Dec. 11 marked the 50th anniversary of lawsuit that ended segregated schools in Knoxville

Mountain View Elementary School, 1807 Dandridge Ave, pictured Dec. 20, 1969. The board of education voted to close Mountain View on Nov. 4, 1959 but changed its mind and decided to reopen it in April 1960 to relieve overcrowding at EastPort and Green, both black schools.

Josephine Goss

Charles Edgar Blair, left, and Theotis Robinson, Jr., 18, register for classes at at UT with William G. Smyth, assistant dean of admissions, Jan. 3, 1961. Blair and Robinson, along with Willie Mae Gillespie,w were the first black undergrad students at UT.

“With all deliberate speed” is a phrase associated with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding desegregation of public schools. It was a dictum apparently lost upon much of the country, including the Knoxville School Board of the 1950s and 1960s.

The complete desegregation of the Knoxville City School System was a drawn-out affair involving entrenched conservatism, the denial of multiple registration attempts by African Americans at white schools, delaying tactics by city school officials, scare mongering, multiple lawsuits and appeals, legal reversals, and the United States Supreme Court. Before all was said and done, the highest court in the land had overturned a previous ruling rendered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eastern District of Tennessee, though only as it pertained to one limited aspect regarding the right of Knoxville’s African American students to transfer to a different school within the city school system.

Remarkably, Knoxville’s public school system was not recognized as meeting the requirements of a “unitary school system” devoid of racial discrimination until 1974.

There were many dedicated people and organizations involved in the long fight for educational justice. The original desegregation petition against the City of Knoxville’s Board of Education was filed in 1956, with Josephine Goss’ parents as the primary signatories, but it was ultimately dismissed on a technicality. Additional suits, tagged Dianne Ward et al, were filed in the following three successive years and met the same fate. The specific legal impetus that finally secured the end of racial discrimination in Knoxville’s school system is traced back to Civil Action No. 3984, filed in Knoxville at the District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, Northern Division on December 11, 1959. The petition asked the court to force the school system to comply with the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Brown case for all Knoxville citizens and specifically to allow registration of 17 named individuals at three schools – Mountain View Elementary, Park Junior High and East High School. Among those African American children were Josephine Goss, Theotis Robinson, Jr., and Albert J. Winton, Jr. The lawsuit was referenced as Josephine Goss, et al v. Board of Education of the City of Knoxville, Tenn.

During the preliminary hearing following the filing of the Goss lawsuit, the district court trial judge, Judge Robert Taylor, gave the Knoxville Board of Education until April 8, 1960, to submit a plan for integration. Despite resistance on the part of the school board the body presented a plan by the dictated date. The so-called Plan 9 laid out a gradual desegregation of Knoxville schools to begin the 1960-61 school year with the first grade and proceeding at a one-grade-a-year pace in succeeding years. Clearly, “deliberate speed” was not what school board members had in mind. Further legal action in 1962 accelerated this glacier-speed plan, but it took another dozen years to resolve the issue for good.

Plaintiff Josephine Goss

“There was so much going on at that time,” recalls Mrs. Josephine Goss Sims, now 66 but 16 at the time of the lawsuit that bears her name. “I remember how explosive things were across the South. As a kid, we saw all of these things on television. My father took the lead along with a group of ministers – Rev. Nathaniel Lindsey, the minister at Mattie Coleman [Memorial Church] at the time, Rev. Frank Gordon and others. They got together with the parents who were willing to allow their children to attempt to register at East High School. They got a few willing parents.”

“The plan was to go to East High School and register, continued Goss Sims. It was right there in the neighborhood, but we could not go to it because it was a white school. When we went to register, it was like the principal was expecting us, which I’m sure he was. He told us he could not register Negroes, which, when he said it, he slurred as “Nigras.” He said ‘You have to go to the Knoxville Board of Education.’ We went there that same day, but we were denied.”

Goss Sims recalled that many parents initially involved backed down from further involvement because they were afraid of losing their jobs or of other reprisals.

“We had a sizable group that went out but those parents who stuck in there with this group still didn’t want to have their names printed,” said Mrs. Sims. “My father stood up and said he was willing for his daughter’s name to go in the paper. He was self-employed, and he had at that time a four-chair barbershop on Vine Street. He told the group that it did not matter to him because he was his own boss. See, his clientele were all black. My father was adamant about moving this forward.”

“I missed I don’t know how many weeks of school because I was in court. I remember going back and forth to court. I don’t know how much time it was, but to a teenager it seemed like forever because I wanted to get back with my friends.”

Ironically, despite being the primary signatory on the lawsuit that finally forced Knoxville schools to integrate, Goss, as with some of the other plaintiffs in the case, never went to an integrated school in the city school system because the desegregation was adopted so gradually. Goss graduated from all-black Austin High in 1961. But the courage she and her parents and others like them demonstrated meant that Goss’ two younger brothers and one sister, as well as countless other African Americans, were able to have expanded and more equable educational opportunity.

Goss enrolled at the University of Tennessee after high school but soon left to attend Lane College, a CME school in Jackson, Tenn. She graduated with a degree in elementary education and came back to Knoxville in 1965 to teach in the city school system. She said she was the only black teacher at an integrated but mostly white Park Junior High for three years before meeting her future husband, Gregory Sims. Mrs. Josephine Goss Sims now lives with her husband in Southfield, Mich.

Plaintiff Theotis Robinson Jr.

Another young high school student attempting registration at East High School in the fall of 1959 was 17-year-old Austin High senior Theotis Robinson, Jr., now Vice

President for Equity and Diversity at UT. Robinson remembers that equality of educational opportunity was a primary goal of school desegregation efforts.

“One of the reasons for wanting to desegregate to begin with was that “separate but equal” was never the case,” said Robinson. “It was very unequal. I remember as a student at Austin High being given textbooks that had been discarded from West High. Pages were missing and there was scribbling in the books.”

Robinson is careful to place the Josephine Goss, et al v. Knoxville Board of Education case in the historical continuum of ongoing local civil rights activities but acknowledges that it was an important piece of the various efforts to secure equal rights that began in earnest in the 1950s and ’60s.

“The Goss lawsuit of 1959 was special,” noted Robinson. “There were a number of people [involved], and while there were 17 plaintiffs, we all came from families and it was larger than just ourselves. Everybody was aware of this. It was the first serious effort that involved lots of people here to the best of my knowledge.”

As with Goss, the eventual desegregation of the Knoxville city school system came too late for Robinson’s personal benefit. He graduated at the end of that ’59-’60 school year and enrolled at UT the following year. His three siblings, the oldest of them 12 years younger than him, all had the opportunity to attend integrated schools from their earliest secondary school days, thanks to the desegregation legislation traced directly to the Goss et al case.

Robinson has worked on political and social issues ever since the Goss lawsuit. He was involved in the lunch counter sit-ins and other demonstrations that began the month he graduated from Austin High School in 1960. In 1961, he was one of the first three black students to enroll in undergraduate courses at the University of Tennessee. He was elected to the Knoxville City Council in 1970, at the time the first African American elected to that office in more than a half century, and served in that capacity for seven years. He joined the UT staff in 1989.

Plaintiff Albert J. Winton Jr.

In 1959, Albert and Lillian Winton lived within walking distance of Mountain View School on Dandridge Avenue. They had one child of school age at the time, 9-year-old son Albert Jr., and Mrs. Winton didn’t appreciate the fact that young Albert had to go all the way over to Eastport Elementary when he could walk to Mountain View.

Mrs. Winton remembers that several parents in the area got together to discuss the situation and decided to attempt registration at schools only serving white students.

“Father Matthew Jones and Rev. Frank Gordon went with us to walk in front,” recalled Mrs. Winton. “We got there, and there were photographers and policemen and people peeking out the window. I wasn’t scared, but we walked up and the principal said that we shouldn’t come in. So we went to the Board of Education and talked to the superintendent. He was pretty nice, but he said they weren’t quite ready [for desegregation] but they were working on it.”

The Wintons’ didn’t accept that, however, and joined with others in signing on with the Goss case. Their persistence meant son Albert Jr. would be able to go to an integrated Mountain View Elementary.

Albert Winton Jr., a successful commercial artist, said the school didn’t stay that way for long though.

“The kids that lived around the area were among the first black kids to go to Mountain View,” he recalled. “I was in the 5th grade at the time, and when we went [to Mountain View] the white kids left in droves. It was like all of a sudden Mountain View became a totally black school.”

When it came time for high school Winton’s parents urged him to go to Fulton High even though it was nowhere near home. Fulton was known for its high-quality college preparatory educational program and also a good vocational program.

“I went to Fulton High School because – and this is sad to say but you want to talk about separate but equal, it still wasn’t – you had more scholarship opportunities at the end of studies at Fulton than at Austin,” said Winton. “My parents felt like I should go to Fulton. It was way the heck away from home, but God love’em, they told me I’m going. Fulton offered a kind of a cache that went with that school that Austin didn’t have. It was kind of tough because we knew teachers at Austin. So to go traipsing all the way out to near Fountain City was questioned. But we were looking at the long view.”

Winton said the experience was unnerving at first. “When I got to Fulton, coming up through a segregated school system and all of a sudden, Boom! I’m one of only a few little brown faces over there. But aside from the first couple of weeks I was treated just like any other kid.”

Fulton High’s commercial art and drafting program turned out to be a blessing for Winton, who graduated from Fulton in 1972 and secured a scholarship to attend the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He went on to make industrial art his profession and now lives in St. Louis.

A special thanks to Bob Booker for providing access to his research materials, housed at the McClung Historical Collection, for use in this article.

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