HOW NASHVILLE BECAME THE HOME OF
TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY

        Chattanooga, Memphis and Nashville were all bidding for the location of the normal school for Negroes for their city. Nashville won the location after Davidson County court voted 31 to 13 to appropriate $60,000 in 4 1/2 per cent bonds in the establishment of the school, and after Ben Carr and Henry Allen Boyd actively worked in the interest of having the school located in Nashville. As reported in The Bulletin, November 1935, Chattanooga and Memphis were leading Nashville in the appropriation of money before Ben Carr engineered a meeting with the members of the State Legislature, the State Board of Education and the Governor to make a special plea for the Nashville location. Mr. Henry Allen Boyd was selected to make the address. It is stated that Mr. Boyd pointed out in his eloquent and forceful appeal, "There will be but one Negro State College in Tennessee for the next one hundred years, and if this school is located in the center of the state where His Excellency, the Governor, members of the State Senate, members of the Lower House, the State Educational Board and this County Court can see the property almost any day by just the mere payment of street care fare, it will be one of the greatest educational institutions in the whole southland for Negroes. We constitute nearly one-fourth of the population of the city. We have been deprived of the first and second Morrill Fund, the Slater Fund and several other philanthropic foundation assistance that should have come to us, so I am informed, and now I appeal to you gentlemen to look twenty-five years ahead and makes for a worthy people a gift that will go down to the credit of the county, the city and the state in after years. The Bulletin further stated that "with these and many other forceful utterances he closed his address, and the county court appropriated the money which was raised through bonds and thus secured the location of the Agricultural and Industrial College for Negroes in this city which has proven, as was, predicted of the greatest state schools for Negroes in the whole nation."