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Season 1, Part 4: The Great Divide
This is a story about the assumptions we all make. And the secrets we keep. With WPLN reporter Meribah Knight as the go-between, Big Man, a public housing resident from the Cayce Homes, walks across...
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Season 1, Part 5: Get Some Gone
What happens when you try to leave Cayce? There is a saying in Nashville’s James Cayce Homes: “Get some gone.” Three simple words that describe the urge, the mission, to move out, to get away from the...
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Season 1, Part 6: The Future
Does this big idea to have low-income and higher income people living side-by-side really make a community better, safer, healthier? As season one The Promise comes to a close, we dig into the...
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Season 1: Bonus
We return to the James Cayce Homes to follow up with residents amid the $600 million overhaul. But in checking back, we trip into some news. And we’re reminded, yet again, of how difficult it will be...
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Season 1, Bonus 2: The Big Man Interview
If you’ve listened to The Promise, you no doubt remember Dexter Turner, aka Big Man. We met him in episode 2. The husband, father and community leader with a quick wit and a large personality had been...
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Season 1 Follow Up: Letting Go
Ms. Vernell has another big decision to make: to stay in Cayce through the chaos of redevelopment, or to leave? Her conclusion reveals something about this long, messy process to overhaul Nashville’s...
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Season 2 Coming Soon
Season 2 of The Promise grapples with some of the most divisive topics in America: public education and race. This is a story about one school trying to stay afloat, a neighborhood divided over race...
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Season 2, Part 1: A Tale Of Two Schools
At the beginning of the 2019 school year, Principal Ricki Gibbs knew he had a tough job ahead. Warner Elementary in East Nashville had just landed on Tennessee’s list of lowest performing schools. It...
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Season 2, Part 2: The Nashville Way
To understand the resegregation of Nashville’s schools, you have to start with understanding desegregation. In 1954, the famous Brown v. Board decision ruled that segregated schools violated the...
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Season 2, Episode 3: The Unraveling
After 43 years of courtroom battles, Nashville’s landmark school desegregation lawsuit was settled. In the eyes of the law, the city finally made an honest effort to racially integrate its schools. But...
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Season 2, Episode 4: What You Can’t Unsee
When Willie Sims’ daughter started kindergarten at a high-performing elementary school in East Nashville, all seemed well at first. His daughter loved her teacher. She was making friends. But then...
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Season 2, Episode 5: Warner’s Hope
Warner Elementary is about to take its moon shot. After landing on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools, it’s aiming to make the list of highest-performing schools. Finally, it has all the...
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Season 2, Episode 6: A Reckoning
Last fall, parents from Lockeland Elementary held a community meeting to talk about the elephant in the room: Despite the diversity of the neighborhood, their school was the whitest school in the...
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Season 2, Episode 7: The Recruitment Divide
There was a time when the decision of where to send your child to school was relatively simple: public or private. Now, in Nashville and many other cities, those choices have multiplied exponentially....
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Season 2, Episode 8: The Final Exam
It’s February 2020, and Warner Elementary’s star is rising. It’s showing so much progress this year that it might be able to go from one of the lowest performing schools in Tennessee to one of the...
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Listen: The Promise Radio Special
On May 18, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement speech at Vanderbilt University, calling for desegregation in America’s public schools. But almost 60 years later, in Nashville...
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