On this day, Sept. 9, 1957, 19 Black six-year-olds walked to newly integrated Nashville public elementary schools as hundreds of white protestors screamed and threw rocks and glass bottles at them. Signs read “God is the author of segregation,” and white ministers preached the evils of integration. That evening, mobs burned down buildings owned by Black families, and burned crosses in their yards. The next day, Hattie Cotton Elementary School was bombed, and the lone Black student there would not return to class.
This is the story of how Nashville schools were desegregated.
🧑⚖️ Courts Weigh in on School Segregation
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools violated the U.S. Constitution in Brown v. Board of Education. Hours after the decision, NAACP attorneys Avon N. Williams Jr. and Z. Alexander Looby — whose home would later be bombed — formally asked Nashville’s school board to end segregation. The superintendents and Nashville mayor Ben West requested more time as they awaited further direction from the court. Only Nashville’s private Catholic schools would desegregate their admissions that fall.
In May 1955, the Supreme Court issued a follow-up ruling that allowed school districts to develop their own desegregation policies locally. NAACP attorneys once again petitioned the school board to desegregate schools that fall, but were ignored. Black families who tried to sign their children up for school were denied.
In September of that year, Looby, Williams, and Thurgood Marshall filed suit against Nashville city schools on behalf of 21 Black children in Kelly v. Board of Education. It would become the longest-running case in Tennessee history.
Superintendent Bass worked out a plan to desegregate Nashville schools one grade at a time, beginning with first grade in 1957, and extending to all twelve grades by 1968. Only certain schools were okayed for desegregation. The NAACP attorneys called the plan “completely inadequate.” But it would be the beginning of school desegregation in Nashville, three years after Brown v. Education.
🎒 The First Day of School
Of the estimated 1,400 Black students expected to begin the first grade, the school board declared only 126 eligible for rezoning to 15 previously all-white elementary schools. The majority of those families requested their children remain in all-Black schools. Many families received anonymous threats, or were told they might lose their jobs if their children attended a white school.
The 19 Black six-year-old students and their families who had signed up for classes at integrated elementary schools were met with protestors, many of whom were incited by segregationist and Ku Klux Klan member John Kasper. Where protests were the most heated, children were escorted by police and advocates.
Some children, after being struck by rocks, were denied transfers to the schools. Hundreds of white families kept their children home in protest. Violence continued into the night, culminating in the bombing of Hattie Cotton Elementary School. Police arrested Kasper, and while some white protestors showed up on the second day of school, police presence and the violence from the night before had subdued them, and protests would not continue after that.
Here are the names of the brave Black first graders who attended school that first day: Erroll Groves, Ethel Mai Carr, Patricia Guthrie, Charles Ridley, Willis Lewis, Bobby Cabknor, Rita Buchanan, Linda Gail McKinley, Barbara Jean Watson, Marvin Moore, Charles Edward Battles, Cecil Ray Jr., Richard Rucker, Era May Bailey, Patricia Watson, Joy Smith, Jacqueline Griffith, Lajuanda Street, and Sinclair Lee Jr.
Eleven of them would stay in their schools after the violence of that first day.
