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Renaming Pearl High School
                 

One of the many unfortunate aftermaths of school desegregation throughout the American South was the renaming of integrated schools. There are few instances when the historic black school’s name was retained. Often the white schools continued in name as the area’s secondary school, and black schools, with their separate but unequal, inadequate facilities, were closed or turned into junior high schools. Pearl High School was no exception and, upon federal desegregation orders, the secondary school population was moved to a new location—a newly-built facility—where they joined students from a traditional white school forming the Pearl-Cohn Comprehensive High School. The 1936 Pearl building, closing in 1983, later reopened as the Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet School in 1986. The historical legacy of Pearl High School was implicitly if not explicitly dismissed. School officials even considered sand-blasting the name—removing Pearl High School—from the façade of the building.

  
   
   
       


 

In 2001, a community movement was initiated by the Pearl High Committee of Alumni & Friends to restore the name Pearl High School to this historic building. Presented by Alice Epperson, a petition to rename the school created some highly contentious discussions and deliberations yet was approved by the Metropolitan (Nashville) Public School Board in December 2001, and the building was retitled the Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet at Pearl High School. Interestingly, a significant and profound counter-narrative occurred during this renaming saga. Pearl High School’s alumni were so strong in their resolve to restore their school’s name, Metropolitan school board officials were willing to remove the Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet School designation and rename the building to historic Pearl High School.

 
                         

Alice Epperson of the Pearl High Heritage Classes Foundation, Inc. spoke against this recommendation. As she noted, “Pearl High graduates have children and grandchildren who had graduated from the MLK Jr. Magnet School. In my opinion, if we changed the name back to Pearl, we would be doing to our own children and grandchildren the same thing that had been to done to us—leaving them without a school. That was unacceptable. We were bigger than that. We knew the power and significance of a community and one’s love for their school. I could not do this to my child—to take away their school identity and dignity—and I could not do this to any other child.”


  
 
 
 
 
         
 
   
     
 


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