Nashville Civil Rights Landmark now hosts strippers

Back in February In 1960, in Nashville, a group of mostly black students sat down at the Woolworth’s downtown lunch counter to stage a nonviolent protest against segregation. Next month, the historic building will become home to shirtless men on the ropes.

Conformable The Tennesseanmen’s revue Thunder From Down Under will take up residence in what is now the Woolworth Theater starting September 26th. It will reportedly be only the second permanent residency for Australian strippers; the other is in Las Vegas.

The announcement is the latest eyebrow-raising news to emerge from Woolworth’s, which, after a stint in 2010 as a restaurant, was converted into a theater in 2022. It has since been home to the Cirque du Soleil-style show. shinywhich The Nashville scene described as a “Pigeon Forge (Tennessee) dinner theater — if Pigeon Forge allowed a lot more sexual innuendo” and, more ignominiously, the October 2022 premiere of right-wing talking head Candace Owens’ anti-Black Lives Matter film. The Biggest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM. That screening had guests like Kanye West, Kid Rock and Jason Aldean.

Thunder From Down Under magazine looks set to spin and shine in tandem with shiny. According to a spokesperson for the Woolworth Theatre, shiny experienced its best year since opening in the fall of 2022. “The Shiners program will continue as is indefinitely,” they wrote in an email to r. “There is no plan to close Shiners.”

While the male dancers are nowhere near the detritus that Nashville attracted this summer — like the neo-Nazis who protested outside a chicken finger store — it’s still hard to host raunchy, chesty entertainment void in such a reverent space. Part of the lunch counter remains on display in one of Woolworth’s front windows facing 5th Avenue North, which in 2021 was renamed John Lewis Way by the Nashville Metro Council in honor of the late U.S. congressman. Lewis was among those who protested at Woolworth’s in 1960 and received his first arrest for civil disobedience after being assaulted by customers.

Nashville has become closer to its “NashVegas” moniker than “Music City” in recent years, with a reputation among tourists as a place for heavy drinking. In a new story of his The Nashville Banner looking at the dynamics of the city’s Lower Broadway entertainment district—a few blocks south of Woolworth—a former security guard describes the environment as “a drunken rodeo.”

Meanwhile, the city continues to grapple with the aftermath of the lunchtime protests, including a still-unresolved string of bombings from 1960 that is the focus of author Betsy Phillips’ new book. Dynamite Nashville: Exposing the KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control.