Lifelong Bonds Grew Out Of 1960s Eastdale Elementary Desegregation

In the fall of 1962, Eastdale Elementary School was desegregated by court order.
 
More than 50 years later, many of these pioneering former black and white students have stayed together as friends – by choice.
 
Between regular lunch gatherings and a yearly Labor Day weekend reunion on the old school grounds off Moss Drive, they are teaching lessons about harmony in an era when many believe America has still not been made socially and racially whole.
 
And they all credit the lessons learned at Eastdale in the 1960s as a big reason, even though the experiences were not perfect.
 
“It taught me not to believe what anybody says about a person,” said Brad Fulghum, a former white student who became a close friend of classmate Jeff Sears, the first black student at Eastdale. “You get to know the person and not stereotype a whole race. To this day I look at everyone as individuals.”
 
Rosie Hart Russell, who was one of Eastdale’s first black female students and has chaired an annual reunion that has continued the amicable relationships, agrees that all the experiences past and present have been collectively good.
 
“It’s definitely been positive,” she said. “We have renewed a bond because we all grew up next to each other or across the road from each other. When we see each other, the bond is still there.”
 
The desegregation of Eastdale and the other local schools in 1962 came about after a federal suit was filed locally to get the community to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling of 1954.
 
Local civil rights leader James Mapp, who died in June, and several other black parents filed suit because their children were to be bused farther away than Glenwood Elementary due to overcrowded conditions at Orchard Knob Elementary.
 
While many places in the South and elsewhere during that time often integrated the high schools or all grades amid some protest, in Chattanooga the plan was to desegregate only grades one-three.
 
That and a lot of planning by local school, business and church leaders helped make the local transition much smoother than in some other communities, even though Chattanooga was the last of the four major cities in the state to integrate.
 
In the city, formerly all-white Eastdale, Elbert Long, Glenwood, Missionary Ridge, St. Elmo and Sunnyside elementary schools were desegregated. One white student attempted to enroll at the all-black Clara Carpenter School, but apparently only black students ended up attending classes there that first year. In the county, formerly all-white Lookout Mountain and Hixson elementaries were also desegregated.
 
At each school an armed police officer was on duty.
 
At Eastdale, the talk was that four students would attend. However, when second-grader Jeff Sears and his mother, Vera, who, like her husband, Rayfield, had grown up in Alabama, showed up to register and enroll that first day, they realized he would be the only black student.
 
He and his family had moved to the mostly white Eastdale area between Tunnel Boulevard and the Wilcox Tunnel farther west that summer from a mostly black neighborhood in St. Elmo.
 
A poignant picture of a young Mr. Sears and his mother walking into the then-25-year-old school building as four white teachers stood outside and talked with a young white student was taken by News-Free Press photographer George Moody. Mr. Moody’s son, George, also attended Eastdale.
 
While the first experiences of integration in America were isolating even for groups, it was even more so for Mr. Sears as the only black student. However, he did decide to stick with it, and that began the positive Eastdale story.
 
“After that first day, my mother and father and I discussed whether I wanted to go through with it being the only one,” he recalled. “I told them I’d give it a try.
 
“There were some lonely days when I had no one to play with at the beginning of school, but that changed with time.”
 
While a high court order had gotten him into the school, the simplicity of children’s toys helped him finally get accepted socially. Mr. Sears said he was feeling down that no one wanted to play with him during recess or at other times, so his mother got him some Army toys. That did the trick, and he soon had some friends.
 
“They would come sit next to me and play with me,” he said with a chuckle. “That was real genius on her part.”
 
Mr. Sears would also soon be accepted as an outstanding athlete, and he would pitch four no-hitters as a grammar school baseball player during those years when Eastdale School and the community were known for having a good baseball program.
  
One of Mr. Sears’ white classmates during the years at Eastdale was Mr. Fulghum, who remembers that he and the other white students were asking each other that first day if they had seen the new black student.
 
And despite the new experiences that were against the norms of the time, it turned out to be positive for Mr. Fulghum, and the two eventually became close friends.
 
“My family was very blessed to accept people,” said Mr. Fulghum, who grew up on Mark Twain Circle.
 
Other black students would soon enroll in Eastdale in the years after Mr. Sears. Ms. Russell said she and Cynthia Dunnigan Dawkins joined Mr. Sears two years later in the fourth grade in 1964-65 as the first two black female students in that class. Other early black students there included Brinkley Walton, Anita Leath, and Aaron Elliott, among others.
 
Ms. Russell’s father operated a radiator shop, and they had moved to Greenwood Road after she had formerly attended Orchard Knob Elementary. She recalled that it was a little nerve-racking attending with her sister a new school that was still mostly white.
 
“I remember being nervous and apprehensive,” she said. “Nobody spoke to us and nobody wanted to sit by us.”
 
The teachers were all white and the only black staff member at that time was the janitor, a Mr. Johnson, she said.
 
However, the white teachers all had a positive manner, she said, and the white principal, Cecil Aldridge, was considered a saint of a man by several of them for the good environment he created.
 
Only years later did they learn that this man who had served on the battlefields of Europe as a decorated Army medic during World War II had to fight his own verbal battles during the 1960s with those less tolerant of integration. As a result, he had to undergo his own isolation, just as the black students did.
 
“During this time, he lost friends and friendships and people quit talking to him and he got death threats,” Mr. Sears said, adding that he learned this information from Mr. Aldridge’s wife, Edna, following his death in 2008 at the age of 88.
 
However, in Mr. Sears’ eyes and in those of some of the others, he was a very admirable man.
 
“He was a tremendous help during this time,” Mr. Sears said. “He was a very fair man, a very good man.”
 
A man who once delivered the old afternoon News-Free Press after his teaching job at Eastdale before becoming principal, Mr. Aldridge went on to serve as a principal at Dalewood Junior High and Washington Elementary. He was also a Sunday school teacher and active member of Eastdale and St. John United Methodist churches and was also involved with the Dalewood Lakeside Lions Club and its service projects.
 
He had also coached the Knothole baseball team at Eastdale.
 
The members of that first integrated class at Eastdale went on to Dalewood Junior High and then Brainerd High before graduating in 1973. While they developed other friends, they also maintained their close connection that had been nurtured at Eastdale, they said.
 
Although Chattanooga Mayor Ralph Kelley had been able to keep racial problems that confronted other cities to a minimum, due in part to his sensitivity to the issue, Chattanooga was later beset with some problems after he left office.
 
That included some controversy at Brainerd High in the fall of 1969, when some black students protested the use of old Confederate symbols and the playing of “Dixie” as a fight song. That prompted rallies and protests from Confederate flag-waving white students, who in part saw it at the time as school pride, one alumnus remembered.
 
At the time of the Brainerd unrest, the old Eastdale class members were still in ninth grade at Dalewood. By the time they graduated from Brainerd, it had become about 20-30 percent black, Mr. Fulghum said, and its class managed to get along mostly well during those more tumultuous times.
 
Of course, there were some racially related incidents at Brainerd during the early 1970s, one alumnus remembered, and neither the black nor white students were totally blameless. Of course, that is likely to happen anytime high school students are trying to find themselves, even when they are not attempting to solve the world’s social problems.
 
Mr. Sears was remembered by Mr. Fulghum as very much a peacemaker during those days, but in the athletic arenas he showed his ferocity. He went on to become a good athlete at Brainerd and played football for Coach Pete Potter before coach Potter was named head coach at McCallie after their senior season. Mr. Sears recalls that a young Ralph Potter – who later followed his father into coaching and is now also the McCallie coach – would hang out at their practices during those days, and all the Brainerd players took a liking to him and treated him like a baby brother.
 
After they all graduated in 1973, the Brainerd class held reunions, and the experiences became positive. In fact, Mr. Fulghum recalled a family member’s surprise after attending a Brainerd class reunion with him a few years ago. “She had never seen so many black and white people hug each other,” he said with a laugh.
 
Today, that bond continues as well among the old Eastdale friends, both black and white. Mr. Fulghum said he and such people as Jeff and Jerry Sears, Gary Hicks, George Moody, Ronnie Thompson and Lamar White get together once a month, and he and his buddy, Jeff Sears, also get together around Christmastime.
 
“We talk about our spirituality. It’s a very good time,” he said of his meetings with Mr. Sears.
 
Ms. Russell has also worked with Mr. Sears, Lily Dunnigan Thomas and Belinda Sears Smith to hold the Labor Day reunions on the old school grounds, where the newer Eastdale Recreation Center now sits. They have been able to meet almost every year over the last five or so years.
 
“It was a dream all of us who went to Eastdale School had,” she said. “We used to run into each other and said, ‘Why don’t we start a reunion?’ ”
 
Besides school alumni and their friends, the larger Eastdale community is also invited, she said.
 
Unfortunately, the tangible reminders of their old school are no longer there. The old building, the original part of which apparently dated to 1937 and was remembered as an old school by the former students, was closed in 1989 at a time when several local schools were consolidated.
 
In the spring of 1991, a newspaper article announced that it was to be torn down soon, but a fire that July sped up the demolition.
 
No sign of a fire or school remains today despite the nice field there, but the positive memories of that time still burn brightly in the minds of many of the alumni from those trailblazing days of the 1960s.
 
“A whole lot of good came out of that learning experience, a whole lot of positives,” said Mr. Fulghum.