JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A complicated piece of Civil War-era history is getting a makeover. Nashville is working to update the remains of Fort Negley with a more accurate presentation of its story. It's a place built by forced Black labor for the Union. From member station WPLN, Cynthia Abrams reports.
CYNTHIA ABRAMS, BYLINE: Along the winding trail at Fort Negley, a group of college students is in the middle of a history class. Tennessee State University's Learotha Williams has brought his students out for a sort of walk-and-talk.
LEAROTHA WILLIAMS: They didn't have much in material possessions, but what did they bring with them?
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #1: Their clothes and stuff?
WILLIAMS: How they dress.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #2: Food.
WILLIAMS: The food.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #3: Their language.
WILLIAMS: Language.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #4: Religion.
WILLIAMS: Religion.
ABRAMS: Williams is asking his students about the thousands of people - many of them enslaved or formerly enslaved - who built the stone fortress, which sits atop a hill overlooking downtown.
WILLIAMS: Who determines what we remember and what we forget? This place is ground zero for that, right?
ABRAMS: Fort Negley is in Tennessee, 1 of 11 states to secede during the Civil War. But in Nashville, secession didn't last long. Less than a year into the war, it became the first Confederate state capital to fall to the Union. Negley is a relic of that defeat. It's one of the best-preserved Union forts still standing, but it's faced decades of neglect, Williams says.
WILLIAMS: This being a, quote, "Yankee fort" in the Confederacy, you know, there's not going to be a lot of glorification of what happens here.
ABRAMS: When the Union took Nashville, many enslaved people flocked to the city to escape slavery. But thousands of these men, women and even children were forced by the Union to construct Fort Negley. Some became soldiers, joining the U.S. Colored Troops. Over this period, Nashville's Black population roughly tripled. Later, many settled near Fort Negley, establishing important Black neighborhoods. Some descendants, like Gary Burke, are still in Nashville today.
GARY BURKE: My great-great-great-grandfather, Peter Bailey, was a soldier here in 1865.
ABRAMS: Burke visits often. His goal is to make sure the workers are never forgotten.
BURKE: This was a Union fort. And that you had African Americans who were forced into labor and what indignations they experienced while doing that.
ABRAMS: That sometimes-invisible history is something Williams' students, like Zariah Browning, say is uncomfortable.
ZARIAH BROWNING: Knowing that it's just a place that people walk through and they don't know the cultural significance behind it is kind of, like, hard to process.
ABRAMS: It's also something the city is looking to rectify. It plans to update signage, do archaeological digs and add a memorial lawn dedicated to the laborers. Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell says the effort is overdue.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FREDDIE O'CONNELL: And I would say that whatever the price of freedom is, the people who built this fort, defended it and descended from it have paid that. They've earned inclusion, belonging and the dignity of our collective memory.
ABRAMS: The changes to Fort Negley are expected to be completed early next year. For NPR News, I'm Cynthia Abrams in Nashville.
(SOUNDBITE OF SAM EVIAN SONG, "CAROLINA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.