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The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1930: Elites and Dilemmas, by Bobby L. Lovett, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999. xi, 314 pp. $36.00 cloth; $18.00 paper.
THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY STUDIES SERIES, edited by Willard B. Gatewood, which has published studies on black communities in Boston, Charleston, Savannah, and now in Nashville. Lovett is a professor of history and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Tennessee State University, Nashville, Tennessee. He has published several articles in historical journals and is co-editor of the book, Profiles of African-Americans in Tennessee. In this work under review, Lovett covers the history of the African-American community from its beginnings as a frontier village called Fort Nashborough, located in Middle Tennessee along the west bank of the Cumberland River, which runs into the Ohio River and the Mississippi River further north. It is interesting to note that an African American was present both with the exploratory team and with the first settlers who established Fort Nashborough during the American Revolution in 1779-1780, which makes Nashville a multi-racial or multi-cultural community from its conception. The settlers came together, worked together, but did not develop a community together. This fact created several dilemmas and challenges for the blacks in the emerging Nashville community, some of which the author masterly examines in his sweeping study of this black community.
This study examines the relationships which existed between the black elite in Nashville and other power blocs over a one hundred and fifty year period. The basic theme of this study is that the black elite and the white elite formed "a peculiar alliance" which worked well until the Civil War era; then the black elite reached out to the Northern liberals and...