(slow ambient music) - Very early on slaves in their minds linked education and power over one's own life and one's own destiny.

For them getting an education was the same thing as becoming truly free.

(slow ambient music) - A bomb explodes at Hattie Cotton School in East Nashville and the signal was clear, you send your children to an integrated school and this could happen during school hours, next time.

(slow ambient music) - They were the pioneers who were selected to go into the white high school or the white junior high school or whatever it was, and to make Brown meaningful and that is a heck of a lot for a child to have to do.

(slow ambient music) - If I go back down to Clinton High School, I will not be the same Bobby Cain.

I just told 'em that up front, that was my defense mechanism to let them know that I was not gonna be docile anymore.

(slow ambient music) - [Announcer] Education: The Key to Freedom is made possible by a group grant from the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area, Amazon, Diversified Trust.

And the following Cat Financial, Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company, Delta Dental of Tennessee, Regions Bank, Walmart and by members of NPT, thank you.

(slows ambient music) (guns firing) - [Narrator] Beginning three years before the final Confederate surrender as battles raged across Tennessee, many slaves made the harrowing decision to break their bonds and escape to union strongholds.

- In a town like Memphis controlled by the union army in a town like Nashville controlled by the union army, you see a lot of enslaved people knowing fully what's going on, knowing that if they can get to one of these fortified towns controlled by the union army, they will be self emancipating, they will be free.

And so with these camps around the cities of Tennessee where enslaved people have found refuge you will see Northern missionaries coming down to these contraband camps as they were called specifically to start educating the children and the adults as well.

- Most of the ex-slaves were convinced that education had the power and the reason why was because people in Southern society who were running everything and who had money they were all educated.

And the people who didn't, even white people who didn't have anything and didn't run anything, they weren't educated.

So, very early on slaves in their minds linked education and power over one's own life and one's own destiny.

- [Narrator] With the help of Northern missionaries, the Freedmen's bureau and black churches former slaves made impressive strides under the protection of federal reconstruction policies.

Thousands of freedmen were learning to read and write, a handful of these schools would grow into black colleges which began to appear across Tennessee as the need for African American teachers intensified.

- [Crystal] What has grown into historically black colleges and universities today began as Freedmen schools and you would see them all across the south very meager students at various age levels and also achievement levels.

- There were people graduating from schools that were called college, but they didn't really have college training.

Most of those schools and Knoxville college is one for a good while it had a normal school which is where you graduated teachers, but that was half the training that a college graduate would get.

- Black education in the south was overwhelmingly controlled by Northern white missionaries.

It was they who had come first, it was they who had given most materially, those who served as faculty and staff then it's for that reason that for a very long time white missionaries got all the credit for the success of black colleges.

I argue that while there is a lot of credit owed to them there's enough credit to be shared and so we have to make room for black self-determination.

- [Narrator] Evidence of that determination appeared in the development of Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee.

- Several African American colleges developed as religious seminaries and a real good example is what was officially at first named the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and for the CME Seminary church leaders created Lane College in Jackson back in the 1870s.

And that college is still with us today, it's been a very powerful institution throughout not just Tennessee, but the CME Church throughout the south.

LeMoyne Owen College starts with Freeman's bureau initiatives in the 1860s and then into the early 1870s, but it really finds its place through its alliance with the congregational church.

The name LeMoyne Owen comes from a later alliance with a Baptist college that had been developed in Memphis known as Owen college.

So, the two combined in the early 20th century and LeMoyne Owen is another one of our key historic black colleges and universities in Tennessee.

- Fisk actually opens in 1865 but is formally dedicated in 1866.

It does not grow into a university earnestly until the mid 1870s when it produces its first college class.

Now this is exceptional, not because it didn't start as a "university" but rather because it grew into university so quickly.

- Roger Williams college was the initiative from black Baptists to build their own higher education institution here in Nashville and that school still survives as American Baptist College over in north Nashville.

How did that school from the 1860s end up in north Nashville in the 1920s and thirties?

Well, it's part of the racial violence against black education that became epidemic in Tennessee in the 1890s and the turn of the 20th century.

- [Narrator] In 1905, the university received warnings to move from its west Nashville location.

Shortly thereafter, both of its buildings were burned to the ground.

- And in 1905, Roger Williams begins the process of moving to the location of American Baptist College and it was there that the training for the sit-in strikes during the civil rights movement took place.

- [Narrator] Meharry Medical College, the first medical school for blacks in the south also traces its beginnings to other schools.

It began in 1876 as the medical department of Central Tennessee College, which became Walden University in 1900.

Meharry received its own charter 15 years later and today is the largest private historically black medical school in the United States.

Graduates of Tennessee's black universities distinguished themselves by advancing the cause of racial equality and becoming role models for younger generations.

One of the most renowned was author and civil rights pioneer, W.E.B.

DuBois who enrolled at Fisk in 1885.

A native of Massachusetts, this was his first experience with the segregated south.

DuBois, spent his summers teaching in rural black schools, near Nashville.

Horrified by the abject poverty and discrimination faced by his students, he resolved to devote himself to ending Jim Crow.

After graduating from Fisk, Dubois would go to Harvard and eventually help create the NAACP.

In a development that would lead to the creation of today's Tennessee State University, the federal government passed an act in 1890 requiring Southern states to either prove that admission to land grant institutions wasn't based on race or designate a separate institution for persons of color.

- And of course the Southern states wanted to segregate that.

well, in Tennessee, this state decided that instead of starting a school for black students, they created an educational department within Knoxville College and it was just for a few students but the notion was that, well we don't have to fund black school, we don't wanna do that, we don't wanna spend the money.

- African Americans had to fight and argue to get that institution included and the price of that was to placate white Tennesseans by saying it will be the Tennessee agricultural and and industrial normal school.

In other words, that it will be preparing black Tennesseans for a life in the trades or in agriculture or in teaching within a segregated and unequal school system.

To this day, Tennessee State University has been receiving less than its funding share should have been and had persistent funding inequalities within the state system of public education as well.

- But the reality is that Tennessee state is extraordinary in that it had a black president at its founding, black faculty at its founding.

I mean, Frisk is founded 50 years earlier and isn't gonna have a black president for some time.

Mid-20th century that's how long it takes because of the white missionary hold on not just its culture identity or its financial wellness, but on its day-to-day life and that matters.

- [Narrator] In 1924, Fisk was considered the top black university in the country, but that year in an effort to appeal to wealthy funders, its president Fayette McKenzie, began drastically changing the curriculum from liberal arts to a more industrial based education.

The decision enraged the student body that had already grown tired of McKenzie's draconian rules.

- Fayette Avery McKenzie, decided that the only thing that students should do at school was to learn and they should learn what he wanted them to learn and they should learn how he wanted them to learn.

And that meant that they should have no social interactions, all clubs were prohibited and students were just over it.

And what you had in the case of Fisk University are the student uprisings.

It's really a demand of students that the institution reflected who they were and who they aspired to be and they had the encouragement and support of previous generations of students like DuBois who Fayette McKenzie probably gave more credit to for the uprising than any other single figure, because he had come to speak at commencement because his daughter was graduating and he had driven home the point that the days of hardline white missionary supremacy at these institutions was about to be over.

- [Narrator] In his speech, Dubois attacked McKenzie and urged black Americans not to send their children to Fisk until it had a new president.

That led to the student protest and a community-wide boycott of the university lasting eight weeks.

McKenzie resigned which resulted in a greater voice for HBCU students across the country.

Winds of change weren't only stirring on black college campuses but in public schools as well.

- Plessy versus Ferguson specified that it's completely constitutional to have separate facilities for black and white Americans as long as they're equal.

Well, of course they were always separate and they were never equal.

So what the NAACP did was to attack the equal part 'cause everybody knew that black schools were nowhere near equal to white schools.

(slow ambient music) - In 1954, a case was brought to the United States Supreme Court known as Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

Chief Justice Warren wrote in his decision, "Segregated schools are unequal and against the constitution of the United States."

And you can imagine the furor that occurred all over the south.

(slow somber music) - [Narrator] Utilizing the newfound power of Brown V Board, the first successful challenge to public school segregation in the Southern United States would focus international attend on the small town of Clinton, Tennessee and cement its place in history as one of the starting points for the modern civil rights movement.

Though most African American families in Clinton lived in an area overlooking Clinton High for years, black high school students had to be bused 20 miles to a segregated school in Knoxville.

That changed when a federal judge ordered the county school board to end segregation by the fall of 1956.

Not everyone was pleased with the decision including the 12 students who would walk down Foley Hill to Clinton High and into history.

- I was disappointed because of my senior year, I would miss my prom and it was gonna be a new adventure, I didn't know that there was gonna be an ordeal.

- Most of the students would meet right here at the Green McAdoo School at the time and then they would walk together down the hill.

No one really knew what was gonna be at the bottom of that hill for that first day - [Narrator] That first day would prove to be the relative calm before the storm.

- Day one of desegregation goes on without a hitch, I mean goes very, very smooth day two did not go nearly as smooth.

(students jeering) - I didn't realize it was gonna be the crowd that I met.

Here it is we're going to Clinton High and all these people out here jeering and whatever.

- [Narrator] Screaming, insults, and threats, the crowd had been agitated by John Kasper a prominent segregationist and KKK member from New Jersey.

- John Kasper is one of the most shadowy people in all of American history but he is going to show up throughout the south anytime there is any hint of integration.

And so he is going to convince the poorest and most marginalized of the white community that they are going to lose something by integrating that high school.

Once that fear is spread, then chaos erupts there is a great deal of violence and governor Frank Clement is forced to call up the state guard in order to provide peace again.

- [Narrator] The arrival of 600 guardsmen put an end to most of the violence outside the school, but inside Clinton High intimidation and violence would follow Bobby Cain until his final day.

- I can't speak for the other students, but no it did not get any better.

- So that's what these black students were subjected to day after day.

It was harassment and it wasn't just words, they were subjected to physical abuse.

- A bunch of guys came into the cafeteria and they said, well Bobby, we're gonna beat you up, I said, well, why is it that every time I'm encountering somebody, it's a bunch of you?

I said, why can't it not be one?

(slow ambient music) - [Narrator] While there were times Bobby contemplated quitting school, he would persevere, graduating on May 17th, 1957, the third anniversary of the Brown V Board decision.

- And the very next year, a bomb explodes at Clinton High, that was kind of the final straw of we are still unhappy with the integration.

The next year, the cameras turn to Nashville.

Nashville has this court case before it the Kelly versus Board of Education of Nashville and the school board decides they're going to work with the council and adopt what becomes known as the Nashville Plan.

- [Narrator] Under the plan, school desegregation would begin with the first grade and advanced to the next grade each following year until all 12 grade levels were integrated.

- Of the 1400 African American children eligible for first grade, only 115 are eligible to go to a white school.

And then there are all sorts of anonymous phone calls and threats made to these families in Nashville so that number dramatically decreases.

- [Narrator] The number would drop to 19 African American students by the first day of school, they would be greeted with the same jeers and threats endured by Bobby Cain and his classmates one year earlier.

John Kasper, the outside agitator who fanned the flames of bigotry in Clinton had spent the summer in Nashville, agitating segregationist and inciting protestors to harass five and six year old children and their parents for carrying out the promise of Brown V Board.

- And then just after midnight (bomb explodes) a bomb explodes at Hattie Cotton School in east Nashville.

As a result of that, some of those families withdrew their children for safety concerns, but those children who did endure the terror of that experience were welcomed by the city's teachers.

White teachers opened their arms to these children knowing how afraid these children as well as their parents were.

And so in 1960s, you begin to see each school district grappling with what to do.

- [Narrator] Four years after the Nashville bombing, more than seven years after Brown, the city of Memphis confronted the issue of desegregation and Dwania Kyles's family was on the front line.

- In 1959, we were living in Memphis and by 61, we were involved with the desegregation of the public schools.

The movements are about young people and my parents were those young people.

- [Narrator] Seven years later, the Reverend Billy Kyles would travel to the Lorraine Motel to bring home a famous dinner guest.

He was on the balcony next to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, when the unthinkable happened.

But on a fall day in October of 61 Reverend Kyles was an anxious father walking his five year old daughter to Bruce Elementary.

Memphis like Nashville was beginning desegregation with the first grade, but there were no jeering crowds waiting on the first day due to a formidable though less than friendly law enforcement presence.

- Several of the police had some unkind things to say but there was no mob, there was no sort of open defiance, there was no one standing in the schoolhouse door in Memphis, the students went into the schools without incident and experienced what was certainly a difficult day.

- There were 13 of us that desegregated the Memphis city public schools in 1961 and the 13 of us were split up between four of the public schools.

Any five year old that's going to their first day of school, that's already traumatic enough and so I was upset that my father had to leave and I was a little upset because these kids didn't look like me.

- They all experienced extreme levels of isolation with just one exception they were split into different classrooms, so it was one student per classroom for most of the 13.

- So the children didn't know who they could talk to, who might be set empathetic and understand what they were going through.

So those people are the real heroes and heroines, it's unbelievable to me that children that age could do that much.

- [Narrator] Years later, Dwania Kyles asked her father if he would do it again, given the choice.

- He said, yeah, I feel guilty about it sometimes, I do.

He said, but it had to be done and he's right, it had to be done.

I think we could have done a better job of it as humans and individuals, because it was a traumatic experience.

We couldn't use the bathroom, we were called the N word all the time and it was really the older kids that are more brutal than the younger one.

And I literally stayed within the system from one through 12 and I think I was the only one of 13 that did that.

In the 11th grade when I started applying to colleges I remember standing up in my chair making an announcement to my family that I had done my part, I said, this I've done my part, I will be attending a black college or university just...

I didn't say just so you know, but just so you know (laughs).

(slow ambient music) - [Narrator] Despite the courage displayed by children of color across the south in the fight for desegregation as the 60s drew to a close, the goal of Brown V Board in many places remained just a dream.

- Schools were resegregating and in 1971, the Supreme Court said that if schools cannot be integrated by any other means, then busing must be used to achieve the goal of true integration.

Many white people just balked at that and refused to participate.

You see during this period of time the 60s and 70s, this enormous increase in private schools not only in the cities of Tennessee but in the rural areas.

- With the implementation of busing, there became a significant exodus of white families from the Memphis City school system.

And so the school district went from one that in 1970 was approximately 50% African American and 50% white to by 1973 it was down to about 30% white and 70% African American and that kind of trajectory continued until the 1980s and 90s to a point where the white population kind of levels off at like seven to 10%.

(slow ambient music) I think it's really crucial to keep in mind that desegregation was important as a symbol that racial segregation was no longer constitutional but it was really also just a means to ensuring higher quality, more equitable educational opportunities for African American students.

I think the real shame of this story is the ways in which the educational opportunities particularly for African American students in our community have been deprioritized and not fulfilled.

- It really is an unfinished story as we watch the resegregation of public education and the inability it would seem or the lack of will to address inequities in the way that we think about distributing educational resources, that hurts everybody.

- I think the most under credited factor for the success of black educational institutions is the self-determination of black people.

Despite underfunding, fires, despite all of the other forces that are always acting on black people they find a way to go on and on measure, they've done far more with far less than any other people in the American experience.

(slow ambient music) - [Announcer] Education: The Key to Freedom is made possible by, a grant from The Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Are, Amazon, Diversified Trust.

And the following, Cat Financial, Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company, Delta Dental of Tennessee, Regions Bank, Walmart and by members of NPT.

Thank you (upbeat music)