Back to School: Tina Turner Museum

0:00There's a one-room schoolhouse in Brownsville, Tennessee. The schoolhouse has actually been moved from its original location. And if you walk into this old schoolhouse, you'll see the same hardwood floor that's been there since 1898, some of the same desks, and the same chalkboard. The only thing that's changed is that the school is now a museum. And aside from telling the history of a one-room schoolhouse, it's partially a monument to honor its most illustrious alone. The queen of rock and roll, Tina Mouff can turn her. My favorite subjects were, would have been, I think, at the time English, and of course, recessed for sport. And my least favorite was arithmetic. I'm Baudelaire, and this is Atlas Obscura. A celebration of the world's strange and incredible and wondrous places. Today, we go to Brownsville, Tennessee to visit the Flag Grove School, aka the Tina Turner

1:03Museum. The story of the school, its most famous student, and their incredible reunion, after this. The story of the Flag Grove School starts with Benjamin Flag. He was born into slavery in 1856 in North Carolina. After emancipation, he saved some money and took his family west. In Tennessee, he was able to buy some land, and then he got some more. By 1898, he was one of few wealthy black landowners, but with his wealth from all his land, he wanted to provide for his community. From the tales that are here, he always had concerns about educational opportunities for the blacks in the community. That is Sonia Outlaw Clark. She is the director of the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center, and was part of the effort to restore Flag Grove School.

2:05And she's right. Back when Benjamin Flag was alive, the black folks in the community didn't have a lot of educational opportunities. Remember, this is just a few decades after the Civil War. Benjamin Flag wanted to create an opportunity for kids to get an education, so he sold an acre of his land for a third of its actual value, basically donating it to the community, so a new school could be built. And that school was called the Flag Grove School, but Benjamin Flag did more than just provide the land. Now, he stayed pretty involved in it the rest of his life. One of the main things that I heard over and over was he was very involved in hiring all the teachers that taught there, so he was vetting those teachers and making sure that they were the quality that he thought they should be to be able to teach the community children. Only a couple decades removed from slavery, the prevailing idea was that black people in the South needed education. Fast. And the way the school was run early on was through a subscription service, charging families

3:08a dollar per student to keep the place running. For almost 100 years, the Flag Grove School would teach black students from first to eighth graders all at the same time in the same room. Probably the most students there would have been 40 to 16 when it was really, really full. But you just lined them up like the first grade was closest to the teacher and then the next row might have been second grade, third, fourth. And the older students would help teach the younger, but the teacher would always start with the youngest, so say she's teaching math. She would start with first grade math and work her way up to eighth grade math. During the restoration effort, Sonya heard some stories from students that went to Flag Grove over the years. So the stories that I've heard are from students that attended like from the late 30s through the 60s. Some of the stories involved, the teacher would always lock the door when it was time for

4:08school to start. She'd lock the door. So if you were running late, you would have to knock on the door to be let in and she would know that she weren't there on time. There's lots of stories of students distracting the teacher so that other students could crawl through the window. And Sonya told us that one of the students that was sneaking through the window was an energetic little girl named Anna May Bullock, but you might know her by her stage name, Tina Turner. My memories of attending the school there was my teacher. Her name was, as we call it, Miss O'Valley. Her name was O'Valley C.Coo. So the memory of the school, I remember it exactly what it looked like. And the horror part is there was a schoolmate. His name was Boobee and he threw rocks. So Boobee threw rocks and we had to break in school and he was also a neighbor of ours. So after school walking from school, we're always dodging rocks all the time from Boobee.

5:15Tina May grew up to be Tina Turner and her music brought joy all over the world. But she wasn't the only alum who went on to make a difference. There are lots of our community people who have gone on to make great contributions in our community and a large part of those are teachers. So they're continuing that legacy of education in our communities and in other areas around the country. The Flag Grove School was the only school the Black community had in the area from 1898 until 1954. That was the year that the Supreme Court heard Brown versus Board of Education and school segregation was struck down. From that point on, Flag Grove kind of fades out of use because the local kids start going to the better funded and previously whites only schools. At the end of the 1960s, the land around the Flag Grove School was auctioned off to a local farmer.

6:16For the next five decades, the schoolhouse would be used as a corn crib and storage space. Then around 2010, the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center was looking for one-room school houses to preserve as a museum. That's when they found out that the Flag Grove School was still standing. Here's Sanya. Our original plans were to preserve the school to turn it back into what it would have been during the early 1800s, which would have been just desk and a chop board, the teachers desk. A lot of that stuff was still in there because the farmer had just pushed it in the corner and it was under straw that was in the building. You get this. At that point, Sanya and the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center didn't know that Tina was an alumni of the school. She actually found out during a conversation with the farmer's wife. I was talking to the wife one day and she said, Sanya, you really should get the chop board

7:18or a desk or something out of that old school on our property. You know Tina, that's where Tina went to school. So the structure was still intact. Perfect. They removed all the farming stuff and restored the furniture. They then moved it in 2012 from Nuttbush where it was originally to Brownsville, Tennessee, where the Delta Heritage Center is. Tina, meanwhile, is living in Switzerland where she still lives today and gets word of this project first from a magazine. There's a magazine in Switzerland called Belands and it was written there that Tina Turner's school is being taken to the Heritage Center. And before that, there was a school in actually Nuttbush that was a white school and I thought they were just putting my name on the white school. And then after Belands, I realized that it was actually Flag Road School. So immediately then I became excited and got involved. And got involved is probably putting it lightly. Tina donated money to the project and provided anything she felt would help the museum be the best experience that it could be. Tina sent a designer from New York Steven Seals, came here to design the showcases and put

8:24the whole thing together. So she was very involved. I remember when we were in there putting the showcases together, they had her on the phone saying, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And she was giving direction from Switzerland. And not only was she involved in how the museum would look, but she also sent a ton of memorabilia from throughout her career in life like plaques, posters, and a reproduction stage of her tour at Wembley Stadium. As you probably know, Tina Turner is an icon over a hundred million records sold 12 Grammys and even a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. But where Tina's value can really be measured is by her fans who traveled to Brown'sville the last weekend of September, every year to celebrate Tina Turner Day. That's where the Super fans come from all over the world. Two little Browns, Voltaen of C, get to go out to that fish, we get to show them where the old homes were, they get to see the old store, get their picture made in that fish,

9:26highway 19, what she talks about in the Bush City limits. Schoolhouse house, highway 19. It's now called the Tina Turner Highway. So they get to have their picture made under the Tina Turner Highway sign. Tina Turner wasn't able to make the museums opening in 2014 because of health issues. And to this day, she actually hasn't been able to make it to the museum. The clips of Tina you've heard in this episode are actually from one of the videos she made for the museum. So it's clear that Tina felt really connected to the old schoolhouse, but even Tina didn't know that she had an even deeper connection to the school and specifically to Benjamin Flagg, the former enslaved person who originally owned the grounds that the school was built on. Here's Tina learning about the connection on Henry Lewis Gates's PBS documentary, African American Lives. This is a land deed from Benjamin B. Flagg, your great grandfather George Flagg's older brother. This is the moment that Tina finds out that the school she attended was on the land

10:26that her great uncle owned. That's right. Flaggs? Flaggrove schoolhouse? Mm-hmm. One acre of land. One acre of land. Flaggrove was my... No. I went to Flaggrove school, elementary school. She's great. Just great. Wow. Like her great uncle, Tina believes in the importance of education and the Tina Turner Museum is the Flaggrove school. The deaths, most of them the original deaths from the old days are there. The chalkboard is there. The cubbies where little anime would have hung her coat is there, but what's also there is all the places and things Tina has seen since those days at the Flaggrove. I hope that as people walk through the school, they see that I said an example for a hometown

11:30girl that grew up in hard times that made a good life for herself and follow by example. I'm very proud that it's there. I hope that people will leave taking the importance of education. Actually, now I would like to take time to thank a lot of people that was involved with the Nuttbridge school, starting with Sonja Outlaw Clock, which is the director of the Tennessee Delta Heritage Center. I also would like to thank Sonja Outlaw Clock for sharing with me the history of Flaggrove School. And also, thank you to Tina Turner for being Tina Turner. And if you want to check out the Henry Lewis Gates doc that Tina was a part of, it's from PBS. You can watch it on Amazon Prime or Apple TV. This podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs.

12:33This episode was edited by John DeLore. Our production team includes Dylan Thores, Doug Baldwinger, Chris Naka, Camille Stanley, Willis Ryder Arnold, Sarah Wyman, Manolo Morales, David DiComo, Chica Acoye, Gianna Palmer, Tracy Samuelson, our technical director is Casey Holford. Our theme and end credit music is by Sam Tindall. This episode was Sound Designed and Mixed By, Luce Fleming. If you want to learn more, we sure to visit Atlas Obscura.com. There's a link in our episode description. My name is Bo DeLore. Witness Docs from Stitcher.