Neighbors,
North Nashville knows what it means to have its future decided for us.
We are the community that Interstate 40 cut in half. We have watched gentrification price out the families who built these blocks, and we have lived the long arithmetic of disinvestment — the dollars that went everywhere but here. So when word came that a data center could rise in the heart of 37208, the anger and the anxiety were not an overreaction. They are core memories. They are earned.
Fisk University has announced “Quantum Leap,” the most ambitious campus plan in its 160-year history. Part of that plan is a proposed Innovation Center that would include a data center, right here in the heart of 37208.
Since that announcement, I’ve heard from many of you. But I want you to be heard by Fisk, too. So join me and community leaders THIS MONDAY at 6:30 p.m. for a North Nashville Town Hall on the Fisk Data Center Proposal.
Let me be honest with you, because you deserve nothing less. I do not believe Black and underinvested communities should keep absorbing the environmental cost of other people’s progress. The pollution, the strain on our water and power, the health burden that always seems to land on the same zip codes. Those harms are real, and I will not pretend this is a tidy debate with two equal sides. It isn’t.
And yet I owe you the full truth of where I sit. I represent Fisk University — one of the oldest and most sacred HBCUs in this nation and the oldest institution in Nashville — and I have real relationships with its leadership, as your senator is supposed to. Fisk is facing a genuine financial reckoning. Like so many of our HBCUs, it has been asked to do generational work on starvation funding. I am fighting this exact battle over the historic underfunding of Tennessee State University.
So here is the question I cannot stop asking — the one underneath this entire fight:
With or without a data center, how do we secure the long-term sustainability and survival of this culturally irreplaceable institution for another 160 years?
That is the real issue. The data center is a symptom of a deeper wound: we have never properly invested in the Black institutions that raised us. If we only fight the symptom, we will be right back here again at the next proposal, the next crisis, the next hard bargain a starved institution feels forced to make.
This town hall is where we begin that harder, truer conversation. Bring your questions. Bring your ideas for how we save Fisk without sacrificing the neighborhood that loves her.
I am not here to sell you anything. I am here to listen, to learn the truth, and to fight the fight that actually matters.
📅 Monday, June 29, 2026
🕡 6:30 – 8:00 PM CST
📍 Lee Chapel AME Church, 1200 Dr. D.B. Todd Jr. Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208
Hosted by the NAACP Nashville Branch, alongside Rep. Harold Love Jr., Councilmember Brandon Taylor, Fisk University, and me — those of us who actually represent this zip code.
Can’t make it? Watch the livestream on my Facebook and YouTube pages.
In service,
Senator Charlane Oliver
The People’s Senator
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