Former Trotter Elementary moved from all-white school to all-black school in one year

In the fall of 1956, Bonnie Cooper began first grade at Frank H. Trotter Elementary School with the rest of her black classmates.

A year earlier, the Alton Park school had only white pupils.

“When I moved to South Central (Avenue), it was predominately white,” said Ms. Cooper, 57, who lives in Shalimar, Fla. “I think we were the third black family out there. A few years later, it was all black.”

Trotter Elementary, which had been known previously as Alton Park Elementary, was one of nearly 40 elementary schools in the Chattanooga City Schools that area baby boomers attended from the 1950s through the early 1980s but which closed by the end of the latter decade.

The school was named after Frank H. Trotter, a longtime principal of Alton Park Elementary and later a Chattanooga city commissioner in the 1940s and 1950s.

Built in the early 1930s, it closed in 1974 and later was torn down.

Louise Johnson, whose late husband, W. Claude Johnson, was principal of the then-all white school from 1946 to 1956, said then Alton Park was a “very good school,” while Ms. Cooper recalled her experiences at Trotter as “all good.”

The one-story, dark red brick building was built in the shape of an “L,” with a cafeteria on one end and offices and an auditorium in the angle of the “L.”

“It was one big, flat building,” said Mrs. Johnson, “and the hallways, they were the longest things.”

The halls and bathrooms were painted a mint green, said Pat Carter Coppin of Atlanta, who attended the school in the 1960s.

Susan Byrd, who did her student teaching at Trotter in 1968 and was a classroom teacher there from 1969 to 1974, said the property also had a small house in which the custodian lived and a playground crossed by railroad tracks.

Velsicol Chemical was across Central Avenue from the school.

The first principal of the all-black school was E.E. Pitts, Ms. Cooper said.

Once when she was at the front of the lunch line, the principal with the “engaging smile” spoke to her and noted that since she led the line she must be a class leader, she said.

“At that point,” Ms. Cooper said, “his words did swim around in my head. But after that I made it a point to seem smart and be a leader.”

The next principal, Janie Holder, stayed a number of years.

“She was very refined, very articulate,” said Mrs. Coppin, 53. “She was a tremendous role model.”

“She was awesome,” said Ms. Cooper, who remembered the principal’s erect posture and high heels. “She was a queen in her domain. There was something ominous about her in the sense that students had an awesome respect for her. She seemed to be in control.”

Mrs. Coppin and Ms. Cooper both remembered annual stage productions in which every grade would participate, and Ms. Coppin said an annual May Day competition always brought in pupils from several area schools.

John P. Franklin, later an area principal and Chattanooga city commissioner, was the school’s itinerant gym teacher, according to Ms. Cooper.

“It was always wonderful to see him coming,” she said, “because we knew we were going to run and do some kind of exercises.”

Mrs. Cooper said she later would occasionally baby-sit for Mr. Franklin’s children, one of whom is present city councilman John P. “Duke” Franklin Jr.

In 1974, when Trotter Elementary closed at mid-year after a federal court case mandated busing to achieve racial balance in schools, Mrs. Byrd said she and her students moved to East Lake Elementary. Trotter students went to both Piney Woods Elementary and East Lake because Trotter was the smallest of the three schools with which it was grouped, she said.

“We had to move in three days,” she said.

Trotter, according to Mrs. Byrd, had been a “nice, little school” with working class parents. Several, she said, went back to college and earned their degrees while she had their children and went on to teach themselves.

Mrs. Coppin, who is founder and program director for Community Alert Inc. in Atlanta, said any success she has had was built on the foundation she received at the school.

“The teachers were really interested in teaching,” she said, “and it didn’t just stay in the classroom. It transferred into your home.”