The Redemption of Franklin McCallie
McCallie’s father and mother were prominent Christian leaders but strong racists in the mid-20th century. Today, Franklin is trying to redeem himself with a program of reconciliation called Chattanooga Connected.
“Try to act like a white man.”
Being a McCallie carried high expectations. As a child, Franklin McCallie tried his hardest to live up to them. After all, his grandfather wasn’t just one of Chattanooga, Tennessee’s most prominent Presbyterian ministers, but he was also the founder of the nationally recognized boys' prep school, The McCallie School. The family was so beloved by the city, it named one of its primary thoroughfares to and from downtown after them.
Franklin credits his father, the headmaster of McCallie School, and his mother for teaching him to be racist. When he was in the ninth grade, before he went to the Presbyterian World Missions Conference, Franklin’s mother pulled him aside and told him that he would hear that to be a good Christian, Franklin would have to accept integration. She assured him, though, that it was not true.
“‘Jesus does not require us to integrate with colored people,’” McCallie tells me as I sit with him on the front porch of his home on the south side of downtown Chattanooga. “That’s a mean statement, and that was said to me in 1955. I’m 14 years of age, and that statement stayed with me. I was born again, washed in the blood. Jesus didn’t demand that we integrate.”
Even when McCallie’s youth minister, Frank Soules, suggested in 1956 that the white teenagers from their church meet with the Black teens from Fairview Presbyterian Church on 9th Street — the segregated African-American community in Chattanooga at the time — his mother shut him down again, noting there was no biblical reason to do so. In fact, racism was so rampant in their privileged social circle that nobody had anything good to say about Black people, unless it was about their maids. And in that case, they were considered “good colored people.”
The Revelation
By 1961, Franklin had graduated from The McCallie School and was a 20-year-old student at Rhodes College in Memphis. Racial tensions were high in the west Tennessee city, as they were all over the South thanks to the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.
“You know where we eat lunch? We get on a bus, we ride two miles out of town to the colored part of town to eat because none of the places where you shop let us eat.”
That’s why McCallie’s classmate Bill Davidson put together a day trip to visit students at Memphis’ all-black Lemoyne College (an HBCU now called Lemoyne-Owen). It was an attempt to start honest dialogue about race between Black and white college students. When McCallie heard about the trip, he objected.
“Why do we care what they think?” he asked.
Bill told him that of all the people he was trying to round up for this experiment, McCallie was the one who would benefit most from it. And because he and Davidson were friends, McCallie went, though reluctantly. Three weeks later, the group of students from Rhodes arrived at Lemoyne to find 100 chairs in a circle set up, with about 30 Black students seated … waiting. The 70 white students from Rhodes sat across from the Black students and everyone just stared at each other in silence. It was the first time McCallie had ever really looked at a Black kid his age.
The students divided themselves into 10 small groups of 10, three Blacks and seven whites together. They isolated themselves in small conference rooms, and forced themselves to get as close as possible to each other. Franklin specifically remembers two of the Black students in his group.
“This guy and this girl were so smart, so funny, so quick, so knowledgeable, so everything,” he says today. “And she was gorgeous. She was absolutely beautiful. I had never looked at a Black girl. I said, ‘Oh my goodness I'm falling in love with a colored girl. This is terrible … I'm the son of the headmaster of McCallie School, one of the great prep schools in the South, maybe in the country, and these two colored kids are smarter than I am.”
Franklin grew irritated at the two Black students, blaming his feelings of confusion and anger on them. They shouldn't be this smart, he thought.
The Black student asked Franklin a question. As he tells me this story, his voice begins to crack. A hint of tears wells in his eyes. His voice becomes impassioned.
“You know anybody who fought in World War II?” the Black student asked.
“Yeah, yeah … I had two uncles,” said McCallie. “One of them was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. The other fought in the Philippines.”
“So did I. I had two uncles who fought in World War II. What were your uncles fighting for?”
“What do you mean, what were they fighting for? Freedom, democracy, the pursuit of happiness!”
“So were my uncles. Let me ask you something. Have you ever shopped in downtown Memphis?”
“Shopping? We’re talking about World War II.”
“So am I,” said the Black student. “Do you ever shop in downtown Memphis?”
“Yeah,” answered McCallie.
“Do you eat lunch?”
“Yeah, I eat lunch,” McCallie answered, growing more impatient.
“You know where we eat lunch?” asked the Black student. “We get on a bus, we ride two miles out of town to the colored part of town to eat because none of the places where we shop let us eat.”
For the first time in his life, everything came to a halt in McCallie’s life. His uncles fought in World War II just like the Black student’s uncles. And they fought for the same ideals — freedom, democracy, the pursuit of happiness. But the Black student’s uncles didn’t have the same freedoms as McCallie’s uncles.
“All of a sudden I was sorry,” McCallie told me. “And I was ashamed. I was angry. I had been told rotten stuff about Blacks. They're dumb, they're not nice, they're not good, they didn't fight well … all this kinda crap.”
After McCallie got back to his dorm, he laid down in his bed and cried for three hours. Everything he thought he knew was wrong. He was embarrassed. He was ashamed. He was angry. He was angry at every white person he knew, angry at his parents for lying to him, angry at his church.
“I'm a 20-year-old, and I'm not dumb, I'm not stupid, and I believed all that stuff. I'd believed every single crappy thing I'd ever been told. All those lies about Black people.”
Father and Son
After his revelation, McCallie dropped out of college. He admitted he was not studying very hard, but this segregated Christian college was no longer a place for him. He moved back to Chattanooga and worked as an orderly at one of the local hospitals. He then joined the Navy for two years and afterward married his high school sweetheart, Tresa Brandfast, and moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to finish his education degree at Towson University. After teaching for two years in Maryland, he completed his master’s degree in English education at Harvard University.
Franklin and Tresa moved back to Chattanooga in 1968. Franklin told his father he wanted to teach at McCallie School, where his father was still headmaster, but only if his father integrated the school. He refused, telling Franklin “those people” couldn’t do McCallie-caliber work.
Franklin and his father had multiple arguments about race that summer, he tells me. They yelled and screamed at each other. The last argument they had during that time ended with his father slamming his fist down on the coffee table.
“I thought he was going to bust his fist or break the coffee table himself,” Franklin says.
McCallie applied to teach at Howard High School, a predominantly black school in Chattanooga, instead of the McCallie School. For the first time in his life, he was the minority. After a year of teaching there, he grew to be well-respected. His students loved him. His peers admired him. He loved the difference he was making in these students’ lives. But even more, he loved the difference they were making in his life.
In the spring of 1969, toward the end of his first year at Howard, Franklin joined his Black colleagues and other Black community leaders to protest a mostly white school in town where the principal was being accused of prejudiced treatment by his Black students. The principal, it so happens, was best friends with Franklin’s father.
The newspaper article in the paper the next morning mentioned Franklin as the sole white protester at the protest. Maybe his father would miss it.
At 6:15 that morning, he got a call. It was his father.
“This is terrible," Franklin's father told him. ‘You've ruined yourself. You have no credibility left. Nobody likes you.’” Franklin got off the phone and he was hurting, tears streaming down his face. “This is my dad telling me that it's all over for me. As far as he was concerned, this was a major mistake, and I had messed myself up with every white person in town — every person who ever went to McCallie. It was over.”
Six months later, Franklin learned that the downtown Kiwanis Club had taken its first Black member. He knew the man who was responsible for this was Marion Gaston, who had gone to McCallie School, the same class as his father. McCallie went to go see Gaston, and congratulated him.
“He says, ‘Huh? Didn't you know? That was your father,’” Franklin tells me. “I burst out crying. I was stunned.‘ Dad did that?’”
Franklin drove to McCallie School, where he found his father. They both sobbed and embraced. “He said to me, ‘Franklin, I've been wrong all my life about Black people. You, your brothers, your sister, and your cousin Jim, you all let me see. You all changed it. Next year the Board of Trustees and I will integrate McCallie School. You all let me understand.’...it was one of the greatest days of my life.” Franklin’s father and mother eventually integrated their church as well.
According to McCallie, it’s the culture you’re around that enables you to believe certain things. Growing up, he believed what his father and mother had told him about Black people, how they were less than whites. And they had believed it because other people had told them.
Chattanooga Connected
in 2013, Franklin and his wife Tresa and their cousins — Eleanor McCallie Cooper and her husband Mel — invited a huge mix of people from the community – young, old, Black, white, lawyers and doctors and professors and business owners and nonprofit leaders — to a meeting. The thought was this: Invite influential Chattanoogans from both races into their home to talk honestly about the problems we face as a nation when it comes to race. Then these community leaders would take what they learned from these ‘dessert sessions” into the community, have to get-togethers of their own, spread the word, and let it spread organically throughout the community.
“One of the nights, we had 60 people,” says McCallie with a bright, proud smile on his face. “A Black man comes in and there's a white man that follows. They're not together. The Black man looks in and says, ‘You mean you've got this many white people that care about this subject?’ And the white man follows in, looks in, and says, ‘You know this many Black people?’ And those two statements are exactly representative of the problem.”
They named the program Chattanooga Connected, and its members’ mission is to reverse the old patterns of relations between the races in their city. They believe the only way to do that is through building relationships and learning from them — and then spreading what you’ve learned to others.
As time went on after that first experimental evening, more people became interested in attending these informal talks about race. McCallie knew that for this social experiment to work, the “dessert sessions” would have to move from his house to other participants’ homes.
Before the pandemic, Chattanooga Connected was quickly growing. Eighteen other cities had reached out to Franklin to inquire about starting their own groups. Chattanooga Connected was even featured on the CBS Evening News.
But then COVID hit, and like everything else, the program's momentum stopped.
Now, as the pandemic shows signs of weakening, Franklin’s determined to rebuild what he started almost 10 years ago. He recently was invited to a screening of Rachel Boynton's documentary, "Civil War (Or Who Do We Think We Are)." He and his Chattanooga Connected members were featured in that film and he participated in a joint talk with Boynton after the film's premiere in Chattanooga. Of course, this is just the start of more things to come, he tells me.
McCallie believes that his little experiment is working. But he insists that it can’t start and end with him and his group. “If it continues to be Franklin McCallie, then people have missed the point.”
He’s right, of course. Franklin is a seed. And now more than ever, we need flowers.
About the author
Charles Moss is a freelance writer based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He has written for The New York Times,Slate, The Atlantic, Paste and Popmatters.