Just north of Germantown, Salemtown grew up in the late nineteenth century as a mixed working-class community and has been predominantly African-American for most of the twentieth century. Salemtown's story is in many ways a representative story of African-American urban neighborhoods in mid-sized Southern cities: a community built with limited resources on the margins of the city's desirable land, sustained by the social institutions — churches, small businesses, mutual aid networks — that Black residents built when larger society excluded them, and threatened repeatedly by the forces of urban renewal, highway construction, and gentrification that have displaced Black communities across American cities. The neighborhood sits at the edge of the rapid development pressure that has transformed north Nashville in the past decade.
Long-term residents have organized through community land trusts and neighborhood associations to resist wholesale displacement, with mixed results. The modest houses on these streets, the corner churches, and the community gardens visible in vacant lots tell the story of what gets built when a community has been forced to build everything itself. Pay attention to who is on the porches and who is walking the dogs here.