Education of Marion County, Tennessee

McReynolds High School

Marion County's Black high school, 1918–1966

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Last updated: May 26, 2026

McReynolds High School was the Black high school serving Marion County, Tennessee and northern Jackson County, Alabama during the Jim Crow era. It operated in various forms from 1918 to 1966, beginning in rented space, surviving one fire and rebuilding with Rosenwald Fund support, and ultimately closing after a second fire destroyed the main building in the summer of 1965. Its students were then absorbed into the county's three white high schools, completing the integration of Marion County Schools.

The school's story spans the full arc of segregated Black education in the rural South: community organizing, philanthropic partnership, decades of operation under separate and unequal conditions, and a forced ending that tied integration to destruction rather than to policy.

Organizing the school (1917–1919)

In 1917, no public high school existed for Black students anywhere in Marion County. That year, per the South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society's history of the school, Brown McReynolds organized a committee of Black citizens in South Pittsburg to establish one. The committee included Dr. W. J. Astrapp, a physician; Dennis Martin; and Arthur Haywood. The group was appointed by what was described as a large mass meeting of Black citizens of the county.

A high school program opened in rented space in 1918, giving Black students in the county access to secondary education for the first time. The arrangement was short-lived: a fire destroyed the rented school in 1919.

On May 3, 1919, the committee appeared before the Marion County Board of Education to press the case for a permanent school. At that meeting, per the SPHPS account, Astrapp proposed naming the school after Brown McReynolds, saying he had "done more for the establishment of the school than any other man." County Superintendent D. A. Tate subsequently made plans for a new school building in South Pittsburg. S. W. Hogan, who would build the new school, appeared before the same board on May 20, 1922 to report on construction.

The Rosenwald building (1921)

The new school was funded through a combination of Marion County appropriations, a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and money raised directly by Black citizens. The Rosenwald Fund, established in 1917 by Sears, Roebuck and Company president Julius Rosenwald, ultimately helped build more than 5,000 schools for Black students across the South between 1917 and 1932. McReynolds was one of them.

Builder S. W. Hogan constructed the school in 1921. The completed building contained 22 rooms, making it one of the larger Rosenwald-associated schools in the region. The Rosenwald Fund school card for McReynolds, preserved in the Fisk University Rosenwald Fund Collection, notes a "$120 H.S. library at this school."

Principal M. M. Burnett

Merzellar M. Burnett (sometimes spelled Burnette) served as principal of McReynolds for 25 years, making him the defining figure of the school's daily life across a generation. Burnett opened every school year with a reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes. He later wrote A History of the Development of Negro Public Schools in Marion County, Tennessee from 1929 to 1950, a document now held in Tennessee State University's School Desegregation Digital Collection. It remains one of the few firsthand accounts of Black education in Marion County during the segregation era.

Former students remembered Burnett as “a strict but deeply respected educator who demanded excellence, discipline, and dignity from his students regardless of the inequities surrounding them,” per Logan Carmichael's Sequatchie Valley Now history of Marion County education. The characterization recurs across alumni testimony: the school's academic standards, its sense of order, and the bearing the students were expected to carry into the world were all traceable to Burnett.

The school at its peak

McReynolds served as the sole Black high school for a two-state region, drawing students from communities across Marion County, Tennessee and from northern Jackson County, Alabama, including Bridgeport. The school offered a full academic program and fielded competitive athletic teams. In 1949, a gymnasium was added to the campus, a rectangular concrete-block structure built at the foot of the mountain near South Pittsburg's old City Cemetery. The 1949 construction was funded primarily through county appropriations and Black community fundraising, following the same financial pattern that had built the 1921 Rosenwald school two decades earlier.

The athletic legacy of McReynolds outlived the school itself. After integration, many families whose children had attended McReynolds sent subsequent generations to South Pittsburg High School, and the Pirates' sports programs benefited from the lineage of McReynolds alumni families for decades afterward.

The school as community center

Like many historically Black schools across the South, McReynolds became the center of community life in the South Pittsburg-area Black community. School plays, basketball games, graduations, church events, and civic gatherings all revolved around the campus, and for many families the school represented hope, progress, and opportunity during an era defined by segregation and discrimination. The 1949 gymnasium was designed to double as an auditorium and community hall, and it was the venue for events that drew people from across Marion County and northern Jackson County.

The 1965 fire

On the morning of July 28, 1965, a fire of unknown origin destroyed the main McReynolds High School building. The timing was significant: fall classes were set to begin in a matter of weeks. With the school gone, the 1949 gymnasium was hastily partitioned into makeshift classrooms that summer to serve Black students for one final academic year.

The fire's cause was never publicly determined. It occurred during a period of intense civil rights activity across the South. Whether the fire was arson, accidental, or something else has remained an open question in the community's memory.

Integration (1966)

The last McReynolds graduating class finished in 1966. After that year, Marion County Schools were formally integrated. Black students were distributed among South Pittsburg High School, Marion County High School in Jasper, and Whitwell High School.

Marion County's desegregation was comparatively late: the Brown v. Board of Education decision had come eleven years earlier in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act had passed in 1964. In Marion County, it was fire, not court order or voluntary compliance, that forced the final step.

The abandoned gymnasium

After integration, the 1949 gymnasium stood at the foot of the mountain near South Pittsburg's old City Cemetery. For decades the building sat vacant. A movement emerged to have the gymnasium listed on the National Register of Historic Places, recognizing it as the last surviving structure of the McReynolds campus. Preservation advocates argued that the gymnasium, even standing empty, remained the physical anchor of a 48-year segregated-era institution whose main building had been lost in 1965. Local attempts to secure a preservation easement, mount a state-historical-marker effort, or raise funds for stabilization gained ground in the 2000s and 2010s through the South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society, but the building itself was never stabilized before the fires that ended its physical existence.

Between 2017 and 2018, a series of fires struck the abandoned building. The South Pittsburg Volunteer Fire Department responded to two fires in 2017, one of which was ruled arson. On June 29, 2018, a final fire destroyed what remained of the structure, and the building was deemed a total loss. Investigators noted that no electricity was connected to the building and no inclement weather had occurred that day. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation assisted in the investigation, and authorities suspected foul play. The destruction of the gymnasium ended any prospect of physical preservation of the McReynolds campus. No arrest or prosecution in the series of fires was publicly reported in the available coverage. The pattern of arson at the McReynolds gymnasium echoed the unresolved 1965 main-building fire, and many local sources have linked the two events in community memory, though no causal link has been established in the available record.

Historical marker

A Tennessee Historical Commission marker, number 2B 33, was placed in honor of McReynolds High School by the South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society on North Cedar Avenue. As transcribed by the Historical Marker Database, the marker reads:

In 1917 no high school for African Americans existed in Marion County. That year Brown McReynolds led a committee to establish an African American high school. The following year a school for African American students opened in a rented space. In 1919 a fire destroyed the school. Soon after the school's destruction by fire, County Superintendent D. A. Tate made plans for a South Pittsburg school.

Using county funds, Rosenwald funds, and money raised by citizens, a twenty-two-room school was constructed. Built by S. W. Hogan in 1921, the school was named in honor of Brown McReynolds, where M. M. Burnett served as principal for 25 years. McReynolds High School educated students in Marion County and north Jackson County, Alabama. On the morning of July 28, 1965, a fire of unknown origin destroyed McReynolds High School.

Significance

McReynolds High School is the most historically significant education story in Marion County. It was one of more than 5,000 Rosenwald schools built across the South, a cross-state institution that served Black students from two states for nearly half a century, and a school whose end was forced by fire rather than by orderly desegregation. The subsequent destruction of the gymnasium by arson erased the last physical trace of the campus. What survives is the historical marker, the Rosenwald Fund records at Fisk University, Burnett's written history at Tennessee State University, and the memory carried by alumni and their descendants in South Pittsburg and across Marion County.

Related

About South Pittsburg High School →
About Marion County High School →
About Whitwell High School →
About the city of South Pittsburg →
Black History of Marion County →
The Civil Rights Era in Marion County →

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