Malcolm X Park? Petition Circulates To Change Hadley Park's Name

NASHVILLE, TN -- A Nashville man wants to change the name of historic Hadley Park to Malcolm X Park, saying that its current name honors a slaveowner, except that it may not.

Joshua Lipscomb, a North Nashville native, told NewsChannel 5 thatthe name of the park is offensive and that when he spread the word of the story of the park, his neighbors felt "hoodwinked, disrespected and degraded."

(For more updates on this story and free news alerts for your neighborhood, sign up for your local Middle Tennessee Patch morning newsletter.)

Lipscomb's petition to rename the park for Malcolm X has generated nearly 200 signatures as of midday Thursday and he intends to present it to the Metro Council.

“Right now we want to send a message to all throughout the community of standing up against injustice," Lipscomb told the station. "I think the message of replacing a slave owner with a peace soldier like Malcolm X just sends a great message to the youth of any race, and it speaks for change, and I think that’s what Nashville needs right now.”

However, Hadley Park may not actually be named for slaveowner.

The park opened to much ballyhoo in 1912 with Mayor Hilary Howse fulfilling a campaign promise that Nashville would have a city-owned park exclusively for the use of African-Americans in the then-segregated city. Howse was already popular in the African-American community because he'd drawn the State Normal School for Negroes, which would eventually become Tennessee A&I and eventually Tennessee State, to Nashville, despite Chattanooga being the odds-on favorite.

In any case, Hadley Park was celebrated as the first ever public park specifically for the use of African-Americans. According to The Globe, the city's leading African-American newspaper at the time, older citizens claimed that Mayor Howse was speaking from the same place Frederick Douglass had when he visited Nashville in 1873; although contemporaneous accounts say Douglass spoke from the downtown Harding House hotel and then at the Colored Fair Grounds, now Buena Vista Park.

What very few accounts mention is who Hadley Park's name actually honors. One brief item from June says that the Parks Board voted to name it for "Mr. Hadley" whose family had owned the tract and was a "friend of the Negro." And through the mists of time, that version has (sort of) become the conventional wisdom.

From Metro Parks' official rundown of park namesakes:

Purchase records indicate the park was the Harding property but contained the home of the Hadley family whose plantation became the site of Tennessee State University at about the time the park was purchased. Major E. C. Lewis named it Hadley Park, but did not identify the Hadley he intended to honor. The city’s black newspaper at the time assumed Lewis meant the Hadley family, John L. Hadley specifically, a white slave-owning family which had lived on the site.

In fact, there are no records of any of the (extremely numerous) white Hadleys living in the area. The Hadleys owned land, appropriately enough, in Hadley's Bend near Old Hickory.

There were numerous John Hadleys in Nashville - a John A., the aforementioned John L. and so on down the generations - and one story says that one of these Hadleys gave the land for what would become TSU and the park because he wanted the best for his former slaves. Another tale is that he invited Douglass to Nashville for the betterment of the slaves he once owned. But there's actual little, if any evidence, of that. Douglass came to Nashville to speak to a convention of black farmers and mechanics and no accounts from the 1873 event mention Hadley, nor did Douglass do so in his remarks.

The Parks Department acknowledges this discrepancy, as well, adding "It’s also possible that Lewis had intended to honor Dr. W. A. Hadley, a pioneer black physician with whom Lewis had worked during the 1897 Centennial Exposition."

Dr. W.A. Hadley was just one of dozens of leading African-American citizens in fin de siecle Nashville with the surname. There were numerous doctors, teachers and business owners named Hadley. In fact, The Globe mentions Dr. C.H. Hadley, who was "for many years the principal of one of the public schools here" and who had a home neighboring the park.

And that it says something a bit curious: "The name will be appreciated by all Negroes in view of the fact that (Dr. C.H. Hadley) is so closely related to the Hadley family."

It is an accepted, though not proven, fact that one of the Hadleys - Samuel - fathered 28 children by two of his slaves, which led to his being shunned by many members of his family, but accounts for the popularity of the name among black Nashvillians in the period following the Civil War. Indeed, The Globe seems to acknowledge as conventional wisdom that the black Hadleys were simply a branch of the white Hadley family tree.

In any case, barring discovery of the minutes of the Parks Board meeting from 1912, it's unlikely we'll ever learn who the actual namesake of Hadley Park was. In any event, Nashville park regulations bar the renaming of any park, though Old Center Park became Cedar Hill Park in 1964. Fred Douglas Park famously became Frederick Douglass Park last year, though that was framed as a "clarification" rather than a renaming.

Image via Google Maps