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.