Bill Carey: What Nashville Chooses to Remember about the KKK’s Presence

There’s a hill south of downtown Nashville that is home to Carter-Lawrence Elementary School and several sports fields, one of which is Belmont University’s home baseball stadium. On a Friday a couple years ago, I took my dog to the top of it and saw joggers, people playing softball and students taking part in their annual field day. It was a wonderful place to be. However, more than 100 years ago, the Ku Klux Klan held its most widely viewed meeting ever in Middle Tennessee there. On the night of June 1, 1923, residents of Nashville were mesmerized by the sight of a huge cross lit by incandescent lights on the hill.

First Blind Man to Use a Seeing-Eye Dog Was a Tennessean

When you see a blind person with a seeing-eye dog, remember that this practice started with a young man from Nashville. In 1927, Morris Frank was a 20-year-old student at Vanderbilt University and unhappy about his dependency on others to get around. Frank’s father read him an article in the Saturday Evening Post by Dorothy Eustis, an American woman living in Switzerland. In the article, Eustis talked about how shepherds there were training dogs to help blind people. She speculated that this practice could be perfected to help blind people on a full-time basis.