The Nashville Way

The Promise

Nashville Public Radio

Society & Culture

4.9 • 777 Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2020

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To understand the resegregation of Nashville’s schools, you have to start with understanding desegregation.

In 1954, the famous Brown v. Board decision ruled that segregated schools violated the constitution. But in reality, that decision changed very little in Nashville. Segregation was an architecture, and to pull it apart was a grueling endeavor. White families derailed the process. City officials worked mightily to resist it. And black families sacrificed for it.

In this episode, we’re going back to the early days of this battle for racial equity in the classroom, to the time not that long ago when school desegregation literally blew this city apart.

The Promise is written and produced Meribah Knight. Edited by Emily Siner, with additional editing by Anita Bugg, Tony Gonzalez, Samantha Max, Sergio Martinez-Beltran and Damon Mitchell. Fact-checking and research by Sam Zern. Advising for this season by Savala Nolan Trepczynski and Alex Kotlowitz. Mixing by Jakob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. The music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Previously on The Promise.
0:03.9	Boys and girls, I want to welcome you to school on this beautiful Monday morning.
0:08.1	There is no other term to describe it but black and white, rich and poor.
0:14.7	I remember feeling like, oh my God, like are we going to do this again?
0:20.5	Like another generation? We're going to do this again? Like another generation?
0:24.0	We're going to do it again?
0:25.8	No.
0:27.4	I can't.
0:31.4	Nashville, some people are in denial about how vicious it was.
0:38.3	I say integration can be reversed. It can be stopped anywhere.
0:42.3	Nashville didn't just say, okay.
0:45.3	De-segregation was thought here.
0:48.3	A school was bombed.
0:51.3	I was spat on in this, in that.
0:56.0	America is not comfortable addressing race.
0:59.9	I mean, really addressing it.
1:02.7	We just wanted to be able to live the American life.
1:10.8	While I was reporting this story, I got my hands on a copy of a grant proposal that Nashville school sent to Washington, D.C. a few years ago in 2017.
1:20.6	They wanted millions of dollars to recruit more white families to Warner Elementary by turning it into a magnet school.
1:29.2	I hadn't made it past the first page when I saw this.
1:32.9	Quote, MNPS has a rich and proud history of school desegregation, dating back to 1957,
1:40.6	the same year as the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
	...

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