Go deeper into the Lee Buckner School house story in this recent article from The Tennessean: 

Georgia Harris traced her finger along the many faces in her class photo from first grade.

Her finger went down a seated row until she landed on herself.

“You see right there?” she asked. “That’s me.”

Harris attended the Lee Buckner School on Duplex Road as a child in the 1940s and 1950s. The one-room schoolhouse gave dozens of African-American students a place to learn before desegregation.

“I thought my teacher was the smartest person in the world,” she said. “She taught me cursive, and she would play us music because she played the piano. They taught the Bible, and we had to say a Bible verse every morning and have a devotion. School was much different then than it is now.”

Decades later, Harris’ school sits in tatters. Glass is shattered across the floor. Paneling has disappeared, and pieces of wood have deteriorated. Harris said she couldn’t sit idle while her school continued to fall apart.