Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville
John Egerton, Nashville, Tennessee
Abstract:
In September 1957, three years after the U. S. Supreme Court declared school segregation laws unconstitutional, the public schools of Nashville, Tennessee, implemented a "stairstep plan" that began with a select group of first-graders and added one grade a year until all twelve grades were desegregated. Nineteen black first-graders enrolled in eight previously all-white schools. Organized white protesters, led by John Kasper, appeared at most of the schools, but there was no violence.
The night after desegregation began, a dynamite explosion destroyed a wing of Hattie Cotton Elementary School, where one black child had enrolled. The violent incident broke the back of the protest movement, and no further demonstrations marked the ensuing days as desegregation proceeded. |
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Grace
McKinley takes Rita Buchanan and Linda McKinley to school among protesters,
Nashville, TN, September 1957.
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Essay Sections:
Introduction | Brown Comes to Tennessee | The Nashville Plan | Resistance and Resolve | September 9 |
The Witching Hour | The Turning Point | A Long Road Ahead |Appendices | Recommended Resources
The Witching Hour | The Turning Point | A Long Road Ahead |Appendices | Recommended Resources
Introduction:
At high noon, Nashville time, on Monday, May 17, 1954,
all nine justices of the United States Supreme Court in Washington joined
in a declaration that legally-sanctioned racial segregation in the public
schools is a violation of the U.S. Constitution's promise of equal protection
of the laws. The unanimous decision, covering five consolidated cases known
collectively as Brown
v. Board of Education (for plaintiff Oliver Brown and his daughter Linda
of Topeka, Kansas), was to have enormous consequences in eleven southern
states, where compulsory separation of the races carried the dual sanctions
of law and social custom, as well as in ten other "border" states and the District
of Columbia, where an inconsistent mish-mash of segregation laws remained
in place. Eventually, public education systems throughout the country would
be affected by the historic ruling.
It could be persuasively argued that Brown was the most important legal principle to be shaped by the Supreme Court in the twentieth century, because it ended for all time an unarticulated presumption that some Americans were more (or less) entitled to the legal rights of citizenship than others. Not just students seeking quality and equality in education, but citizens pursuing fair treatment in all walks of life have benefited from the court's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in Brown v. Board of Education.
Within hours of the 1954 decision, two Nashville attorneys representing the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) formally asked the city's Board of Education to end segregation forthwith. Z. Alexander Looby, the chief NAACP attorney in Tennessee and one of two black members of the Nashville City Council, had been practicing law in the city for more than twenty-five years. His young associate, Avon N. Williams Jr., would later become Tennessee's top civil rights lawyer and a standout state senator. They worked closely on racial discrimination cases with Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP's national legal director and lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Brown, who later to became a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Practically speaking, there were four public school systems in the Nashville metropolitan area in 1954: separate but overlapping districts for whites and blacks in the city proper, under Superintendent W. A. Bass, and similarly split districts in surrounding Davidson County, under Superintendent J. E. Moss. In round numbers, there were about ten thousand black students and twenty thousand whites in the city schools; enrollment in the county system was also about thirty thousand, and ninety percent were white. The city's overall population at mid-decade was estimated to be about 175,000 (eighty percent white) and falling; the county was near 150,000 and rising, and soon would be the larger of the two systems.
In each of the school systems, every facility that served blacks was clearly separate, but no fair-minded person would have called any of them equal to the schools reserved for whites. By almost any measure save one — the dedication of teachers — whites enjoyed special advantages: better buildings and equipment, newer textbooks, higher levels of teacher training, smaller pupil-teacher ratios, closer administrative and school board oversight.
It could be persuasively argued that Brown was the most important legal principle to be shaped by the Supreme Court in the twentieth century, because it ended for all time an unarticulated presumption that some Americans were more (or less) entitled to the legal rights of citizenship than others. Not just students seeking quality and equality in education, but citizens pursuing fair treatment in all walks of life have benefited from the court's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in Brown v. Board of Education.
Within hours of the 1954 decision, two Nashville attorneys representing the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) formally asked the city's Board of Education to end segregation forthwith. Z. Alexander Looby, the chief NAACP attorney in Tennessee and one of two black members of the Nashville City Council, had been practicing law in the city for more than twenty-five years. His young associate, Avon N. Williams Jr., would later become Tennessee's top civil rights lawyer and a standout state senator. They worked closely on racial discrimination cases with Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP's national legal director and lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Brown, who later to became a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Practically speaking, there were four public school systems in the Nashville metropolitan area in 1954: separate but overlapping districts for whites and blacks in the city proper, under Superintendent W. A. Bass, and similarly split districts in surrounding Davidson County, under Superintendent J. E. Moss. In round numbers, there were about ten thousand black students and twenty thousand whites in the city schools; enrollment in the county system was also about thirty thousand, and ninety percent were white. The city's overall population at mid-decade was estimated to be about 175,000 (eighty percent white) and falling; the county was near 150,000 and rising, and soon would be the larger of the two systems.
In each of the school systems, every facility that served blacks was clearly separate, but no fair-minded person would have called any of them equal to the schools reserved for whites. By almost any measure save one — the dedication of teachers — whites enjoyed special advantages: better buildings and equipment, newer textbooks, higher levels of teacher training, smaller pupil-teacher ratios, closer administrative and school board oversight.
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The superintendents told Looby and Williams that they would study the Supreme Court ruling and await further instructions promised by the court. Nashville Mayor Ben West also wanted more time to digest the decision, but he offered a conciliatory response. "Our people are law-abiding citizens," he said. "We have no other thought except to conform to the law of the land." County Judge Beverly Briley expressed confidence that any problems brought about by the decision could be worked out in due course at the local level. |
Protesters
in the street on the day Nashville schools were desegregated,
Nashville, TN, September 1957 |
As the summer of 1954 passed, it became increasingly clear that no desegregation would take place in Nashville's public schools that fall. (The city's several Catholic schools did remove their racial barriers to admissions at that time, though, under a decree signed by the local bishop, and the demonstration school at George Peabody College for Teachers also desegregated promptly, but no other private schools followed suit.) A biracial and advisory Citizens Committee for Public Schools was formed, and various religious, educational, and civic groups expressed public support for the principle of equity. In late summer, two white professors at historically black Fisk University, the only unsegregated liberal arts college in the city, asked the school board to permit their children to enroll at black schools near the campus, but the board denied the request, saying that no cross-racial transfers would be approved until the Supreme Court issued more instructions.
Near the end of May, 1955, in a follow-up ruling that would be known as "Brown II," the Supreme Court gave school districts some latitude to work out their desegregation plans locally, "with all deliberate speed," under supervision of the federal district courts. The NAACP attorneys promptly petitioned Nashville's school officials to begin the desegregation process, but again, the Board of Education took no formal action. On the first day of the new term that fall, several black students attempted to enroll in white schools near their homes, but all were refused admission.
Soon thereafter, on September 23, 1955, Looby, Williams, and Marshall filed suit against the Nashville city schools on behalf of twenty-one African-American children, one of whom was fourteen-year-old Robert W. Kelley, who had been turned away from East High School. His father, A. Z. Kelley, a barber, agreed to be listed as the lead plaintiff, so the case was named Kelley v. Board of Education. (By historical coincidence, this action came a hundred years after the opening of Nashville's first public school, Hume High and Grammar School, for white boys and girls, in September 1855; Trimble, the city's first school for blacks, was opened in 1870, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.)
After hearing the complaint from the NAACP lawyers and the schoolboard's plea for more time, Federal District Court Judge William E. Miller gave the schools six more months to draw up a plan that would comply with the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees. Then, in March of 1956, the school board offered for discussion a tentative plan that would begin desegregation in the first grade the following fall. The plaintiffs' attorneys responded by agreeing to the plan if the entire process could be completed within a fixed period — say, five years, as the Evansville, Indiana, school system had done in 1949-54 — but the Nashville board wanted a slower pace of one grade a year. With the two sides at an impasse, Judge Miller scheduled another hearing for later in the summer.
Emboldened by such delays in Nashville and elsewhere, segregationists were stepping up their opposition across the South. In the spring of 1956, nineteen of the twenty-two southern members of the U.S. Senate (excepting only Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr.) signed a manifesto in defiance of the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings. State legislatures from Virginia to Texas passed a flurry of new laws aimed at tightening restrictions on black rights and shoring up the walls of white privilege. That fall, in a few upper-South communities, modest steps toward ending segregation were met with fierce resistance. The fight to preserve white supremacy was like a gathering storm that would eventually engulf the entire South. Tennessee, no less than the others, was bound to be caught in it.
The state legislature flirted with repeal of its compulsory school attendance laws, even though Governor Frank Clement warned that he would veto any such move. Prominent officials from the more openly rebellious Deep South states came to make fiery speeches in Nashville, exhorting Caucasians to rise up and defend their racial privileges at all costs. Units of the Ku Klux Klan and the newly-formed White Citizens' Council, a sort of white-collar Klan then springing up across the South, held well-publicized meetings in the city. In the forefront of opposition groups locally was the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government (TFCG), about which little was known except that it had close ties to the White Citizens' Council. Its chairman was a famed Vanderbilt University writer and English professor, Donald Davidson.
Near the end of May, 1955, in a follow-up ruling that would be known as "Brown II," the Supreme Court gave school districts some latitude to work out their desegregation plans locally, "with all deliberate speed," under supervision of the federal district courts. The NAACP attorneys promptly petitioned Nashville's school officials to begin the desegregation process, but again, the Board of Education took no formal action. On the first day of the new term that fall, several black students attempted to enroll in white schools near their homes, but all were refused admission.
Soon thereafter, on September 23, 1955, Looby, Williams, and Marshall filed suit against the Nashville city schools on behalf of twenty-one African-American children, one of whom was fourteen-year-old Robert W. Kelley, who had been turned away from East High School. His father, A. Z. Kelley, a barber, agreed to be listed as the lead plaintiff, so the case was named Kelley v. Board of Education. (By historical coincidence, this action came a hundred years after the opening of Nashville's first public school, Hume High and Grammar School, for white boys and girls, in September 1855; Trimble, the city's first school for blacks, was opened in 1870, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.)
After hearing the complaint from the NAACP lawyers and the schoolboard's plea for more time, Federal District Court Judge William E. Miller gave the schools six more months to draw up a plan that would comply with the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees. Then, in March of 1956, the school board offered for discussion a tentative plan that would begin desegregation in the first grade the following fall. The plaintiffs' attorneys responded by agreeing to the plan if the entire process could be completed within a fixed period — say, five years, as the Evansville, Indiana, school system had done in 1949-54 — but the Nashville board wanted a slower pace of one grade a year. With the two sides at an impasse, Judge Miller scheduled another hearing for later in the summer.
Emboldened by such delays in Nashville and elsewhere, segregationists were stepping up their opposition across the South. In the spring of 1956, nineteen of the twenty-two southern members of the U.S. Senate (excepting only Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr.) signed a manifesto in defiance of the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings. State legislatures from Virginia to Texas passed a flurry of new laws aimed at tightening restrictions on black rights and shoring up the walls of white privilege. That fall, in a few upper-South communities, modest steps toward ending segregation were met with fierce resistance. The fight to preserve white supremacy was like a gathering storm that would eventually engulf the entire South. Tennessee, no less than the others, was bound to be caught in it.
The state legislature flirted with repeal of its compulsory school attendance laws, even though Governor Frank Clement warned that he would veto any such move. Prominent officials from the more openly rebellious Deep South states came to make fiery speeches in Nashville, exhorting Caucasians to rise up and defend their racial privileges at all costs. Units of the Ku Klux Klan and the newly-formed White Citizens' Council, a sort of white-collar Klan then springing up across the South, held well-publicized meetings in the city. In the forefront of opposition groups locally was the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government (TFCG), about which little was known except that it had close ties to the White Citizens' Council. Its chairman was a famed Vanderbilt University writer and English professor, Donald Davidson.
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The local lines of division in this intensifying national debate were sharply drawn at a public hearing before the Nashville School Board in early March of 1956. An overflow crowd of intensely interested citizens (racially mixed), was told at the outset that the nine-member board had already decided it would not offer any specific desegregation plan at an upcoming hearing on the pending lawsuit in federal district court.
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People crowd the room at a Nashville School Board hearing on desegregation, Nashville, TN, March 1956.
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That stance was immediately endorsed from the floor by TFCG chairman Davidson, who asserted that under the doctrine of "states' rights," neither the school board nor the federal courts had any legal authority to override the Tennessee legislature's standing laws requiring strict segregation of the races. If such "defiant actions" were to be attempted, Davidson warned, "The capital city of Tennessee would become an uneasy island of integration surrounded by a tumultuous ocean of protest and discontent."
But others of local prominence urged the board to move toward change. Attorney Whitworth Stokes, president of the Citizens Committee for Public Schools, said "a host of moderate-thinking people . . . will applaud you if you adopt this plan" of gradual desegregation beginning with the first grade. Another Vanderbilt professor, John Compton, said the question before the board was not whether but when to implement the order of the Supreme Court, "as a matter of justice that has been decided." No members of the school board offered any public response to the speakers.
A week later, in federal court, the board formally appealed for more time to study and prepare for orderly change. Over the objections of the plaintiffs, the court granted the request, which meant that another school year would begin without the first step being taken to desegregate the system. Seeing this third straight year of delay as a major victory, the fired-up opponents of desegregation celebrated with a motorcade through Nashville accented by blaring horns, Confederate flags, and signs reading:
But others of local prominence urged the board to move toward change. Attorney Whitworth Stokes, president of the Citizens Committee for Public Schools, said "a host of moderate-thinking people . . . will applaud you if you adopt this plan" of gradual desegregation beginning with the first grade. Another Vanderbilt professor, John Compton, said the question before the board was not whether but when to implement the order of the Supreme Court, "as a matter of justice that has been decided." No members of the school board offered any public response to the speakers.
A week later, in federal court, the board formally appealed for more time to study and prepare for orderly change. Over the objections of the plaintiffs, the court granted the request, which meant that another school year would begin without the first step being taken to desegregate the system. Seeing this third straight year of delay as a major victory, the fired-up opponents of desegregation celebrated with a motorcade through Nashville accented by blaring horns, Confederate flags, and signs reading:
SOUTHERN WHITES ARE
THE NEGROES' BEST FRIENDS . . . BUT NO INTEGRATION. The campaign of relentless pressure on school administrators and board members intensified through the summer, and the beleaguered officials were further vexed in the fall of 1956 when reports of violence at a desegregating high school in the east Tennessee town of Clinton grabbed national headlines. |
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Desegregation opponents decorate a car for a protest parade, Nashville, TN, March 1956.
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Essay Sections:
Introduction | Brown Comes to Tennessee | The Nashville Plan | Resistance and Resolve | September 9 |
The Witching Hour | The Turning Point | A Long Road Ahead |Appendices | Recommended Resources
The Witching Hour | The Turning Point | A Long Road Ahead |Appendices | Recommended Resources
