John Egerton, Walking into History: The Beginning of Desegregation in Nashville; Southern Spaces

Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville

John Egerton, Nashville, Tennessee

cite this page | printable version

Essay Sections:

September 9:

A late-night thunderstorm swept across the city, leaving the air dense with humidity, and Monday dawned gray and sultry as Kasper and his followers emerged from the gloom to take up their stations at three schools north of downtown and three more east of the Cumberland River. The special police units were soon in place around the same schools.

It was principally at these six — Buena Vista, Jones, and Fehr on the north side and Bailey, Caldwell, and Glenn on the east — that public attention was focused, due in part to extensive advance coverage by the city's newspapers. Two more elementary schools also were desegregated that morning — Clemons, south of downtown, and Hattie Cotton, to the northeast — but they had not been listed in the papers and thus drew no sign-waving protesters.

Harold Street walks his daughter Lajuanda (right) and Jacqueline Griffith (left) to Glenn Elementary School, Nashville, TN, September 1957.

Each of these eight schools had its own distinctive set of circumstances to address. To get a clear picture of the Nashville scene in a larger context on that first day of historic change, it is useful to review the opening-day activity at these schools, one by one. The eight had several things in common: All were elementary schools in working-class neighborhoods, serving white children in grades one through six (no kindergarten or preschool programs were provided in the city then). They were selected for change because African American families with first grade children were known to live within their zones, closer to them than to the nearest black schools.

Buena Vista. The three first graders who desegregated Buena Vista School, in the 1500 block of Ninth Avenue North — Erroll Groves, Ethel Mai Carr, and Patricia Guthrie — had all visited the school with their parents in late August for early registration. A few whites had been clustered outside on the front sidewalk that day, passing out pro-segregation handbills, but there were no disturbances. Two weeks later, a far different scene unfolded.

"I was young myself, in my early twenties," recalled Iridell Groves, Erroll's mother, fifty years later, "and it really wasn't that big of a deal to me. We just lived around the corner from the school, and some of these little white kids, they were our neighbors. Erroll played with them. I guess I couldn't understand why if they played together, they couldn't go to school together.

"So that first morning, after my husband went to work, I got out some new clothes I had bought for my son — blue jeans and a Roy Rogers shirt — and I got dressed up too, wanted us to look nice, and we started out. Well, we rounded the corner down there, and I couldn't figure out what was going on — all these people hollering, waving signs, calling us names and everything. I held his hand real tight and kept walking, up the steps and past everybody and straight in the door. And as soon as we got inside, people were waiting there, talking nice to us, telling us everything was going to be all right."

Close behind Mrs. Groves and her son came the Carr and Guthrie parents with their children. All made it safely inside the school, with the noisy crowd of about a hundred protesters hounding them along the sidewalk. John Kasper put in a brief appearance to stir up the assembly, but most of the agitation was the work of Fred Stroud, who thundered doom and damnation upon the heads of all who failed to heed his segregationist message. The presence of several photographers and news reporters lent an air of drama to the scene, and for their benefit the demonstrators waved their signs to pulsing, vociferous bursts of indignation. But the police were out in force too, and at the sight of them, the crowd's threatening behavior was edged with enough caution to keep even the most foolhardy from physical contact.

Jones. Half a mile north along Ninth Avenue, a similar encounter was taking place in front of Jones School, where four black first graders, three of whom had pre-registered, arrived with their parents and other adult escorts. Barbara Jean Watson, Marvin Moore, Charles Edward Battles, and the newest child, Cecil Ray Jr., were not attacked physically, but the protesters were loud and abusive — some crowding the sidewalk, others riding past in cars emblazoned with KKK signs, Bible quotations, Confederate flags, and other messages. (The same vehicles were also seen cruising around Buena Vista and Fehr, the third North Nashville school, as well as in East Nashville, during the day.)

As the morning wore on, the crowd at Jones was aroused by a grandmotherly white woman who refused to give her name but mesmerized her listeners with spellbinding oratory. She exhorted the parents to go into the school and remove their children, and about a dozen promptly did so, giving unexpected energy to a boycott strategy that Kasper had advocated and all the active pro-segregation groups in the city seemed to support. As with those at Buena Vista, all the black parents and their first graders at Jones managed to walk safely to and from school that day, a bit shaken but unharmed.

"Most of our neighbors — the black ones or the white ones — didn't want us to take Barbara Jean down there to Jones," said Mary Louise Watson years later. "And we had people calling, saying if we did carry her, they would kidnap her or burn our house down or whatever. But my husband had talked to his cousin, who was a school principal, and he urged us to go on and do it, so we did. Once we had made up our minds, there was no turning back. It was scary, oh yes, plenty of times — but we never doubted it was the right thing to do. We went back the next day, even though some of the other black children and most of the white ones stayed at home."

Fehr. A mile or so from Jones, on Fifth Avenue North, four children crossed the segregation line: two girls, Linda McKinley and Rita Buchanan, and two boys, Charles Elbert Ridley and Willis Edgar Lewis Jr. All four had registered early. A fifth child, Bobby Cabknor, had pre-registered but was not in attendance on opening day. The school census had indicated that eighteen black first graders were living in the Fehr zone.

Twenty-one-year-old Grace McKinley and her daughter Linda lived with Mrs. McKinley's parents and her invalid brother in a four-room house just around the corner and a block away from Fehr; the nearest all-black school, Elliott, was about a mile south, on Jefferson Street.

"I remember a lot about that morning," said the mother (now Mrs. Grace Lillard), fifty years later. "I heard they had better books at Fehr, and it was a lot closer than Elliott, and when they said Linda could go there, I made up my mind to do it. So on the early registration day, this nice lady, Mrs. C. E. Hayes, came to the house and walked down there with us. Linda had a friend, Rita Buchanan, who went too, her and her mother. There was some white people down there hollering, but they didn't bother us.

"The day school started, I got Linda up, we got dressed, ate something. We must have been nervous. My mama said, 'Don't go down there with an attitude,' and I didn't, but my daddy was walking right behind me — to help me stay calm, I guess. Rita went with us that morning. Her mother said she was afraid to go. I never was afraid to stand up for my rights."

When they turned the corner onto Garfield Street, a block from the school, they could see and hear the crowd: sign-waving demonstrators, police officers, curious neighbors (white and black), parents arriving with their children, school personnel, reporters and photographers — more than two hundred people in all. Having been warmed up by Kasper and Stroud, the protesters released a flood of epithets upon the mother and the two little girls; clutching their hands, she steered a path to the front door and entered.

"It was a lot calmer inside," Mrs. Lillard recalled. "We never did have any trouble with the teachers or the principal. Some of the white parents were nice, too — but those women out in front, they were bad." Two of the women were arrested that morning, and booked on charges of disorderly conduct.

When school was dismissed at noon, the girls and Linda's mother tried to avoid the crowd by leaving through a side door, but rocks and bottles were thrown at them, and Mrs. Lillard reacted defensively, raising a fingernail file she had pulled from her dress pocket. Quickly, she was arrested and taken away to be charged, leaving the crying girls in the care of friends and family.

About half of the 370 white children expected at Fehr that morning did not come. The ones who did, white and black, may have wished not to be there themselves. Even the black custodian would have reasons for regret. Returning to the building in late afternoon to take down the American flag, he was assaulted by a roving band of white bullies. Beaten and bloodied, the man ran for his life, leaving his car. The thugs promptly slashed its tires.

Bailey. Across the river but still not far from downtown Nashville, Bailey School on East Greenwood Avenue was one of three expecting black enrollees. One black girl, Era May Bailey, had been pre-registered for the first grade there. Several dozen white protesters waited for an hour past the opening for her to appear, and then left to join demonstrations at Caldwell and Glenn schools nearby. It was later reported that the Bailey child's grandparents (her legal guardians), after being besieged with phoned threats against her life, had decided to enroll her elsewhere. (The same also happened in the case of Richard Rucker, who was pre-registered at Jones but never attended the school. Bobby Cabknor, who was pre-registered at Fehr but not present on opening day, did subsequently attend; he later transferred to Jones.)

Caldwell. A jeering crowd of more than a hundred white protesters met three black children and their parents as they approached Caldwell School on Meridian Street. None of the three had registered earlier, but the school census indicated that thirteen black first graders lived within the zone, and at the sight of three of them, the restless crowd was soon transformed into a mob. A policeman and a black parent were struck with rocks, the parents and children were spat upon and cursed, and soon after they entered the building, the mob rushed in too, and went rampaging from room to room in search of the black families. The police detail, momentarily caught off guard, quickly pursued and routed the marauders, detaining several of them.

The three children, meanwhile, were sheltered in the principal's office, where it was determined that their transfer papers to Caldwell were not in order. The principal, Jack Stanfill, helped the distraught families leave the building by the back door, but they were pursued to their cars, and police again had to step in. Stanfill, saying he intended "to keep personalities out of this," refused to divulge the applicants' names.

Glenn. If there was one school above all the others where both pro- and anti-desegregation forces expected trouble, it was probably Glenn, on Cleveland Street in East Nashville. The census indicated that twenty-five black six-year-olds lived in the zone. Kasper, fearing disaster for his side if many or all of the children enrolled, spent more time at Glenn than anywhere else that morning, rallying and firing up the ragtag army of more than two hundred demonstrators and troublemakers massed there. "We've got to defy this thing!" he shouted. "They don't have enough jails to hold all of us!" Waiting feverishly for the blacks to arrive, they were a mob in the making, goading the stoic police detail and threatening a full-blown boycott.

Finally, right at eight o'clock, three black children appeared with their parents. Two — Jacqueline Griffith and Lajuanda Street — had registered early; the third, Sinclair Lee Jr., was there for the first time. They were roughly jostled as they threaded through the milling mob, and when a policeman cleared a path for them, his effort was met with cries of outrage. "I would turn in my uniform before I'd do what you're doing!" one man told the officer. Another protester shouted to Superintendent Bass, "What about our states' rights?" He replied calmly, "We lost those at Appomattox in 1865."

Once inside the building, the three families were hospitably received, though registration of the Lee child was deferred for lack of final transfer documents (he subsequently was enrolled elsewhere). In retaliation, frustrated whites began to withdraw their children, and by noon more than eighty had exited. All told, roughly half of Glenn's expected enrollment of five hundred was absent on the first day of school.

Clemons. Another five hundred white students were projected for Emma Clemons School on Twelfth Avenue South, together with just four black first graders — and none of those four had registered early. The white opposition decided, based on these figures, that there was no need to send protesters there. Curiously, local newspapers and the relatively new medium of television, with its limited news-gathering capacity, made a similar decision with regard to reporters.

No one paid much notice, then, as six-year-old Joy Smith, holding the hand of her father, Kelly Miller Smith — pastor of one of Nashville's most historic black churches, First Baptist Capitol Hill, and president of the local NAACP chapter — walked up the steps at Clemons and into the venerable building where she was to receive the first six years of her education. There were no incidents. At home that evening, Joy's father, after fending off several anonymous and threatening calls, warily answered one more and, to his surprise, heard a familiar voice: "Reverend Smith, this is Ben West. I just wanted to be sure that you and your family are all right."

Cotton. One more school was desegregated that morning: Hattie Cotton, on West Greenwood Avenue, northeast of the city center. No black children had pre-registered, but a few were known to live nearby. One of them, Patricia Watson, appeared that morning with her mother to be enrolled, and quietly joined a first grade class. Not a single white demonstrator had been there when she entered, but word spread during the morning, and several carloads of men drove up, waiting for the noontime dismissal.

Margaret Cate, the principal at Cotton, observed a few odd occurrences during the morning: first, enrollment was close to the expected total of about four hundred, but more than twenty mothers came in one by one and quietly withdrew their children; then, cars with segregationist banners and symbols were seen driving slowly around the school; and finally, when classes were dismissed, several cars full of men were parked around the driveway entrance. Minutes earlier, a taxi had pulled up near the cars, and then driven away.

When most of the children were gone, Miss Cate saw that no one had come for Patricia Watson. "I decided to take the child home in my own car," she later told police. "As I paused before backing into the street, one of the men standing beside the car verbally protested my transporting a Negro child." At the home, she learned that the mother, too frightened to walk back and meet her daughter inside the school, had called the taxi to pick her up.

At dawn the next morning, Miss Cate's phone rang at home. When she picked up the receiver, she heard a woman's voice, cold and menacing: "Well, now you won't be carrying the little nigger home any more!"

<<< Previous Section | Next Section >>>

Essay Sections: