Home / Full timeline / Judge R. Allan Edgar dismisses a school segregation suit against the board of education of Chattanooga, Tennessee, 26 years after it was originally filed.
Judge R. Allan Edgar dismisses a school segregation suit against the board of education of Chattanooga, Tennessee, 26 years after it was originally filed.
1986 (Dec 10)
United States District Court Judge R. Allan Edgar dismissed a school segregation suit against the board of education of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was first filed in 1960. Edgar commented: “Based upon their conduct for many years, there is no indication that the defendants [the school board] will take any steps to reinstitute vestiges of segregation." He ruled that the board had finally met the court order to racially integrate students and faculty. At the time of Edgar's ruling, there were nearly 23,700 students, 51.26 percent of them Black, enrolled in Chattanooga's public schools. Most recently, the school board had reassigned 185 teachers in order that the faculty at each school in the system match approximately the 60-40 white-to-Black teacher ratio system wide. The desegregation suit, filed by Black real estate agent James Mapp, was "the longest to linger” in the federal court in Chattanooga. But Mapp, whose home was bombed in 1970, said, “I think the past effects of state-imposed racial discrimination and segregation have not been completely done away with.” He cited several local schools that were still either “almost 100 percent Black or white."
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.