OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — At Robertsville Middle School in Oak Ridge, John Spratling has been teaching his fifth-grade students about the Scarboro 85. Now, it's a required part of the Tennessee curriculum after the state Department of Education voted to include it in the social studies curriculum.
Spratling teaches near the same place where 85 Black students faced hostility and division just to go to class, in September 1955. They were the first to integrate a public school in the southeast.
"It just makes me really emotional," Spratling said. "It's been a long process. And not only is it local history, state of Tennessee's, but it's also national history."
Students will start learning about the Scarboro 85 in the fifth grade. Lessons related to the trailblazer group of Black students will continue throughout the years.
"It's been a long time coming," said Ray Smith, an Oak Ridge historian. "I have no rationale to say why it took us 65 years to recognize it. Other than to say some of the members of the Scarboro 85, especially Larry Gibson. When someone would say Clinton 12, he'd say, 'No, Oak Ridge did it one year before,' And bless his heart, we finally listened to him."
Schools started integrating in the region after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It found that it was unconstitutional to separate children in schools on the basis of race, paving the way for future landmark Civil Rights decisions and legislation.
The group of students helped change the course of history while facing segregation, Jim Crow laws and intense division. In the 1940s, Scarboro was a woodland area where Black residents were separated from the rest of the community, living in hutments. These hutments were 14x14 frame units with no plumbing and a coal stove for heat.
From the 1940s to the 1950s, the Scarboro community moved from the woodland area to its current location in Gamble Valley, roughly two miles outside of Oak Ridge. Eventually, they built Scarboro School — the only school in the community for Black students. Some members of the Scarboro 85 attended that school before arriving at Robertsville
“We were the first to integrate into the whole Southeast United States, and you put it in perspective," Spratling said. "You can’t have a civil rights conversation and leave Oak Ridge out of it."