Back in 1954, Black students in Anderson County were bused to Knoxville to attend Austin High School as there wasn’t a segregated school for them to attend in their home county. Imagine how early you’d have to get up, over 70 years ago, before the interstate highway system existed, to make a 30ish mile bus trip into Knoxville just go to high school?
Then came the Supreme Court’s landmark 9-0 decision in Brown v. The Board of Education that wiped the “separate but equal” travesty of the knuckle dragging Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 from the books. Public schools could not exclude students on the basis of race. Decades of systemic educational oppression were set to crumble.
But it wouldn’t happen immediately nor easily. In a lot of areas it took years, in some over a decade (we see you, Mississippi). In general, heels were dragging on integration across the old confederacy. Back in Anderson County (home to three school systems), Oak Ridge schools become among the first in the southeast to desegregate. But those schools fell under the Atomic Energy Commission, a federal agency…