The Scarboro Community

Scarboro began as hutments without plumbing where Black workers and their families lived apart in the Manhattan Project town, with married couples separated by a fence. The idea of integrating the schools came from the Town Advisory Council, whose chairman, Waldo Cohn, drafted a 1953 petition and later stepped down after threats and a recall effort. Superintendent Bertis Capehart announced the plan in February 1955. The first year brought fistfights and isolation, and Archie Lee became the first Black student in the school's National Honor Society. Scarboro Oak Ridge 85 Day is now September 6.

What the plaque says

The Scarboro Community The Scarboro Community is the home of the original African American families who were moved in 1946 from Woodland area hutments to houses in Gamble Valley. The community became known as Scarboro when the school by the same name located here in June 1949. It is the African American community where the Scarboro 85 desegregated Oak Ridge High and Robertsville Junior High Schools on September 6, 1955. Continued - It was also the home of the only elementary, junior high, and Black High School in Oak Ridge. Under the leadership of Principal Arizona Officer, the Scarboro School with grades one through six continued to operate as a community school until 1967. Steets in the community are named after Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Scarboro has a rich and largely untapped history.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• American Museum of Science and Energy — 5.4 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.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 6.8 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.
• Museum of Appalachia — 13 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.
• Blount Mansion — 14 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.

More markers nearby

• David Hall Cabin — 2.0 mi
• Oak Ridge — 3.7 mi
• The Elza Gate — 4.1 mi
• First Integrated Public Schools in the Southeast — 4.9 mi