Growing up in the 1950s and early '60s, Delorise Munn Little isn't sure exactly how far she had to walk to school. Maybe a mile or two, and it depended on whether she was coming from her parents or grandparents’ home.
However, she does remember dreading the trek on cold, winter days. Her grandmother tried to help.
“She would put a boiled egg in each hand and she’d tell me, you know, try to hold it together until I got to school,” she says.
When she arrived—already having helped her father with chores such as feeding chickens—a potbelly stove kept her warm at her desk. Her male classmates were in charge of chopping logs to feed it.
This is how it was attending the last one-room schoolhouse in Shelby County, located in what would now seem an unlikely place: President’s Island.
Today most people know President’s Island as an industrial area South of Downtown Memphis, a peninsula jutting into the Mississippi River. But before the railroad tracks and chemical plants, this tract of land was an actual island, cut off from the mainland and at one point, home to a small community of Black sharecroppers and farmers.
The President’s Island School was made of wood and raised up on stilts to escape flooding. The building lay along a dirt road, next to a cemetery. It had an outhouse, a pump well and no electricity, even in 1964, the year the school closed with 11 all African American students still enrolled.
“One-Room Relic is Still Part of Memphis School System,” reads a Commercial Appeal headline from March 1, 1964.
The article outlines the school’s scant resources.
School officials said the school existed "simply because the youngsters live on the island,” the article says. “The city does not ordinarily provide transportation for students.”
About a decade ago, teacher Mark Scott and his AP History Class at East High School found the newspaper clipping in library archives as part of a project to research the schoolhouse and lobby for its historic preservation. By then, it had already been moved off the island.
Scott, who is now retired, says teaching there required a special gift.
“This wasn’t just one class,” he says. “These were grades one through eight in one room, with one teacher—just the difficulty of trying to teach that way.”
That job fell to Ms. Elnora Devers, who is believed to have been the only person to ever run the school and was known for her exceptional dedication to her students.
“We make the best of it,” she told the Commercial Appeal in 1964.
Before the physical schoolhouse was built in 1952 (although that date is disputed in a later newspaper article), she taught out of an old church on the island. And prior to the construction of the current causeway connecting Memphis to the island in 1950, Devers, who lived in the city, had to take a ferry each day to reach her classroom.
“She was a real nice lady. Hardworking lady. Really makes you do your homework,” says her former student Robert Fields. “She’s going to get on you.”
Fields, 74, is retired and lives in Southaven, Miss. He spent about a decade of his youth on President’s Island. His father was a sharecropper, and his family lived right next to the school.
He remembers Ms. Devers grouping students by ages for lessons and also holding “gym” classes outside.
“She drilled a lot in my head what I know now today,” he says with clear affection for Devers, noting that he later visited her at her home in her elder years before she died in 1979 at the age of 84, according to an obituary.
Munn Little, 75, also says Ms. Devers was a firm instructor who prioritized her students' education. She provided all the class materials such as pencils and paper and even conducted fire drills with the students.
Outside of class, farming duties dictated life’s rhythms for Munn Little, who valued the tight-knit community on the island. She and her many siblings lived on some 240-acres of family-owned land and cherished her grandmother’s cooking.
“We raised any and everything you could name. We raised cotton, corn – any vegetable you could name,” she says. “We made sorghum molasses, peanuts…potatoes, sweet potatoes.”
Even without amenities like electricity or plumbing, Fields does not focus on any perceived adversities. He says though he wanted modern conveniences like a television, his childhood was rich with other experiences.
“You know how to take care of yourself, know how to survive because there wasn’t nothing over there,” he says. “You go fishing, eat fish. They had all kinds of berries, plums, peaches, and stuff like that…It was nice. You know, we [were] young, we don’t know. We kids [so] got a lot of energy, so we running, playing.”
By the late 1940s, plans were in place to industrialize part of President’s Island. As businesses began moving in, agriculture moved out. In time, the school’s student body dwindled. When the Board of Education announced its closure in the summer of 1964, the superintendent said anticipated enrollment for the coming school year was down to four students.
Fields believes his family left the island that year. He was looking forward to urban comforts. As a seventh grader, he attended Carver High just across the river in Memphis.
“[It] seemed like I went to heaven,” he says with a chuckle. “I never saw that many kids in my whole life. You know, when I went to Carver, it was so many kids: small, big, football player, basketball player…it was exciting.”
Munn Little, who migrated off President’s Island a few years earlier, says she was academically prepared for a new city school but less so for the new city lifestyle.
“I was just shocked that the children in the city didn’t have anything to do – compared to us, you know, in the country, we had plenty to do,” she says.
After the students moved away, the school sat vacant for about two decades. In the 1980s, it was relocated to the Mid-South Fairgrounds.
Then, around 2010, the fairgrounds underwent redevelopment, placing the future of the schoolhouse in peril. That’s when Mark Scott and his AP History class at East High School stepped in to save the classroom from demolition. They launched a research project, including tracking down some of the school’s alumni like Munn Little and Fields.
Initially, the East High students wanted to move the schoolhouse to their campus to use it as an exhibit to teach about the ongoing evolution of education equality in Memphis.
“They were seeing this, and it really hit home. It hit home just how much things have changed and how much this didn't work, this whole system, separate but equal,” Scott says.
Although they were ultimately unable to move the structure to East High, their efforts convinced others of the school’s historic value. For a period, the Memphis Fire Department safeguarded the building on its property while plans developed.
It took about another decade, but the little schoolhouse finally has a permanent home at the Memphis Museum of Science and History (MoSH).
It’s still in the parking lot, awaiting restoration to be used as an outdoor learning space. The project could cost upwards of $100,000, which includes repainting its current red color to a more neutral one that would be closer to its original tone. The museum intends to outfit the building with items such as a desk and a chalkboard that would resemble those used at the time.
“A lot of our permanent collection is told with not a very well-rounded story, or something you could find anywhere in America, so as we move forward, we are trying to be more telling of the stories in our region,” says MoSH’s executive director Kevin Thompson.
Showcasing the school's journey, Scott says, offers timeless lessons.
“You can't move forward without knowing where you came from and the appreciation of what you can do when you have the odds stacked against you,” he says.
A classroom born in the age of school segregation will now be used to educate students from all backgrounds.
This post has been updated to add details about the dates when Munn Little grew up.
