 at ninety-seven, the last living owner of a Negro Leagues baseball team, and outside of Nashville almost nobody has ever heard his name.
So when somebody tells you integration closed the Black businesses, hand them this.
In July of 1964 one arm of the federal government made the white hotel take a Black family's money. In those same years another arm of it paid nine dollars of every ten for a road through the block where the Black hotel stood, on a route chosen after the route that would have spared them was set aside for the sake of a university, a hospital, a park and a rich suburb.
And the banks did not change in 1964. A man who lost his building on Jefferson Street was bidding for a new one against men who could borrow, in a market where he still could not.
Nashville was ordinary. Between 1949 and 1974 urban renewal alone ran more than two thousand five hundred projects in nearly a thousand cities and moved about a million people, and close to two out of every three of them were Black.
The right to spend your money anywhere is not the same thing as the right to keep what you built. One of those was signed into law in front of cameras, and the other was never on the table.
Here is something worth doing with an afternoon. Find out what the first proposed route for the interstate through your own city was before it was changed, because state archives keep them, university libraries keep them, and most of them have never been looked at by anybody outside a planning office.
Then put that first line next to where the road actually went, and see whose houses sat in the gap between the two.
In Nashville the gap is about a mile and a half wide, and it has a dance floor in it.
It was built with the money from two hundred and eighty acres of Alabama that two people bought after slavery, by their grandson, who was still opening the doors twenty-seven years after the government came through and took the building out from under him.
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