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The Pearl High School Building

The Pearl School opened in 1883 as the first public school for blacks in Nashville, the “Athens of the South” and the first Southern city to institute a public school system. Named for Joshua Fenton Pearl, the city's first superintendent of public schools, the primary school located at South Summer Street (Fifth Avenue South) was staffed with white teachers until 1887 when black educators were employed. In 1897, a secondary school program was added. The high school moved to a second site in 1917, located on Sixteenth Avenue North and Grant Street. The Secondary School Study’s work, occurring through the 1940s, took place at the third Pearl High School site at Eighteenth and Jo Johnston Streets, North Nashville neighborhood, just blocks from Fisk University.

  
                       

From the 1946 Secondary School Study catalogue description of Pearl High School

“Pearl Senior High School is a public high school in one of the South’s largest industrial centers. It provides opportunities for observation and practice teaching by students from Fisk University. It is about four blocks from Fisk University and is on a car line, thereby making it possible for students living far away to ride to the school’s door. Nashville, with its colleges, hospitals and social centers, exerts a favorable influence on Pearl High. The Nashville board of education provides considerable curricular services of an advisory nature to the school. Pearl High houses three grades 10-12, consisting of about 1,100 pupils. Its health rooms, cafeteria, and gymnasium and generally well-appointed plant provide a wide range of educational activities, both general and vocational. In 1940, nearly 60 percent of its faculty of 36 teachers held master’s degrees. The school received regional accreditment in 1941. The population of Nashville is about 160,000, 40 percent of which are Negroes. There are 14 Negro schools; 8 elementary, 5 junior high and one senior high school.” (1)

      
                     
         

Pearl High School’s curriculum was distinguished at the time for its extensiveness, yet was still somewhat conventionally organized with courses in English, mathematics, social studies, science, art, commerce, manual training, home economics, cosmetology, and music. The school’s student enrollment during the time of the Secondary School Study included a predominance of girls with 85% of the students continuing their studies at the post-secondary level. Enrollment was lower during the 1940s due to the war conditions “with many of the boys being drafted into the armed forces and many girls leaving school for new opportunities in employment.” (2)

    


The third Pearl High School site
of the Secondary School Study

      


McKissack and McKissack, the nation’s first black architectural firm, designed the third Pearl High School building, constructed in 1936-37 and opened in 1937. Considered at the time the finest school for blacks in the South, the building’s art deco design included terrazzo floors at the entry level.

  

Pearl High School represented a construction project of the Public Works Administration (PWA) and was viewed by some as a political plum for past voters’ support. As the African-American community of Nashville shifted its political allegiance to the Democrats at the national level, “President Roosevelt and the Democratic party rewarded black Nashvillians for their support with . . . a huge new Pearl High School.” (3) Included in the school facility was one of the largest auditoriums available to the African American community in Nashville. This performance venue enriched the extra-curricular offerings of the school and further established Pearl High School as a center of cultural activity for the black community. A vocational building was added in 1945 and another gymnasium was built in 1964.

 
Autographed photograph from W. C. Handy after a Pearl High school performance

In 1983, Nashville’s federal desegregation plan merged Pearl High School with the predominantly white Cohn High School. A secondary school complex, Pearl-Cohn Comprehensive High School, was built at a new location in north Nashville, the former site of two traditionally black schools. In 1986, the Pearl building was renamed the Martin Luther King, Jr. Magnet School. Years later and with the urging of the Pearl High School Alumni Association, this building was re-named the “Martin Luther King, Jr. Magnet School at Pearl High School.” The Tennessee Historical Commission designated the site as an historical landmark in 1992 and, in 2004, the site was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Endnotes:
1) W. H. Brown & W. A. Robinson, Serving Negro Needs, Atlanta: ACSSN, 1946, p. 30.
2) Sadie R. Galloway, “A Comparative Study of Certain Characteristics of Student Leaders and Non-student Leaders in a Public High school,” M.A. thesis, Fisk University, 1945, p. 14.
3) Bobby L. Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1930, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999, p. 232.

    
 


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