This groundbreaking historical study makes the compelling case that the culturally sophisticated and upwardly mobile figure of the New Negro first emerged long before the Harlem Renaissance or the twentieth-century Great Migration to the North. Drawing from extensive archival research, Gabriel A. Briggs reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, showing how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades.