By the time Thornton Prince opened his restaurant, segregation governed Southern life.

Reconstruction had seemed to offer African-Americans new opportunities. Black men got the vote, and a handful were elected. Schools opened, educating children and adults alike. People hoped for land ownership and fair wages. But the abandonment of the federal government and violent opposition by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan let white Southerners “redeem” their communities. Jim Crow laws hardened the divisions between blacks and whites, making inequality part of the legal code. Lynchings, riots, rapes and other attacks terrorized black communities. Many people left the region, hoping Chicago or New York or Los Angeles would be more peaceful and profitable for them. Others fled the countryside for Nashville and the other cities of the upper South.

Jefferson Street gave black Nashvillians places where they could shop, eat, learn and worship safely. Thanks to these new migrants, the area around Jefferson Street continued to grow and prosper. In 1912, the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial and Normal School — now Tennessee State University — moved there. That same year, the city built Hadley Park, the first park blacks could use. Restaurants, music venues and speakeasies opened. Country music dominated white Nashville’s music scene, but Jefferson Street became an important haunt for jazz and blues musicians. The Ritz Theater let African-Americans watch movies without having to climb into a segregated balcony. Motels and hotels gave travelers options. Similar districts grew up at the heart of the black neighborhoods in East and North Nashville.

But the city developed a “pyramid” zoning code, which meant that land was zoned according to its perceived value. Property zoned for residential use was of higher value, and so it was protected from the incursion of commercial interests. Property zoned for commercial or industrial use could be used for single-family dwellings, but at any point, a developer could come into the middle of the neighborhood and start building anything he or she desired.

Most white neighborhoods were zoned as residential areas. African-American neighborhoods were zoned as commercial and industrial properties.

In 1949, the city administration claimed 96 acres in Hell’s Half Acre. They justified it by saying they would rid the city of vice. The plat included six historic African-American churches, a business district, schools and other sites of community life. The city replaced the neighborhood with the State Library and Archives, a large office building, a six-lane parkway, terraced parking lots and green space. They announced that they would replace the rest of the neighborhood with a planned municipal auditorium and private development. Few provisions were made for the people who lost their homes.

There was “a view that Nashville had held for some time that suggested that one of the major problems with downtowns was people,” former Mayor Bill Purcell explains to me as we look out the window of his high-rise downtown law office. “That if you could eliminate the people, then the city would be successful. … They banned vices; they banned activities that they felt were detrimental to civic life, and they banned residential living.”

Urban redevelopment accelerated over the next several decades, and it bore down upon other black neighborhoods around the city. The 1954 Federal Housing Act offered to pay up to 90 percent of the cost if Nashville would raze unwanted buildings and replace them with superhighways. The city planners cleared the edge of East Nashville for a new interstate. They emptied another 400 acres for warehousing and industrial use. Another highway was routed through Edgehill, a lower-income, predominantly minority community. Black leaders began worrying that urban renewal would become “Negro removal.”

New suburban developments popped up just outside the city’s limits. The interstates proved to be effective walls between the new developments and the city’s centers. Neighborhood covenants controlled who could buy the houses, and so these areas were up to 98 percent white. Nashville grew increasingly segregated.