Pearl School

Item Name: Pearl School
Creator: Molly Taylor-Poleskey
Lede: School shaped lives of Nashville's black leaders for decades
Story-Subject: The first African-American public primary school in Nashville was built on this site (then 217 S. Summer St) in 1893. The Pearl School was named for the first superintendent of Nashville schools, Joshua F. Pearl.

The new building was the pride of the Nashville Public School system. At the outset of the 1883 school year, the Board of Education reported in the Daily American newspaper that the leading improvements for the year were the two “new school buildings for colored children." The larger of the two projects was the Pearl School and the other was the Meigs School. The Pearl School building was “inside as well as out a model of architecture and finish.” The furniture was made of walnut and oak and included the latest educational technologies including desks with newly-patented ink wells in them. In 1885, the value of the property was estimated at $15,000.

James C. Napier (1845-1940), the era’s last African-American city councilman pushed for a public high school for Nashville African-Americans. Although the board passed that resolution in 1884, the School Board didn’t move to create the African-American high school until Sandy Porter attempted to enroll her black son in a white high school in 1886. The African-American high school started out at the Meigs School, but was rolled into the Pearl School in 1897.

This location for the building was in a prominent African-American neighborhood that was already home to many other elite institutions of higher education, including the African-American schools of Central Tennessee College and Meharry Medical School. All of these schools were eventually moved out of the downtown area, including the Pearl School itself, which relocated to larger facilities at 16th Ave. North in North Nashville and later at 17th Ave. North.

The school house remained vacant from 1917 until 1924 when the Nashville School Board reopened it as the Henry Cameron School, in honor of H. H. Cameron, a Pearl High teacher who died in World War I. The Cameron School also relocated in 1940. It is unclear when the original brick school building was destroyed, but the Sanborn Fire Insurance map that was updated until 1951 shows a building of a different shape on the site listed as the “5th Av. Terminal Inc. Motor Freight Sta.”

The Pearl School was part of a wave of schools built to educate the 4 million newly freed African-Americans in the years after the Civil War. One hundred African-American colleges were established in the U.S. from 1865-1910 and many students were educated with the objective of becoming primary school teachers. The Pearl School originally was the only African-American public school in the city to have white teachers. Beginning in 1887, though, the school employed African-American teachers. Schools like Fisk University fed the need for well-educated teachers at Pearl. For example, Lena Terrell Jackson (1865-1943), who taught Latin at Pearl High School for over 50 years, was born in a slave cabin, and earned a bachelor’s degree from Fisk in 1885 before entering teaching. Nearing retirement in 1939, Jackson reflected on her life’s work, “I have devoted my life to endeavor to uplift my race by teaching and instructing children, realizing that by helping promote the cause of education among the colored race and the developing of the mind, the great questions that are before my people can more easily and properly be met.” In her obituary, one former student remembered her knowledge and dedication, “She knew every word of every line of Caesar, Cicero and all of the other classics she taught. When we missed a word, she told us what it should have been, without ever looking at the book.”

Pearl High School was eventually combined with the Cohn High School as part of desegregation in the 1980s. In 1998, alumni of Pearl High School gathered to mark its centennial and reflect on the school’s legacy of educating Nashville’s African-American teenagers to the highest standards. The Pearl High School and Cameron High School alumni groups continue to memorialize these two important Nashville institutions.
Subtitle: Nashville's first African-American public elementary school
Subject: Nashville's first African-American public school.
Source: File #46: "Unknown group with J.A. Galloway and teachers possibly 1893"
Description - Students and teachers of Pearl School
Source
http://www.pearlhighalumnitn.com/photo-gallery.html
Date - 1893
Rights - Pearl High Alumni Association, Inc.

File #47: "H.A. Cameron B.A.L.L.B. Science, Miss Lena Jackson M.A. Latin"
Source
http://www.pearlhighalumnitn.com/photo-gallery.html
Date - ca. 1880
Rights - Pearl High Alumni Association, Inc.

File #48: "First Pearl High School South Summer Street & 5th Ave. So. 1898-1916"
Description - The first building of the Pearl School
Source
http://www.pearlhighalumnitn.com/photo-gallery.html
Date - ca. 1898
Rights - Pearl High Alumni Association, Inc.

File #49: "Zoom into Pearl School from Bird's-eye view of Nashville, Tenn. in the 1880s"
Description - This is an illustrated, hand tinted map of Nashville, (Tenn.) during the 1880s from an eastern perspective. Map has detailed and color-coded illustrations of Nashville commercial buildings, churches, houses, and structures from an aerial view. There is a numbered key at the bottom that provides names of businesses and buildings. The Cumberland River runs through the lower section of the map with steam boats passing along it. The city is in the center of the map and hills are in the distance in the upper section.
Historical Note The original map was drawn and published originally by H. Wellge & Co., Milwaukee, in 1888. This is a facsimile of a print owned by Mr. Stanley F. Horn and reproduced with his kind permission in 1958 by First American National Bank of Nashville. It was tinted April 1969 by Katherine W. Ewing and presented to the Manuscript Division of the Tennessee State Library and Archives. A framed print of this map hangs in the Manuscripts area of the South Reading Room at TSLA.
Creator - Wellge, H. (Henry)
Source
http://cdm15138.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15138coll23/id/334
Date - 1880s (reprinted 1958)
Rights - Tennessee State Library and Archives. All rights reserved.

File #50: “"The City Schools"”
Description - Newspaper article describing the new Pearl School in 1883
Creator - The Daily American
Source
https://www.newspapers.com/image/118945691/?terms=pearl+school
Date - September 4, 1883.
Rights - The names, logos, and other source identifying features of newspapers depicted in Newspapers.com are the trademarks of their respective owners, and our use of newspaper content in the public domain or by private agreement does not imply any affiliation with, or endorsement from, the publishers of the newspaper titles that appear on our site. Newspapers.com makes these newspapers available for the purpose of historical research, and is not responsible for the content of any newspapers archived at our site.

File #51: "Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Detail to former Pearl School site. Plate"
Date - 1914-1951

File #52: "Sanborn Fire Insurance Map detail of Pearl School, plate 102"
Date - 1897

File #53: "City Council. Nashville and her Property."
Creator - The Tennessean
Source - Accessed December 4, 2017. https://www.newspapers.com/image/119196300/?terms=nashville%2Bschools
Date - October 4, 1885.
Rights - The names, logos, and other source identifying features of newspapers depicted in Newspapers.com are the trademarks of their respective owners, and our use of newspaper content in the public domain or by private agreement does not imply any affiliation with, or endorsement from, the publishers of the newspaper titles that appear on our site. Newspapers.com makes these newspapers available for the purpose of historical research, and is not responsible for the content of any newspapers archived at our site.
Official Website of historic site/monument: Donald Johnson, "Cameron School History." Cameron High School Alumni Association. Accessed December 4, 2017. Lynda Wynn. "History of Pearl High School." Pearl High Alumni Association. Accessed December 4, 2017.
Related Resources: “The City Schools. Notes of Preparation for the Coming Session.” The Daily American, September 4, 1883. Accessed December 4, 2017. https://www.newspapers.com/image/118945691/?terms=pearl+school

Louise Davis. "Popular Negro Teacher Dies But Her Enthusiasm Lives On. Lena Terrell Jackson, Master of Latin Classics, Left Imprint on Careers of Hundreds of Pupils." The Nashville Tennessean, Wednesday Morning, September 8, 1943. Accessed December 4, 2017. https://www.newspapers.com/image/148631993/

Sonya Ramsay. Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 15-16.

Patrick Connolly. "Pearls of Wisdom. 100 years later, a historic high school still makes its mark." The Tennessean, July 26, 1998. Accessed December 4, 2017. https://www.newspapers.com/image/111893125

Pethel, Mary Ellen, and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman. "Lift Every Female Voice: Education and Activism in Nashville’s African American Community, 1870–1940." In Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, edited by Bond Beverly Greene and Freeman Sarah Wilkerson, 239-69. University of Georgia Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17575nc.16.
Bibliographic Citation: Molly Taylor-Poleskey, “Pearl School,” Bygone Nashville, accessed September 16, 2025, https://bygone-nashville.mtsu.edu/admin/items/show/23.
Title/Location: Pearl School

Item sets: Bygone Nashville Location

Site pages: Home

Media: Unknown group with J.A. Galloway and teachers possibly 1893.; H.A. Cameron B.A.L.L.B. Science, Miss Lena Jackson M.A. Latin; First Pearl High School South Summer Street & 5th Ave. So. 1898-1916.; Zoom into Pearl School from Bird's-eye view of Nashville, Tenn. in the 1880s; "The City Schools"; Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Detail to former Pearl School site. Plate; Sanborn Fire Insurance Map detail of Pearl School, plate 102.; "City Council. Nashville and her Property."