"The presentation of truth in new forms provokes resistance, confounding those committed to acceptable measures for determining the quality and validity of statements made and conclusions reached and making it difficult for them to respond and adjudge what is acceptable."  

—Derrick Bell 

The Olympic Garden at The Esther F. Garrison School for the Arts 

She was oddly considered one of the 'quiet' women involved in Savannah's Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps Esther F. Garrison wasn't boisterous. But her work effort was tireless—and she was always effective. Edna Jackson, Savannah's first female African American to be elected mayor of Savannah, said of Esther: "She would always be the one to say what needed to be said." 

My daughter had the opportunity to attend The Esther F. Garrison School for the Arts. Located a couple of blocks west off Martin Luther King Boulevard in Savannah's Historic District, Garrison is a K-8 school focused on the arts and named after the first African American woman appointed to the Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education. Esther F. Garrison served on the education board for 20-years. 

Painted here en Plein air is the walled garden built in front of the school to commemorate Savannah's role in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. This garden joined the Olympic Cauldron (see PFS-111) to memorialize the Olympic Yachting competitions held in the Atlantic Ocean nearby Savannah. 

In 2017, the Garrison school grounds added the Yamacraw Center for the Performing Arts, which wonderfully incorporated this Olympic Garden into its final design. This beautiful arts center includes a 600-seat theatre, a large band hall, piano rooms, and state-of-the-art choral and dance studios. 

The Esther F. Garrison School for the Arts was awarded a National Blue-Ribbon School designation in 2015 by the U.S. Department of Education. Like its namesake, the school is a community blessing. 

Esther F. Garrison also served as Secretary of the Savannah chapter of the NAACP at the height of the civil rights struggle. At that time, Wesley Wallace Law was the President of the local NAACP in Savannah (see PFS-97). Esther was also the office manager of the International Longshoreman's Association, teaching literacy to union workers in her spare time. She also organized the local NAACP Youth Council. 

Unsurprisingly, Esther was an essential and dedicated member of her church, Mount Zion Baptist Church, located on MLK Boulevard. As a member, Esther served in virtually every leadership position the church had to offer, including as Mount Zion's youth choir director. 

Esther F. Garrison's most significant service to the Savannah community came during the challenging years directly following the 1966 decision in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia: Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education. Effectively, the court ordered desegregation of the public schools in Savannah, and Esther F. Garrison helped lead the way. 

The lawsuit was led locally by attorney Eugene Gadson, the first Black member of the Savannah Bar Association. Derrick A. Bell, Jr. of New York, was also a lead attorney. Hired by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Bell led the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), crafting legal strategies for more than 300 school desegregation cases — to include the LDF effort in Savannah. 

Derrick Bell moved on to academia — a professorship at Harvard Law School and then New York University — and was a foundational scholar for the Critical Race Theory educational movement. The above quote comes from his book: Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992).   

In the middle of Savannah's portentous Civil Rights Era, Esther F. Garrison defined the term: Heroic.