Audio clip
Booker T. Scruggs & Virgil Roberson
Black History Month got personal Thursday afternoon for students at East Lake Academy, as two local black leaders stopped by to tell about their struggles for racial equality in the 1960s.
Howard High School graduates Booker T. Scruggs and Virgil Roberson, who participated in a series of nonviolent sit-ins at lunch counters around Chattanooga in 1960, said they were allowed to buy items at the five-and-dime stores but could not be served lunch — a story many of today’s students don’t know.
“They think it’s always been this way, but it’s not,” Mr. Roberson said Thursday in East Lake’s cafeteria. “We couldn’t even have been here in this school, period, in 1960. This is a personal history that’s not in the school books.”
After showing a 15-minute documentary about the sit-ins and their local organizers, the two men took questions from the eighth-graders, most of whom were black.
Most of the students wanted to know how the participants felt about their involvement and how it changed their lives.
“It makes us very proud now ... back then, it was pretty scary,” Mr. Roberson said. “It was years before I told my parents we were involved.”
The 20-minute sit-ins were done without much planning, Mr. Scruggs said, and none of the participants told any adults.
East Lake teacher Buddy Sullivan, a friend of Mr. Scruggs and Mr. Roberson, said he organized Thursday’s assembly to raise awareness of local history, especially for the school’s Hispanic students whose parents and grandparents didn’t grow up here.
Benjamin Pascual, whose parents are from Guatemala, said he’d never before heard about the Howard sit-ins.
“This is my first time hearing the story, so I got pretty excited,” the 15-year-old said. “I never thought that ever happened here.”
Thirteen-year-old Shicovia Covington said hearing the story made her appreciate the fact that as a black student, she now has the same rights as her white classmates.
“The different races are together now. We go anywhere we want now,” she said. “There ain’t no more of that segregation.”
Kelli Gauthier covers K-12 education in Hamilton County for the Times Free Press. She started at the paper as an intern in 2006, crisscrossing the region writing feature stories from Pikeville, Tenn., to Lafayette, Ga. She also covered crime and courts before taking over the education beat in 2007. A native of Frederick, Md., Kelli came south to attend Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism. Before newspapers, ...
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