Skip to main content

CORE and the Nashville School Crises of 1957


The Fall of 1957 CORE-LATOR newsletter included Anna Holden's article on CORE's activity in the Nashville School Crises.

According to Holden, Nashville adopted a "partial desegregation plan" which would integrate schools one grade level per year, beginning with first-grade. Although 126 African American children qualified to enroll in the previously all-white schools, only 13 parents decided to enroll their children in the schools. CORE members decided to contact eligible black families to assure them the Mayor promised to provide "adequate police protection for both school and parents' home" (Holden, 1957). Despite this promise, the home of Linda Gail McKinley was set on fire by a mob. McKinely was one of two black children to first integrate Fehr Elementary school but shortly transferred after the violent demonstrations.

The following Spring, CORE along with forty-four local and national groups, petitioned the Tennessee School Board to desegregate the remaining grades by the Fall of 1958 by signing the following petition.

"We feel that it would benefit the community to accomplish desegregation as quickly as possible, so that the process will not be dragged out over a long period of time, keeping the public in a state of tension and confusion and giving those who are opposed to compliance a constant field for debate."

The Tennessee School Board ruled by a margin of 7 to 1 to continue the one grade per year approach. The only African-American member on the school board was the one to disagree with the desegregation method. By the fall of 1958, only 34 out of 300 eligible black children enrolled in the first and second grade.

 

CORE conducted a survey on 215 parents in Nashville to determine the reasons they did not enroll their children in the newly desegregated schools. They reported the following reasons: 

  1. Lack of confidence in public officials 
  2. They didn't want to send different age children to different schools 
  3. Didn't want to pioneer the desegregation movement 
  4. Didn't want to break bonds with black school-teachers