First Integrated Public Schools in the Southeast

Oak Ridge's wartime plan set aside an eastern section as a Negro Village, with dormitories and some well-built homes. The operating companies then hired few Black workers into jobs that qualified for such housing, and the village was absorbed by the white community. African American employees were put in hutments farther west, segregated by race and by gender. Tennessee was a segregated state and the Army town followed local custom, which is what made the 1955 school decision notable: Oak Ridge became one of the first Southern cities to mandate desegregated public schools.

What the plaque says

First Integrated Public Schools in the Southeast Following the American Civil War the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, abolishing slavery in the United States. During the post-Reconstruction era, leaders of southern states created a separate and second-class status for Black Americans, which included separated schools for Whites and Blacks in Tennessee. In the 1940s, the Manhattan Project and subsequently the Atomic Energy Commission operated the Oak Ridge Schools. Continued - The Atomic Energy Commission directed Oak Ridge Schools to desegregate. On September 6, 1955, a total of 85 Black American students peacefully enrolled in Oak Ridge High School and Robertsville Junior High School. These were the first desegregated public schools in the Southeast. The names of the brave individuals who first broke the practice of racial school segregation are listed on plaques inside each of the schools.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 2.3 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 6.5 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.
• Museum of Appalachia — 9.1 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.
• Norris Dam and Norris Dam State Park — 11 mi
  TVA's first dam, finished in 1936 on the Clinch River, and the state park beside it with the 1798 Rice Grist Mill, built for a valley whose families were moved out.

More markers nearby

• Clinton High School — 2.5 mi
• The Rev. Paul W. Turner — 2.6 mi
• The Market Place of Pearls — 2.7 mi
• The Elza Gate — 3.1 mi