THE curious history of the UNITED CLASS of 1968.  

We are made up of African American students from ALL of the graduating classes in Knoxville area schools in that year.

These students had gone to racially segregated schools until the time they entered high school. School desegregation was mandated by federal court orders in 1954. But many Southern districts resisted. The Knoxville schools eventually responded by implementing a phased desegregation plan starting in 1961.

The plan was designed to be implemented in stages, with each stage allowing a limited number of African American students to transfer to previously all-white schools. The plan began with the transfer of six African American students to a previously all-white elementary school. Over the next few years, additional cohorts were integrated by moving up one grade each year through the elementary and middle schools, then adding the high schools all at once.

However, as with other desegregation efforts, the integration of Knoxville City Schools was accompanied by “white flight,” where white families moved out of the city into predominantly white suburbs to avoid integration. As a result, the racial composition of the city’s schools swung significantly, with many schools becoming integrated, and then eventually, re-segregated. For example, in the school year 1967-68, the year before the merger, East High School was approximately 56% African American and 44% white. By 1970, the merged school, now called Austin-East was over 90% African American. A similar transition occurred in other city schools, though over a longer period.

The Class of ’68 was in high school during an early bubble when, yes, the schools were integrated, but society at large was not. We still carry some of the vestiges of that. But we’ve gone on to build lives, to build careers, to build families, and to reunite with the students of color we had known since elementary school. Bonds endure.

We offer these pages as an opportunity to REVISIT, to REMEMBER, to RECONNECT, to REKINDLE acquaintances, and to REMIND ourselves to REFLECT on who we are and from where we came, and to RECONCEIVE not only the past, but the present and future as well.