In the early 1960s, members of the Sewanee community begin petitioning Franklin County, Tennessee to integrate the school.

[3] To commemorate the desegregation, on January 19, 2014, a Tennessee Historical Commission marker was dedicated at the school.

Nine years after Brown v. Board of Education, eight local families initiated a lawsuit to compel Franklin County to desegregate the public school system.

The plaintiffs included the Bates, Cameron, Camp, Goodstein, Hill, Sisk, Staten, and Turner families.

They were represented by Nashville attorney Z. Alexander Looby and Jack Greenburg, Constance Banker Motley, and James M. Nabrit of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.