page_title: Briarcrest Christian School
section_title: Establishment
hierarchical_section_title: Briarcrest Christian School / History / Establishment
caption_attribution_description: English: Pastor W. Wayne Allen, founder of Briarcrest Christian School.
context_page_description: Briarcrest Christian School is a private, coeducational, Christian school in Eads, an unincorporated area of Shelby County, Tennessee. The school was founded as a segregation academy during the racial integration of public schools in Memphis, Tennessee. Today, it serves students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
context_section_description: In 1970, the leaders and members of East Park Baptist Church began to plan a collection of segregation academies — schools that would allow white parents to avoid having their children in desegregated public schools — in anticipation of the court-ordered racial integration of Memphis City Schools. That order arrived in 1972, and on March 15, 1973, the church incorporated the Briarcrest Baptist School System. Briarcrest's initial faculty consisted of teachers who left public schools after desegregation. Principal Joseph A. Clayton said he and others wanted to be "back among their own" with "less fear, less culture shock" and more "cultural homogeneity". As part of the effort, the administration screened prospective teachers to ensure that all staff members believed in creationism and that no teacher would teach the theory of evolution.
  In September 1973, the school system launched with 2,400 pupils attending kindergarten through 8th-grade classes at 11 Southern Baptist churches throughout the Memphis area. Tuition and fees were $650 per student (about $3,744 today), with $100 discounts for siblings. Few, if any, were black, despite a declared policy of nondiscrimination — a requirement for the school's tax-exempt status — and reported efforts by Briarcrest officials to attract African-American students. A 1976 book published by Christian Literature Crusade said those efforts included asking 10 African-American pastors in Memphis for recruiting help and advertising in the Tri-State Defender, a local minority newspaper. W. Wayne Allen, the pastor of East Park Baptist Church and head of the school system, said the black community pressured its families not to attend Briarcrest schools. "A black pastor friend of mine told me, 'Brother Allen, if I had one of your satellite schools in my church I'd be ostracized as an Uncle Tom,'" Mr. Allen told the New York Times in August 1973. "I told him, 'It's too bad you folks are so segregationist.'"
  In the fall of 1974, Briarcrest narrowly won an auction for a plot of land in East Memphis, beating out a Jewish group that sought to build a synagogue. School officials, who wanted the land for their high school campus, described the victory as a divine intervention in favor of Christianity over Judaism.
  Grades 9–12 were added in 1975. That year, all of the high school's 1,432 students and 69 faculty and staff members were white, despite the ostensibly open admissions policy.
caption: Pastor W. Wayne Allen, founder of Briarcrest Christian School
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