The Path to Confederate Memorial Hall Goes Through Roger Williams University

BETSY PHILLIPS
AUG 22, 2016 7 AM

... let’s talk about why Confederate Memorial Hall stood on that very place ...

"In 1874 Nashville Normal and Theological Institute was able to purchase 30 acres of the Robert Gordon’s farm on Hillsboro Road for a new campus. The 1884-85 catalog describes two buildings. Mansion House, part of the Gordon property, was enlarged to measure 48 x 80 feet. It served as the girls’ dormitory and contained apartments for faculty. Centennial Hall, next door, measured 49 x 185 feet. Like Mansion House, it was four floors above a basement with a mansard roof. The ground floor contained school rooms, while the upper three floors were dormitory rooms" ...

... Sitting across Hillsboro Road from Vanderbilt was a black college that rivaled Fisk at the time in size, with beautiful buildings, a bustling curriculum and activist students who intended to change the country. Roger Williams students palled around with Vanderbilt students and sat in the bleachers at football games and I read that professor as saying that they sat intermixed with the white students at football games, not just in the same bleachers, but sitting together ...

In 1903, someone shot at the chapel. In 1904, someone shot the college president’s wife through a window of her own home (she was not killed). A month later, at the start of 1905, someone burned down Centennial Hall. In May of that same year, another building on campus burned down. The terrorism has its effect and Roger Williams got the message that it was no longer welcome on that plot of land. The school began efforts to sell off the land and in 1910, 25 acres of the campus was sold to the trustees of Peabody College. The other acres were subdivided for homes, and the deeds to those homes all forbid those home from ever being sold to black people.

In 1913 the United Daughters of the Confederacy began raising money to put a building on Peabody’s new campus ...

http://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pith-in-the-wind/article/20831347/the-path-to-confederate-memorial-hall-goes-straight-through-roger-williams-university