Pearl High School – Nashville Historical Newsletter

Nashvillians Who Stood behind the Sit-ins: C. The Quiet Allies

by Kathy B. Lauder.

We would be remiss if we neglected to mention some of the quiet heroes who provided support to the protests with their time, money, and encouragement. Among the most generous were two Nashville couples – Dr. Charles and Mary Celeste Richardson Walker, and Dr. McDonald and Jamye Coleman Williams.

Georgia native Charles Julian Walker (1912-1997) earned his M.D. from Meharry in 1943 and opened a medical office in Nashville four years later. So devoted was he to his practice, he once agreed to see a patient when he was hospitalized himself! Deeply committed to the civil rights movement, he worked tirelessly behind the scenes, pressuring local leaders to take immediate action after the bombings of Hattie Cotton School (1957) and the Looby home (1960). He and his wife also quietly posted bail for many of the students arrested during the sit-ins. Walker served briefly in the Tennessee House after being appointed to fill a vacancy in his district, and he was a Fisk University trustee during the 1970s, encouraging the university to become more accountable to the community. According to his longtime friend, Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice Adolpho A. Birch, he was “fierce” and relentless in urging politicians and businessmen to invest in struggling low-income communities and to expand and diversify the work force. An outspoken champion of prison reform, he was a tireless advocate for prisoners’ rights. Although Dr. Walker was known for his energy and optimism, the loss of his beloved wife Mary in 1994 sent him into a downward spiral from which he never fully recovered.

*Nashville student protestors crammed into jail cells.* (*Photo courtesy of Civil Rights Movement Archive)*

Mary Celeste Richardson Walker (1910-1994) demonstrated a lifelong concern for social justice. Her parents divorced when she was a toddler, and she grew up in the home of her grandparents, Fire Captain Reuben B. Richardson and his wife. She attended Nashville city schools and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Fisk University. When Dr. C.J. Walker met her in early 1942, he was immediately smitten. The Meharry graduate promptly proposed, and the couple married, as Walker liked to say, “five weeks after I first laid eyes on her.” That fall Mary began a 30-year career teaching English at Pearl High School, where she earned a reputation for being tough but fair, showing particular concern for disadvantaged and at-risk students. She and her husband shared a strong commitment to supporting the young civil rights demonstrators in Nashville, providing generous financial and moral support to the movement. Shortly after Mary retired from teaching, Governor Lamar Alexander appointed her to the state parole board, where her even-handed approach to the situations they faced won the profound respect of both inmates and judicial authorities. A member of Church Women United, educational advisory boards, and other civic organizations, she was a trustee of Scarritt College, as well as a lifetime member of the NAACP.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McDonald Williams (1917-2019) came to Nashville with his wife Jamye Coleman Williams in 1958, he as an English professor specializing in 19^th century English literature, and she as chair of the Tennessee State University Communications Department. When TSU initiated its Honors Program in 1964, Mac Williams was appointed director, serving in that position until his retirement in 1988. Together the couple edited the A.M.E. Church Review and The Negro Speaks: The Rhetoric of Contemporary Black Leaders, and they provided valuable support to Nashville’s civil rights activities. The Williamses received many awards for their service, including the Otis L. Floyd Jr. Award from Saint Bernard Academy, the Joe Kraft Humanitarian Award from the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, and the Human Relations Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In 1995 a room in the newly remodeled Northwest YMCA building was dedicated to Dr. Williams, a longtime board member. He died in Atlanta at age 101.

*Jayme Coleman Williams with husband Mac* (*photo courtesy of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee*)

The daughter of a Kentucky minister, Jayme Coleman (1918-2022) earned a B.A. with honors from Wilberforce University at age 19 and an M.A. from Fisk the following year. She taught English at Wilberforce and three other HBCUs before earning a doctorate in speech communications at Ohio State University. In 1959 she began teaching at Tennessee State University, and she was named department head in 1973. She and her husband, educator McDonald Williams, were valuable organizers and supporters of the Nashville sit-in movement, later playing an active role in the development of the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, where their efforts earned them the Joe Kraft Humanitarian Award of the CFMT in 2002. A lifelong member of the A.M.E. Church, Jamye Williams was a member of the board of the United Council of Churches, president of the 13^th District Lay Organization, and editor of the AME Church Review, the oldest African American literary journal. A member of the NAACP Executive Committee, she received the organization’s Presidential Award in 1999. She lived to be 103 years old.

You might enjoy these two short video clips of an interview with McDonald and Jamye Coleman Williams: A. and B.

Some of this material has been adapted from the Greenwood Project.

Important books about the Civil Rights Movement in Nashville:

John Egerton: Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award)
David Halberstam: The Children
John Lewis: Walking with the Wind
Bobby L. Lovett: The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee

Nashville-Tuskegee Ties, Part I: Medicine, Music, & Architecture

by Kathy B. Lauder.

Nashvillians have built some important connections with Tuskegee, Alabama, over the years, primarily in the fields of education, medicine, music, and the military.

*Dr. Halley Tanner Dillon Johnson (1864-1901)*

Booker T. Washington hired Dr. Halley Tanner Dillon (1864-1901) to be resident physician at Tuskegee Institute in 1891. After passing the state’s challenging medical exam, Dillon became the first woman, black or white, to practice medicine in Alabama. At Tuskegee she taught several classes, supervised the infirmary, established a dispensary where she mixed her own medicines, and founded a nursing school. She returned to Nashville after marrying Pastor John Quincy Johnson in 1894. When she died in childbirth at age 36, her death certificate listed her profession as “housekeeper.”

Dr. John Henry Hale (1878-1944), a member of the Meharry faculty for nearly 40 years, was chairman of the Department of Surgery (performing more than 30,000 operations) as well as associate director of the Tumor Clinic, while also serving as head surgeon at Nashville’s Millie E. Hale Hospital. President (1935) of the National Medical Association, he was a longtime patron of the Tuskegee Institute and oversaw the Surgical Clinics there.

Dr. John Christopher Ashhurst (1908-1995), a native of British Guyana, served as chief pathologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, before moving to Nashville in the mid-1960s to become head of surgical pathology at Meharry Medical College, while at the same time serving as the county medical examiner.

Thomas W. Talley (1870-1952), acknowledged as Tennessee’s first African American folklorist, began collecting folk songs about 1900 and published a collection, Negro Folk Rhymes, in 1922, a decade before Lomax and Niles. A Fisk graduate who later taught chemistry and choral music at his alma mater, Talley had previously taught at Tuskegee Institute (1900-1903).

Marcus H. Gunter (1918-2003) earned a degree in music at Tuskegee Institute. During college he performed with the Tuskegee Melody Barons, a popular dance band, and he later studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. During World War II, Gunter, a warrant officer, was director of the 41^st Engineers Band in France. In 1947 he began a 39-year teaching career as music teacher and band director at Pearl High School. After retiring from his teaching career, he became owner and director of a Nashville funeral home.

Daughter of a Philadelphia longshoreman, Dorothy Coley Edmond (1927-2006) attended Fisk University, then earning a nursing degree from Meharry Medical College, a master’s degree from Columbia University, and an Ed.D. from Peabody College. She worked as a nursing instructor at Tuskegee Institute before marrying and returning to Nashville, where she established the School of Nursing at Tennessee State University. She is believed to be the first African American registered nurse ever to become a member of the Tennessee Nurses Association.

Born in Pulaski, Tennessee, Moses McKissack III (1879-1952) was the grandson of a slave who passed on his skills as a “master builder” to his descendants. As a teenager, Moses was hired by a local contractor to create designs and drawings for a Pulaski construction business. From 1895-1905 the youngster oversaw building crews in Tennessee and Alabama before moving to Nashville, where he and his brother Calvin opened their own firm –Among their first projects were Fisk University’s Carnegie Library and the residence of Vanderbilt’s dean of architecture and engineering. Later projects included Pearl High School and the TSU Memorial Library, as well as many other schools, homes, churches, and office buildings throughout the South. Now based in New York City and Washington, D.C., McKissack & McKissack remains the oldest minority-owned architectural engineering company in the U.S.

Like his older brother Moses, Fisk University graduate Calvin McKissack (1890-1968) earned his architecture degree through a correspondence course and from lessons passed down by their grandfather. Not long after they opened their Nashville firm (1905), Calvin started a satellite company in Dallas. However, he eventually returned to Nashville to teach industrial drawing at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School (now Tennessee State University), which had opened in June 1912. Six years later he was hired to be director of Pearl High School’s industrial arts department, and he presently became executive secretary of the Tennessee State Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. When the state enacted a law requiring architects to be registered (1921), the McKissacks were nearly banned from taking the licensing examination because of their race. State administrators eventually conceded, evidently assuming neither brother would be able to pass, but when the authorities continued to dither after both men sailed through the exam, the national media took up the story . . . whereupon the McKissack brothers promptly received their licenses, and their company officially became Tennessee’s first professional African American architectural firm. Their $5.7 million contract (1942) to design and build the 99^th Pursuit Squadron Air Base in Tuskegee, Alabama, was the largest federal contract ever granted to an African American firm up to that time. The base was the home of the Tuskegee Airmen, African American fighter pilots who would gain the admiration of the entire world for their skill and courage in combat. Moses McKissack, whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed to the White House Conference on Housing Problems, continued to head the firm until his death in 1952. His brother Calvin succeeded him, handing the reins to Moses’s son, William DeBerry McKissack, in 1968.

Learn more about the Tuskegee Airmen in “Nashville-Tuskegee Connections, Part II.”

Some of this material has been adapted from the Greenwood Project.

Nashville Coaches Who Made a Difference

by Kathy B. Lauder.

“A good coach can change a game. A great coach can change a life.” John Wooden

WALTER STROTHER DAVIS (August 9, 1905 – October 17, 1979) was born in Canton, Mississippi. After receiving a B.S. from Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State University), he earned his M.S. (1933) and Ph.D. (1941) from Cornell University. Before completing his doctorate, Davis was employed by TSU in 1933 as head football coach and professor of agriculture. Within ten years he had earned his Ph.D. and was elected the school’s second president, serving in that role for twenty-five years (1943-1968). Under his leadership, university enrollment grew from 1,000-6,000 students. During that same period the school gained university status (1951), constructed 24 new buildings, and established six new schools: Arts & Sciences, Education, Engineering, Agriculture, Home Economics, and a graduate school. In 1958 TSU achieved land-grant status and was also awarded accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Davis proved his commitment to athletic excellence by hiring superior football coaches like John Merritt and Joe Gilliam Sr., along with other great leaders. Davis retired in 1968 and was named to the TSU Hall of Fame in 1983.

Another notable achiever Walter S. Davis brought to Tennessee State University was legendary track coach ED TEMPLE, whose talents attracted dozens of stellar athletes to the school. Temple headed the TSU women’s track and field program for 44 years, during which time his Tigerbelles won 23 Olympic medals. Among the 40 Olympic athletes Temple trained were gold medalists Wilma Rudolph (1960 – a former polio patient who became the first American woman to win three gold medals in the same Olympics), Wyomia Tyus (1964 & 1968 – the first person, male or female, to retain the Olympic 100-meter title), and Ralph Boston (1960 – the first man to top 27 feet in the long jump). In addition to their international successes, Ed Temple’s athletes held over 30 national titles. The U.S. Olympic Committee called him “the most prolific women’s track and field coach in the history of the sport.”

JOHN AYERS MERRITT (January 26, 1926 – December 15, 1983) was a Kentucky native who moved in with an aunt in order to play football at Louisville’s Central High School. After graduation he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, but when he returned, he won a football scholarship to Kentucky State College. He graduated in 1950 and went on to graduate school at the University of Kentucky, earning his M.A. in 1952. Merritt spent ten years coaching football at Mississippi’s Jackson State University (1952-1962) before Walter S. Davis hired him to be head football coach at Tennessee State University. He moved to Nashville in 1963, bringing along his talented assistants, Joe Gilliam Sr. and Alvin Coleman. Merritt’s career included thirty straight winning seasons, four undefeated seasons, and an NCAA 1-AA playoff victory in 1982. By the time ill health led to his retirement at the end of the 1982-1983 season, he had amassed a cumulative coaching record of 233-67-11. During his long career he coached 23 future NFL players, including six who played on Super Bowl teams. He died less than a year after retiring and in 1994 was inducted posthumously into the College Football Hall of Fame. In 1995 Merritt received the American Football Coaches Association’s Amos Alonzo Stagg Award, presented annually to an “individual, group, or institution whose services have been outstanding in the advancement of the best interests of football.”

John Merritt’s able assistant, JOSEPH W. “COACH” GILLIAM SR. (March 26, 1927 – November 14, 2012) had been an All-American quarterback at West Virginia State University. After graduation he coached football and basketball at Oliver High School in Winchester, Kentucky (1952-1954), leading them to a state football championship in 1954 and winning the title of Kentucky High School Football Association Coach of the Year. The following year he joined John A. Merritt’s coaching staff at Jackson State in Mississippi, where the team won a national championship. Gilliam left Mississippi in 1957 to become head coach at Kentucky State, but, having compiled a fairly unimpressive record there, he soon followed Merritt to Tennessee State (1963) as defensive coordinator. During the next 20 years the Merritt-Gilliam combo led the Tigers to four undefeated seasons and seven national titles. Gilliam himself served as head coach at TSU from 1989-1992 and was named Ohio Valley Conference Coach of the Year in 1990. He was inducted into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame in 2007. His son, “Jefferson Street Joe” Gilliam (1950-2000) was the starting quarterback at Pearl High School during Nashville’s first season of integrated football. He developed into a football standout at Tennessee State University, was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1972, and, after taking the field as starting quarterback in the first six games of the 1974 season, gained recognition as one of the first black quarterbacks ever to start an NFL game.

RONALD R. “Scat” LAWSON SR. (April 26, 1941 – February 6, 2002) was the son of James R. Lawson, Fisk University president from 1967 to 1975, and Lillian Arceneaux Lawson. Young Ronnie attended Father Ryan High School his freshman year (1956-57), but, because its athletic teams were not yet integrated, transferred to Pearl High School in 1957 in order to play basketball under Coach William Gupton. The Pearl Tigers won the Black National High School Championship Lawson’s junior and senior years. Offered basketball scholarships to several universities, Lawson chose UCLA in order to play for Coach John Wooden. The youngster set freshman scoring and rebounding records that stood for six years (until they were broken by freshman Lou Alcindor, better known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and he was named Honorable Mention All-American his sophomore year. In 1962 he transferred to Fisk, earning his B.A in 1963 and his M.A. in 1966. Lawson was hired as head coach of Cameron High School in 1964, while its student body was still entirely African American. He led the school to state championships in 1970 and 1971, with a 61-1 two-season record. After Cameron closed in 1971 and its students were sent to McGavock High School in Donelson, Lawson served as head coach of the Fisk men’s basketball program. He was a 2004 selection of the TSSAA Hall of Fame.

JELANI KHALIB OVERTON (December 11, 1980 – November 15, 2008) first appeared in local sports pages (1994) as one of Joelton’s eighth-grade football “players to watch” By 1998 he had earned area-wide recognition as an All-Region Football offensive lineman. Graduating from Whites Creek High School (1999), he enrolled at Tennessee State University, where he played football, earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and even taught a few courses himself. His first job working for Metro Schools was to teach physical education at Napier Elementary School. A short time later he began coaching football, first at Stratford High School and then at Hillwood, where he became a beloved member of the school community. Other Nashvillians got to know the generous and supportive young man through his part-time job at the Northwest YMCA. In March 2008 Jelani’s students and friends were horrified to learn that he had been diagnosed with cancer. The disease took him quickly: only 27 years old, he died eight months after his diagnosis. Hillwood High School, devastated by his loss, named its annual senior athletic retreat in his honor. But even more gratifying were the memorial tributes from his players, whose lives he had clearly touched very deeply: “You were the greatest coach, mentor, and friend I could ever ask for” . . . “I’m doing my best to make you proud” . . . “I thought about what you said and I didn’t drop out I stayd in school” . . . “Im gon keep you alive by doin the right thing.”

Adapted from essays in the Greenwood Project.

“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.