Locals look back on desegregation in Jackson

JACKSON, Tenn. — The color of one’s skin stood at the forefront of school systems during the 1950s and 1960s in America.

In 1896, the U.S Supreme Court issued the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites.

Almost 60 years later, the Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned the Plessy decision, resulting in 29 school districts in Tennessee being sued to forcibly integrate their schools.

In 1956, Clinton High School in Anderson County became the first to integrate in Tennessee.

Shifting over to Jackson, in 1962 there was a quiet integration at Tigrett Junior High School.

1964 is when one of the more publicized integrations of schools came.

That’s where Brenda Monroe-Moses stepped foot into Jackson High School, as the first African American student to enroll.

“January 25, that’s when I came over here, front page of the newspaper, looked like everyday,” Brenda Monroe-Moses said.

“There were 800 students in this building when I showed up, and it was novel, it was more novel for them than it was for me, you see,” Moses said.

At the time, Moses said she didn’t know she would be apart of history.

“I’m not thinking about history or whether how I fit into it, I’m trying to see how I get to my dream,” she said.

She had a dream of becoming an ambassador after admiring one of her teachers at her previous school in Detroit.

“She was doing something that I didn’t even know that women did, and that was go to law school,” Moses said.

Driven to live out her dream, Moses was focused, but she faced challenges along the way.

“Well this isn’t going to be hard, they pray, and I was sitting there, maybe about five minutes, when I heard from the back of the row I was seated in, in a male voice, ‘You old black b,'” Moses said.

“I said well, maybe this not gone be quite as easy as I thought it was,” Moses said.

As a teenager in a desegregated climate, Moses says she encountered racism first hand.

“There were a few of them, very few that felt comfortable enough in even speaking to me, because most of them when they moved away from the novelty of me being there, the next step was to deny my humanity and pretend that I didn’t exist,” Moses said.

Desegregation was different for some in 1969.

“We were part of the first, first-grade class to be desegregated in the Jackson City School System,” WBBJ 7 Eyewitness News Anchor Brad Douglass said.

Douglass said he remembers desegregation like it was yesterday.

“It’s interesting now, to go back 50 years and look at the classroom again, and go through the school again, to the first-grade, in the first-grade room I was in, and all the memories come flooding back,” Douglass said.

“Being in a classroom with someone of the opposite race, it didn’t really register,” Douglas said.

“We kind of looked at each other, like what’s this all about,” Douglass said. “What’s desegregation?”

Bentley and Preston are students from local high schools who say there is still a strain on relationships between white and black students.

“There still is white kids picking on black kids, but nowadays there’s black kids that may pick on white kids,” Liberty Technology Magnet High School student Preston Bond said.

“People like, looked at African Americans differently as they do now, it’s different to see them, but nowadays its regular,” North Side High School student Bentley Gray said.

“You know probably in the high school, since the school system was going through it, it may have been a little more tense, tension there,” said Douglass.

“They would put glue on my locker, and I couldn’t get in my locker to get my books, just little prankish things like that, that made it inconvenient. No ‘N’ was ever going to graduate from Jackson High, I didn’t think much of it at the time,” Moses said. “Somebody was gone shoot me, because if I walked across the stage and got this it would have happened.”

“People are afraid of change, people are uneasy about it,” Douglass said.

“From the day the decision was made, the officials in the southern school districts were looking for ways to get around doing it,” Moses said.

“Some of the people in the medical community, they would write letters to the effect that this student cannot go to the school in their district for medical reasons, it would be ambiguous as to what the medical reason was, but this was to keep them from having to go to the school that was now integrated,” said Moses.

With our school systems now, do you think we’ve come a long way?

“Like most of my closest friends are black people, and I love them so,” Gray said.

“I feel like it’s a lot better now, because most of my friends are white,” Bond said.

Both students agree since desegregating schools 50 years ago, there is still room for improvement.

“I think the community should host more things where both sides of the community, African American and the whites, should all come together as one and to do stuff together,” Gray said.

“Because we’re one generation and there’s black and whites in both generations, and there’s going to be black and whites in the next generation, so I think when we realize we all need to start progressing instead of pushing each other back,” Bond said.

“But it begins with every person looking in the mirror, cause see you either part of what, you either part of the problem or your part of the solution. There are no innocent bystanders, everybody is going to be one or the other,” Moses said.

Brenda Monroe-Moses said she is in the process of working on a book to tell more of her story.