Brown v. Board of Education – Nashville Historical Newsletter

Civil Rights Timeline, 1624 – 2012

Part Two: 1947-1956.

1947 Apr 15 Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to join a white professional baseball team when he is hired by the Dodgers. He will win the first MLB Rookie Award later the same year, and the Major League MVP Award in 1949.

1947 Fall Indiana University integrates its basketball team when it adds William Garrett to its roster. He is the first black player in the Big Ten and will be named an All-American in 1951. As other schools follow Indiana’s lead over the next few years, an unspoken “gentlemen’s agreement” evolves, limiting to three the number of black players on the floor at any one time.

1947 Dec President Truman’s Civil Rights Committee issues its report, “To Secure These Rights,” which positions America’s harsh treatment of its black citizens against our criticism of Communism’s destruction of its citizens’ individual rights. Among other things, the report, which at the time is considered quite radical, calls for segregation to be abolished (first and foremost in government and the military), for lynching to become a federal crime, for poll taxes to be outlawed, for voting rights to be guaranteed for all citizens, and for a United States Commission on Civil Rights to be established.

1948 May 3 Sipes v. McGhee, a Michigan case, leads to Shelley v. Kraemer, in which the Supreme Court rules that, although no statute prohibits racially restrictive covenants in property deeds [written to block Asians, Jews, or African Americans from purchasing property in a neighborhood], no state or federal court can enforce them.

1948 Jul 26 President Harry S Truman signs Executive Order 9981, which establishes the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. It is accompanied by Executive Order 9980, creating a Fair Employment Board to eliminate racial discrimination in federal employment. [This will require an additional change in Department of Defense policy. See entry for July 26, 1963.]

1949 William Henry Hastie is the first African American to be appointed a federal judge, when President Truman names him judge of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hastie, a native of Knoxville, graduated first in his class from Amherst and took his law degree at Harvard University. One of his law students at Howard University was Thurgood Marshall.

1950-1960 During this decade over 100 Native American tribes are legally terminated, resulting in federal takeover of native lands, relocation of thousands of Indians, and the weakening of tribal governments nationwide. One example is the powerful Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, which was recognized by Congress in 1848 and 1854. In 1959 the federal government terminates them as a tribe. Not until 1993 is this decision reversed, after they win a settlement for longstanding land claims they have disputed since 1904, and they are established once again as a Federal Tribe with full treaty status.

1950 African-American diplomat Ralph J. Bunche receives the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Arab-Israeli truce. He had also played a critical role in the formation and administration of the United Nations, chartered in 1945.

1950 Gwendolyn Brooks is the first African-American writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

*Poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, 1949* (*photo courtesy of Chicago Public Library*)

1950 Nov 1 Chuck Cooper becomes the first African-American professional basketball player when he takes the floor with the Boston Celtics against the Fort Wayne Pistons.

1951 The University of Tennessee admits its first African-American students.

1952 The first year since 1881 without a recorded lynching. However, lynchings will continue to occur in America, the last on record being that of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981.

1952 The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) passes a resolution introduced by the Yale Law School faculty two years earlier, making racial integration a requirement for membership in the organization.

1953 Fall Vanderbilt University admits its first African-American student.

1954 May 17 The unanimous decision on Brown v. Board of Education overturns previous rulings, beginning with Plessy v. Ferguson(58 years earlier, almost to the day), by ruling that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students deny equal educational opportunities to the black children – “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The decision bans segregation in public schools.

1954 Sep 30 The last remaining all-black units are disbanded by the U.S. Military.

1955 Mar 2 Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old African American is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Local black leaders consider using this as the test case for a major protest movement, but reject the idea when Colvin becomes pregnant.

1955 Mar Black basketball players K. C. Jones and Bill Russell lead the University of San Francisco to the NCCA championship.

1955 May 24 The Little Rock School Board votes unanimously to adopt Superintendent Virgil Blossom‘s plan of gradual integration, to start in September 1957 at the high school level and add the lower grades over the next six years. Mr. Blossom is named “Man of the Year” by the Arkansas Democrat for his work on desegregation.

1955 July Rosa Parks receives a scholarship to attend a school desegregation workshop for community leaders. She spends several weeks at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, TN, later saying that the workshop was the first time in her life she had felt a sense of being in “an atmosphere of equality with members of the other race.”

Educator Septima Clark with Rosa Parks at Highlander Folk School, Monteagle, Tennessee, 1955. (Ida Berman photograph) Rosa Parks Papers, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (023.00.00)

1955 Aug 28 On a dare, 14-year-old Emmett Till, visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, flirts with a white woman in a general store. Later he is beaten to death by a group of men, including the woman’s husband. Soon after the two men tried for murdering Till are acquitted by a local jury, they sell a story to Look magazine in which they confess to the murder.

1955 Sep 3 Emmett Till’s mother, schoolteacher Mamie Till Bradley, insists on keeping Emmett’s casket open during his funeral, even though his face is so swollen and disfigured by the beating that he is unrecognizable: “Let the people see what I have seen. I think everybody needs to know what happened to Emmett Till.”

1955 Nov 7 In Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company the Interstate Commerce Commission outlaws segregation on interstate buses.

1955 Dec 1 Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. The next day JoAnn Robinson and other community activists make and distribute flyers encouraging the African-American community to boycott city buses.

1955 Dec 5 On the first day of the bus boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) is established. Members elect a young minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King, 26, as president.

1956 Jan 30 Dr. King’s home is bombed. Over the next two months, MIA attorneys file a federal suit challenging the constitutionality of segregated seating on public buses; a Grand Jury indicts 90 MIA members for breaking an anti-boycott law; Dr. King is convicted and fined $1,000. The MIA’s appeal draws nation-wide media attention.

1956 Mar The Southern Manifesto, opposing racial integration in public places, is signed by 101 Senators and Congressmen, all from Southern states. Refusing to sign are Senators Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver from Tennessee and Lyndon B. Johnson from Texas. Other Congressmen who elect not to sign are Representatives William C. Cramer and Dante Fascell of Florida; Richard Chatham, Harold D. Cooley, Charles Dean, and Charles R. Jonas of North Carolina; Howard Baker Sr., Ross Bass, Joe Evins, J. Percy Priest, and B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee; and seventeen members of the Texas delegation, including Speaker Sam Rayburn. Their decision to oppose the Southern Manifesto will cost several of these individuals any chance of reelection.

1956 Jun 5 A Federal court rules bus segregation unconstitutional. Montgomery city officials quickly appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the bus boycott continues, and city officials concentrate on finding a legal way to prohibit the MIA’s carpool system, a home-grown network of alternative transportation provided by drivers both black and white.

1956 Summer African-American tennis player Althea Gibson reaches the finals of the U.S. Open. She wins both singles and doubles in the French Open, becoming the first African American to win a Grand Slam tennis title.

1956 Aug 28 After 27 African-American students fail in their efforts to register in the all-white Little Rock city schools, the NAACP files a lawsuit on their behalf. On this date, Federal Judge John E. Miller dismisses the suit, stating that the Little Rock School Board has acted in “utmost good faith” in following its announced integration plan. Although the NAACP appeals, a higher court upholds Miller’s ruling. Meanwhile, during the same period of late summer, the city’s public buses are quietly desegregated.

1956 Fall Although Vanderbilt University Law School has enrolled Native American, Asian, and Hispanic students for decades, new students Frederick T. Work and Melvin Porter are the first African-Americans admitted to a private law school in the South. Both will graduate in 1959.

1956 Nov 13 In Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court upholds the lower court ruling finding Montgomery’s bus segregation unconstitutional. On December 20, U.S. marshals officially serve the Supreme Court order on Montgomery city officials.

*African American residents of Montgomery, Alabama,* *walk to work during the bus boycott.*

1956 Dec 21 The Montgomery bus boycott comes to a successful end. After 381 days and the combined efforts of 50,000 people, black residents of Montgomery are now free to choose any seat on city buses.

Adapted from a timeline created by Kathy B. Lauder for the TN State Library and Archives, 2013.

“With All Deliberate Speed”: The Desegregation of Cameron High School

by Kathy B. Lauder.

Nashville’s first public high school for African American students was the Meigs School, which opened as a grammar school in 1883 and accepted secondary students for the first time the fall of 1886. Eleven years later, in 1897, responding to rising student enrollment, the Board of Education moved all the city’s black high school students to the former Pearl Grammar School building, built in 1883 at 217 5^th Ave. S (across from today’s Country Music Hall of Fame), creating Pearl High School, which remained at that location until its move to 16^th Ave. N. in 1917.

The 5^th Avenue building remained vacant until the fall of 1924, when it reopened as Pearl Junior High, serving grades 1-9. Four years later, on November 26, 1928, the School Board voted to change the school’s name to Cameron Junior High School, in honor of Professor H. A. Cameron.

Henry Alvin Cameron was one of eleven African American soldiers from Davidson County to die in World War I. Before enlisting at age 45, Cameron had worked as a science teacher and coach at Pearl High School, taking a leave of absence from teaching in 1917 to volunteer for service in the war. One of only twelve black soldiers from Tennessee accepted into the officer training program at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, Cameron was among the 1.2 million American soldiers who participated in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in the autumn of 1918. He died twelve days before the end of the war at Châtel-Chéhéry, not far from where Sgt. Alvin York had earned the Medal of Honor for courage under fire three weeks earlier.

Cameron was the fourth public school in Nashville to be named for an African American. The others were Carter School (1897), named for Nashville teacher Howard Carter (and becoming the Carter-Lawrence School after a 1940 merger); Napier School (1898), named for Henry Alonzo Napier, a Nashville school principal who had studied at West Point; and Nelson Merry School (date unknown), honoring Nashville’s first African-American ordained minister.

The original Cameron school building was a two-story brick structure. It lacked indoor plumbing, heated its classrooms by means of a scattering of stoves and grates throughout the building, and was seriously overcrowded — designed for 800 students, it typically housed 1,000 and had a lengthy waiting list. Elementary classrooms were located on the first floor; grades 7-9 met on the second.

*Cameron School building on First Ave. S. and Lafayette St. (photo by Andrew Jameson*)

In 1940 Cameron School moved to First Ave. S., occupying a building designed by Henry Clossen Hibbs, a celebrated architect who also designed Nashville’s NES building, along with structures at Fisk, Vanderbilt, Peabody, Scarritt, Belmont, and Meharry. This four-story facility, set on a 7-acre campus, featured 23 classrooms, two office suites, a large library, three home economics rooms, two science laboratories, a clinic, a cafeteria, and a teachers’ lounge.

Under the leadership of Principal John C. Hull, Cameron became a senior high school in the fall of 1955, when its elementary grades (1-6) moved into the newly constructed Johnson Elementary School (named for a former principal) on 2^nd Avenue South. Hull oversaw the construction of a boys’ gym, an auditorium, band and chorus rooms, and a stadium. Cameron High School’s first senior class graduated in June 1957.

In 1958 Oscar Jackson, a TSU alumnus with a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina, became principal of Cameron High School. Jackson was still principal at Cameron in 1968, the year the school’s athletic program was suspended, setting off a legal battle that would continue for more than three years and would ultimately cost Oscar Jackson his health. Jackson and his staff fought the suspension in both the courtroom and the media as the battle merged with efforts to end segregation in the Nashville schools. By late summer 1970 the beloved principal, exhausted and in poor health, retired after twelve years at the helm of the school. James M. Robinson replaced Jackson, but only for a year. The battle for full school integration was nearly over.

Despite the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education declaring public school segregation unconstitutional, and the Court’s subsequent decree (1955) that integration proceed “with all deliberate speed,” Cameron High School’s student body was still entirely black in 1968 when the Metro school board and the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association suspended the school’s athletic program for a full year after a basketball tournament fracas. Cameron parents and their supporters, represented by attorney Avon N. Williams Jr., claimed that the suspension was racially motivated and also insisted that city schools should be made to conform to constitutional integration requirements. In 1971, after a federal judge ordered busing to resolve racial segregation, many white parents withdrew their children from the public schools, and private schools sprang up all over town¹. Nevertheless, desegregation was finally winding down. In June 1971 the last all-black senior class graduated from Cameron High. Beginning that fall, Cameron students were bused to McGavock Comprehensive High School² in Donelson. McGavock, which opened in 1971, initially served students in grades ten through twelve who had previously attended Cameron, Donelson and Two Rivers high schools; the school added ninth grade in 1978. Cameron became an integrated junior high school, and in 1978 pioneered Nashville’s first middle school program.

The Cameron School has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2006, and has also been designated by the Metro Nashville Historical Commission as part of a Historic Landmark District. (2021)

McGavock High School football players, fall 2021 (photo by Caryn Scherm Hill)

Adapted from the Greenwood Project.

¹ Nashville schools that opened in the early 1970s:

McGavock Comprehensive High School (public), Donelson, initially served students in grades 10-12 who had previously attended Cameron, Donelson and Two Rivers high schools; the school opened its doors in 1971;
Brentwood Academy (private), Granny White Pike, Brentwood, was chartered 20 Nov 1969 and opened September 1970;
Donelson Christian Academy (private), Donelson, founded in 1971;
Ezell-Harding Christian School (private), Bell Road, Antioch – parents began meeting about establishing the school in 1971-72; school’s first year of operation was 1973-74;
Franklin Road Academy (private), 4700 Franklin Pike, founded in 1971;
Goodpasture Christian School (private), Madison, opened to grades 7-11 in Sep 1971, adding grade 12 by fall 1972; the former East Nashville Christian School, it had opened to grades 1-6 in 1966;
Nashville Christian School (private), 7555 Sawyer Brown Rd., opened 20 Sep 1971;
St. Paul Christian Academy (private), 5033 Hillsboro Pike, opened Sep 1971 for students in grades K-6. The school added grades, 7, 8, and 9 by 1975 but phased them out by 1981 to focus on elementary education.

McGavock High School facts:

Largest high school in Tennessee in physical size – just under 500,000 square feet; its main building covers 14 acres;
First high school in Nashville to combine an academic program with extensive vocational training;
Its impressive marching band has won the state championship 25 times and has performed at the Tournament of Roses Parade, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Orange Bowl Parade, and other nationally televised events; the National Band Association has recognized it as one of the Ten Finest Bands in the U.S.

The story of the battle for integration at Cameron High School is told in The Past Is Prologue: Cameron Class of 1969, a documentary film by Mark Schlicher, and in this Nashville Scene article.

School Desegregation in Nashville

by James Summerville.

The 1896 Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, upheld the constitutionality of social segregation, ruling that state laws which required the separation of the races did not imply the inferiority of either. Yet separate was not equal in Tennessee. A 1930 study of Nashville schools called attention to dilapidated buildings, unsanitary outhouses, and inadequate lighting. Twenty years later, some black students still had to walk half a mile for a drink of water.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court reversed Plessy, which had been used by many states to justify public segregation. Brown v. Board of Education held that “separate educational facilities” were “inherently unequal” because segregation denied black students equal protection under the law, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. A year later, the high court issued its implementation order, directing district federal courts to bring about compliance with the Brown decision. This was to be accomplished “with all deliberate speed,” an oxymoron which suggested that lower courts could show flexibility.

Nashville’s Board of Education appointed a committee to consider its options. Matters would have lingered in committee forever except for the lawsuit filed by Alfred Z. Kelley, an East Nashville barber. Kelley could not see why his son Robert had to commute across town to Pearl High School when the family lived within walking distance of East High School. The simple answer was that East was all white, and the Kelleys were black.

Lawyer Z. Alexander Looby and his partner Avon Williams Jr. carried Kelley v. Board of Education into federal district court. In time, Judge William E. Miller found for the plaintiff and directed the school board to prepare a plan for desegregation and submit it to the court by January 1957.

Z. A. Looby’s grave in Greenwood Cemetery

The educators stressed “deliberate” rather than “speed” and proposed that one grade per year be integrated, beginning with the first grade that next fall. At the same time, their plan allowed parents of either race to transfer a child out of a school where the other race predominated. In their final act, the board redrew the bounds of school zones so that only about 115 black first-graders, out of 1,500 eligible, could enter all-white schools come September.

Despite its novel evasions, the school board had acceded to the Brown decision. Diehards were left with unpalatable choices: resistance in public protests or keeping their children out of school.

Some black parents, worried about segregationists’ threats, took advantage of the school board’s transfer privilege. In the end, the burden of bringing down Jim Crow in public education in Nashville fell on 19 boys and girls. Twelve of them and their parents arrived at six elementary schools on the morning of September 9, 1957. So did knots of jeering white adults and teenagers. Police escorted the youngsters safely inside, but the day passed uneasily.

A few minutes after midnight, a bomb demolished a wing of East Nashville’s Hattie Cotton School. The police cracked down on persons carrying weapons, and jailed an agitator, John Kaspar, who had come to town to promote resistance to school desegregation.

*Photo of schoolchildren from NHN collection*

The handful of black youngsters who brought down the “walls of Jericho” adapted well, as did their white peers. Ironically, militants like Kaspar led the city to declare itself a peaceful, law-abiding community. Although support for the idea of racial equality was equivocal, the issue was now public order, for which there was universal support. The number of black students in formerly all-white schools grew from a few in 1957 to more than 700 by 1963. This was hardly a social revolution, but it did preface the gradual acceptance by Nashville parents, black and white, that the old days of separate and unequal schools were finished.