Nashville Public Library’s Andrea Blackman brought a piece of Nashville’s civil rights history to Lipscomb for MASK breakout chapel last week.
MASK stands for Multicultural Awareness, Skills and Knowledge and is Lipscomb’s new special interest chapel.
Blackman serves as the manager of the special collections division for Nashville Public Library and specializes in the library’s civil rights collection. Over the past 13 years, she has gathered and created an extensive collection of images, newspaper articles, primary documents and buttons that students and segregationist parents wore.
“The relevance of the civil rights movement is so ingrained here in Nashville,” said Sylvia Braden, Lipscomb University coordinator for international student services. “That’s a history that our community may not know much about, even for people who grow up here. We felt that might really resonate with our students.”
The library is now home to one of the largest collections of oral histories pertaining to the 1960’s civil rights movements, including over 200 interviews with participants of those movements that have been tediously conducted and transcribed.
“One thing I did want to do on the front end was make sure that every teacher and educator knew that this material was here and that it’s available for free,” Blackman said. “We continue to have public programs and conversations around current civil rights issues.”
Blackman worked alongside a team of librarians, historians, activists, local freedom writers, a private donor and an architect to create a physical space within the library, known as the Civil Rights Room.
“The room itself is designed to capture Nashville in the 1960s, but we’ve left this circular lunch counter open in the middle so that we can always continue this dialogue and conversation about civil rights,” Blackman said.
“Every year we get tens of thousands of students from here in Nashville and from around the world come to see what made Nashville special, why we have a place to honor this specific part of history, what we’re doing with the collection now and how we’re going to continue this conversation.”
Painfully accurate and stirring photographs cover the walls inside the room. These photos highlight a chronology of Nashville’s civil rights history, starting with school desegregation and ending with lunch counter sit-ins and Dr. King’s speeches.
“The reason we selected these photos is because it gives you just a snapshot, just a teaser, of what happened right here in downtown Nashville,” Blackman said.
Blackman showed a handful of these images during her presentation at MASK breakout chapel.
She not only spoke about Nashville’s rich civil rights history, but she also touched on current civil rights issues and movements that, like the 1960’s movements, are finding their grassroots here as well.
“We live and learn in Nashville and even Lipscomb requires us to serve in our community, but what Mrs. Blackman showed me when she spoke in MASK chapel last week is that our community is made of much more than just country music,” junior Hannah Fleming said, adding that she appreciated Blackman’s insight and passion.
MASK chapel was introduced last year as a special interest chapel and due to an overwhelming student response, it resurfaced this year as its own breakout chapel.
“We have students from all corners of the globe,” Braden said. “We wanted to create a venue for them to come together with our domestic students to worship and learn about different cultures in a powerful way.”