By Logan Langlois
NASHVILLE, TN — Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of a United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) milestone, still celebrated as one of the most important rulings for racial equality made in American history. On May 17, 1954, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered SCOTUS’ unanimous ruling for the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education, that separating children in public schools based on race was in violation of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The decision marked the end of the “separate but equal” principle that had been set forth by the Supreme Court nearly 60 years earlier by Plessy v. Ferguson, but the fight in Tennessee was far from over.
Hours after SCOTUS’ decision was delivered, two of Nashville’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attorneys asked the Board of Education to officially end segregation. The two men, Chief NAACP Tennessee attorney and half of the total Black members on the city council, Z. Alexander Looby, and his young assistant who would later become Tennessee’s top civil rights lawyer and noteworthy state senator, Avon N. Williams Jr. had also worked closely with the NAACP’s national legal director, lead attorney for the plaintiffs of Brown and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Looby and Williams were told by Nashville Superintendent W. A. Bass and Davidson County Superintendent J. E. Moss, that they would study SCOTUS’ ruling and were awaiting further instruction promised by the Court. Nashville Mayor Ben West wanted more time to consider the Courts, though he said, “our people are law-abiding citizens.” Despite these promises, as the summer came and went, it became apparent to all that no desegregation would take place in Nashville schools that year.
In the follow-up ruling Brown II in late May 1955, SCOTUS ordered school districts to desegregate with “all deliberate speed under federal court supervision. Several NAACP attorneys petitioned Nashville school officials to carry out the decision, but no formal action took place. Several Black students would attempt to enroll in historically white schools near their homes, but all were denied.
The first Tennessee school to integrate their white and Black students would be the Oak Ridge schools in September 1955, who were attached to the federal nuclear research facility nearby and not subject to local governance. On September 25, Looby, Williams, and Marshall filed a lawsuit on behalf of 21 African American children against Nashville city schools. Federal District Court Judge William E. Miller gave schools six months to draw up plans in accordance with SCOTUS’ decision. In May 1956, the school board offered a tentative plan that would see schools desegregated one grade a year, starting with the first grade that fall. The NAACP agreed, provided the school board moved at a quicker fixed period, more similar to the five-year plan executed in Evansville, Indiana.
As the two sides stalemated, Judge Miller would schedule another hearing for later in the summer. State school desegregation legal delays throughout the south encouraged segregationists, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens’ Council, and Tennessee Federation of Constitutional Government chaired by Vanderbilt University writer and English professor Donald Davidson, to make fiery speeches throughout Nashville and Tennessee encouraging whites to defend their privileges.
A week later in federal court, the school board was granted their plea for more time for planning, and a third straight year of delay. Segregationists celebrated by motorcading through Nashville with Confederate flags and anti-integration signage. Judge Miller’s approved state school grade-a-year desegregation began in September 1957 with first graders, to much aggravated protest and a school bombing, for which no one has ever been charged.
Copyright 2024, TN TRIBUNE, all rights reserved.
