Fehr School, named for local merchant and former school board member Rudolph Fehr and designed by architects Dougherty and Gardner, opened in 1924. On Sept. 9, 1957, it became one of the first schools in Nashville to desegregate, admitting four African American first graders who attended despite a hostile atmosphere. Some 200 protestors surrounded the school, and it received bomb threats before Hattie Cotton School was firebombed shortly after midnight on Sept. 10. In Brown v. Topeka (1954) and Brown II (1955), the U.S. Supreme Court ordered public schools nationwide to end racial segregation "with all deliberate speed," but Nashville failed to comply, leading to Kelley v. Board of Education in 1955 and to the 1957 enactment of a grade-per-year plan beginning with first grade. In 1963, Maxwell v. Davidson County (1960) was merged with the Kelley case, and in 1998 the court deemed the Metro school system desegregated.
