Separate But Equalized

Saturday, May 17 marked the 60^th anniversary of the famed 1954  Brown v. Board of Education case that upended “separate but equal” schools. Perry Wallace entered elementary school in the fall of that year, 1954, and attended segregated schools in Nashville all the way through high school. He said his teachers did all they could to provide a stellar education to their students, creating a learning environment Wallace describes as “separate but equalized.” Denied opportunities in the Nashville job market, many of Wallace’s teachers held masters degrees and several had studied under the legendary W.E.B. DuBois. Wallace thrived in the classroom, becoming valedictorian of his senior class at Pearl High  School and earning a double engineering major at Vanderbilt before earning his law degree at Columbia University.