Storyteller returns to Oak Ridge to dramatize Scarboro 85 experience

Carolyn Krause

Acclaimed professional Black storyteller Sheila Arnold returns to Oak Ridge next week to retell the Scarboro 85 story she first dramatized at the Flatwater Tales Storytelling Festival in June 2022 in the Historic Grove Theater. She will speak here nine times about the first historic desegregation of schools in the Southeast that took place in 1955 at Oak Ridge High School and Robertsville Junior High School.

Sheila Arnold
Sheila Arnold

She will give four free public performances Feb. 20-23 at different Oak Ridge venues during Black History Month. The festival committee had commissioned her in 2021 to develop and relate the story in 2022. She conducted research and interviewed members of the Scarboro 85.

Thanks to a grant the festival committee received from the Tennessee Arts Commission and matching funds from a patron, "Ms. Sheila," as she is known on the national storytelling circuit, will dramatically portray the experiences of a few of the 85 Black students who obeyed a federal government order to desegregate two all-white Oak Ridge schools beginning on Sept. 6, 1955.

"These events will help us get support for creating a spectacular monument to tell the story of the Scarboro 85 and make this great story an official part of the Tennessee History curriculum,” said John Spratling, a Black social studies teacher at Robertsville Middle School for almost 30 years and the school’s winningest boys’ basketball team coach. He is leading this effort along with Rose Weaver, local Black historian, to commemorate the historical Scarboro 85 accomplishment.

The Scarboro 85 students “left Scarboro School where they were loved and nurtured to catch buses to go where they were, by and large, merely tolerated in the hallway, in classes and even at the prom at the high school, which had 1,400 students,” said Martha Hobson, co-chair of the Flatwater Tales Storytelling Festival committee.

“When Ms. Sheila tells this story, it becomes so real that you can smell the fumes from those old 1950s buses,” said Sue Byrne, committee co-chair.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission issued an order to desegregate the two Oak Ridge schools in response to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in the Brown vs. Board of Education case. The highest court decided that separating children in public schools because of race was unconstitutional. The lesser-known Oak Ridge school desegregation preceded the more famous school desegregation cases including the Clinton 12 at Clinton High School (Aug. 26, 1956) and the Little Rock Nine at Little Rock Central High School (1957).

Since 2003 Ms. Sheila has provided storytelling, character interpretation and professional development programs at storytelling festivals, schools, churches, libraries, professional organizations and museums in 41 states. A member of the Virginia Storytelling Alliance, she was honored as Arts for Learning’s Artist of the Year in 2010. In January 2020, Ms. Sheila was George Washington’s Mount Vernon Research Fellow, enabling her to deepen her knowledge of the many details of the historical characters she portrays.

She will give four free public performances:

  • 3 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 20, at the Scarboro Community Center, 148 Carver Ave.;

  • 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 21, at the Goff Building, Roane State Community College, 701 Briarcliff Ave.;

  • 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 21, at Oak Valley Baptist Church, 194 Hampton Road; And

  • 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 22, at the American Museum of Science and Energy, 115 E. Main St., hosted by the Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association.

Ms. Sheila will also tell the story to numerous classes at Jefferson and Robertsville middle schools and Oak Ridge High School.

The Flatwater Tales Storytelling Festival, which is presenting these special events and will again host professional storytellers in early June 2024, is a joint project of Oak Ridge’s three Rotary clubs, and its major sponsors are CNS Y-12 National Security Complex and Pinnacle Bank. Ms. Sheila’s free public appearances are made possible by a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Storyteller returns to Oak Ridge to dramatize Scarboro 85 experience

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