Desegregation of Franklin County Public Schools

The suit was filed on July 2, 1963, by four Black and four white families, and the court moved in steps. A September order demanded a plan, a December injunction reassigned pupils at two schools, and in March 1964 the judge required zoning and student assignment. Sewanee raised $50,000 locally, decided at a March 30 town meeting, for new classrooms. Doug Cameron, whose family sued, recalled that water fountains and bathrooms were still segregated in 1964. In 1966 two Black teachers asked to join the case over hiring and firing.

What the plaque says

Desegregation of Franklin County Public Schools Nine years after Brown v. Board of Education, eight local families initiated a lawsuit to compel Franklin County to desegregate the public school system. The plaintiffs included the Bates, Cameron, Camp, Goodstein, Hill, Sisk, Staten, and Turner families. They were represented by Nashville attorney Z. Alexander Looby and Jack Greenburg, Constance Baker Motley, and James M. Nabrit of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The case was successful, and in 1964 the U.S. District Court issued an order to desegregate the schools. This lawsuit was notable in that it involved both white and African-American plaintiffs. The Sewanee community raised funds to add four new classrooms to the Sewanee Public School, located at this site, thus eliminating the argument that there was insufficient space to educate all of the community's children together. Additionally, during the summer of 1964, Sewanee residents offered tutoring across the street at Otey Parish. This effort countered a second argument that African-American children would not be adequately prepared to join their white classmates.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 0.5 mi
  The Episcopal university on the Cumberland Plateau, founded in 1857 as a school for the slaveholding South and now examining that history through its own Roberson Project.
• Tims Ford State Park — 19 mi
  A lake park on the Elk River below the Cumberland Plateau, made by a 1970 TVA dam on land the Cherokee and Chickasaw ceded by treaty in the early 1800s.
• Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park — 22 mi
  A 2,000-year-old enclosure of piled stone and earth on the bluffs above the forks of the Duck River, built by Native people between about 80 and 550 A.D., with a museum and waterfall trails.
• Savage Gulf State Park — 23 mi
  Roughly 19,000 acres of gorge and sandstone bluff on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, a state park of its own since 2022, with the Stone Door and a National Natural Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Saint's Rest — 0.3 mi
• University of the South — 0.8 mi
• Monteagle Sunday School Assembly — 5.5 mi
• Cowan Railroad Museum — 5.6 mi