A Tale Of Two Schools

The Promise

Nashville Public Radio

Society & Culture

4.9 • 777 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the beginning of the 2019 school year, Principal Ricki Gibbs knew he had a tough job ahead. Warner Elementary in East Nashville had just landed on Tennessee’s list of lowest performing schools. It had lost so many students that it wasn’t even half full. Gibbs was the fourth principal in six years. Yet, he had seemingly unending enthusiasm and a federal magnet grant to boot. He was confident he could turn Warner around.

But what he didn’t anticipate was the neighborhood divide. Warner’s kids are almost all black and most live in poverty, but just about a mile up the road is another public elementary, named Lockeland, whose student body is exactly the opposite. What happens when you have two schools so close together yet so different? And what happens when people in the neighborhood finally start to notice?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you very much.
0:05.0	In a time of tension, it is more important than ever to unite this country.
0:12.7	On May 18, 1963, President John F. Kennedy arrived in Nashville, Tennessee
0:18.2	to deliver the commencement speech at Vanderbilt University,
0:22.2	one of the South's most prestigious colleges.
0:25.4	More than 100,000 people lined the city streets to greet the president and watched his
0:30.3	motorcade pass by.
0:32.5	It was Kennedy's first visit to Nashville since becoming president, and the South was convulsing in racial unrest.
0:39.3	You can never whip these boys if you don't keep you in them separate.
0:44.1	A week earlier, Bull Connor had unleashed fire hoses and dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.
0:50.5	You've got to keep the white and the black separate.
0:53.4	You've probably seen the images.
0:55.7	Up until now, Kennedy had done and said little on the topic of race relations, and he was widely criticized for it.
1:03.8	But seeing what was happening in Birmingham had galvanized the president.
1:08.5	A month earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had penned his letter from a
1:12.7	Birmingham jail. The president could avoid the issue no longer. This nation is now engaged
1:20.5	in a continuing debate about the rights of a portion of its citizens. Just five days before this speech,
1:29.2	a thousand black high school and college students took to Nashville's streets,
1:33.5	in solidarity with Birmingham,
1:35.3	but also to protest segregation here,
1:37.9	still very much a part of this city.
1:40.7	Black protesters linked arms outside white-only restaurants and lunch counters.
	...

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