In presentation remarks, ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy said to the group of former students, five of whom were able to attend the event, “I want to thank each and every one of you. We know that it must have taken great courage to step through that doorway that morning. You have done so much for so many of the other generations."
Some history: The Scarboro 85 hail from Oak Ridge, in the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee, a city that was secretly built as part of the Manhattan Project. It is the home of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the birthplace of the atomic bomb. In the 1950s, the city was still federally run and managed by the AEC.
An initial proposal to integrate Oak Ridge’s schools was made in 1953 by Manhattan Project veteran, biochemist, and then-chair of Oak Ridge’s Advisory Town Council, Waldo Cohn.
In December 1953 at Cohn’s urging, the seven-person council voted 4–2 in favor of petitioning the AEC to include Oak Ridge in President Dwight Eisenhower’s executive order to integrate schools on all military posts. The petition caused a swift uproar within the racially segregated Tennessee community. Subjected to antisemitic abuse and a recall election that fell just short of a two-thirds majority to remove him from the council, Cohn stepped down as chair in 1954. Under pressure, the council also rescinded their integration resolution but tabled the issue of desegregation for further study by committee.
Then in January 1955, the AEC stepped in and ordered the city to desegregate its public schools. That September—two full years prior to desegregation in Little Rock, Ark.—85 young black students from Oak Ridge’s Scarboro community cautiously entered the previously whites-only classrooms at Oak Ridge High School and Robertsville Junior High School. This made the facilities the first public schools in the southeast to become racially integrated.
About the group, Rose Weaver, a black historian and member of the Scarboro 85 Monument Committee, said, “Those brave young students and key leadership from the Department of Energy [then the AEC] helped begin the modern civil rights era—back in 1955.”
