I can't decide if this is hyperbole or not, but the ways that whole swaths of black history in Nashville have been erased feels like ethnic cleansing. Today I went and saw a whole side of a hill that had been one of the largest black cemeteries in Davidson County. It's gone.

Not just the cemetery. The whole side of the hill the cemetery sat on. Six thousand people marched from East Nashville to that spot in 1872 and dedicated that cemetery. It was filled with babies and grandparents and loved ones.

And it was lost in 1995. The owner of the land paid to have all the remains dug up and moved to one corner of the property--this was all legal--and he told the Tennessean that he was going to make a right proper spot, with access and everything.

This may, may, be the access.

People in the community estimated there were 800-1,000 people buried there, because basically, if you were black and lived in East Nashville, you went here in the end. The archaeologist who disinterred the remains found fewer than 500. I have found the names of fewer than 25.

It was a 20 acre cemetery right along Brick Church Pike. Just seeing the space it took up was important. Would still be important.

The men who wiped this cemetery off the map also gave the land for the Beaman Park expansion. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to go to that park again. It feels like being complicit in laundering their reputations.

Not that their reputations need laundering. This was all legal and done by the book and, with the exception of Kwame Lillard trying to stand in the way of it, the city was fine with it. Again, this is 1995. It was covered in the Tennessean as an interesting thing.

Not the desecration and destruction of the "final" resting place of Nashvillians who mattered.