Oak Ridge offers funding, location to Civil Rights history monument
Oak Ridge City Council member Ellen Smith talks to John Spratling, chairman of the Scarboro 85 Monument Celebration Committee, at the Oak Ridge Muncipal Building after a meeting of Oak Ridge City Council. (photo:Ben Pounds )
Oak Ridge City Council passed a resolution at its meeting, Monday, March 13, saying it will provide a spot at A.K. Bissel Park at the site formerly occupied by the International Friendship Bell. The bell recently moved to a new site in the park, leaving the old site as a place for this new monument to stand. Tentative plans for the monument are on the website scarboro85monument.com. The resolution passed unanimously among all the council members present, although Mayor Warren Gooch was not there. Councilmember Derrick Hammond made the motion and Councilmember Ellen Smith seconded. The resolution also calls on the City Council to support putting Oak Ridge’s desegregation in school curricula and in museums.
The Scarboro 85, named for the Oak Ridge neighborhood from which they came, began to attend Oak Ridge High School and Robertsville Middle School on Sept. 6, 1955, one year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision called for public schools to integrate. The Atomic Energy Commission ran Oak Ridge Schools at the time rather than the state of Tennessee. The Clinton 12 in neighboring Clinton became the first students to attend a formerly white state-run high school in the Southeast one year later, Aug. 26, 1956.
A sculpture honors the Clinton 12 outside the Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton. Plaques at Oak Ridge’s schools honor the Scarboro 85, but no large monument to them on the scale of the Clinton 12 sculpture exists yet.
“The significance of it would be to get Oak Ridge into Civil Rights history,” John Spratling, chairman of the Scarboro 85 Monument Celebration Committee, which is separate from the city of Oak Ridge government, told City Council. “We were the first to break the Jim Crow segregation throughout the whole Southeast. Whereas everyone else kind of waited to see what happened, Oak Ridge took a stance.”
Spratling is also a basketball coach, athletic director and fifth-grade social studies teacher at Robertsville Middle School.
It is not clear how much money to pay for the monument will come from the city. Council’s resolution states only that City Council will “consider” a request for money at a future date. A memo by city staff included in Council’s agenda estimated the full cost at $2 million but stated that “fundraising and grant applications” will cover that cost rather than all of it falling on city taxpayers. The Scarboro 85 Monument Celebration Committee, which advocates for this monument, already held a sold-out fundraiser last month with Civil Rights leader Harold Middlebrook at Oak Ridge’s Doubletree by Hilton Hotel Feb. 23.
Spratling told the Courier-News people can donate at Scarboro85monument.com. He said he was reaching out to the NFL, NBA and WNBA for donations. However, he still wanted at least some city buy-in.
“If they endorse it, that gives it credibility,” he said of the city, saying a city contribution would attract other donors.
The resolution stated the city plans to reach out to the Tennessee State Board of Education to request the Scarboro 85 be part of the state’s upcoming Social Studies curriculum standards. Spratling told the Courier-News that the Clinton 12 were already part of the state curriculum, but the Oak Ridge 85 were not.
The resolution speaks of reaching out to “the state of Tennessee Civil Rights museums” and the “National Civil Rights African American Museums in Washington D.C.” Spratling said he also wanted to see the Scarboro 85 acknowledged at the American Museum of Science and Energy and Oak Ridge History Museum, both in Oak Ridge. He said his group had already been working with the Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton.
“It’s kind of a partnership thing. We’re not competing with each other as most people think. We’re actually working together because this is good for Anderson County, because this is what happened in Anderson County, and it helps both of us,” he said. “We’re working together to get history told in its totality.
“It’s becoming known but we’re still having to educate people about something that happened almost 70 years ago,” he said.