Corinthian Nutter: Dearest Friend and Teacher
When the Walker School students boycotted their school in 1948, their teacher Corinthian Nutter walked out with them. She lost her job with the South Park School District as a result. Yet she knew staying with her students was the right thing to do.
The South Park School District hired two teachers from Kansas City, Missouri, to teach at the Walker School for the 1948 term. They each taught one student, as only two students continued to attend classes at the Walker School that year. The other 38 students were taught in two private homes — Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Gay’s and Mrs. Marva Berry’s. The students were divided into two groups: grades 1-4 were in the Gay’s living room while grades 4-8 were taught in the Berry home. Corinthian Nutter taught the upper grades; Hazel McCray-Weddington was hired to teach the lower grades. The parents paid the teachers’ salaries and raised money for legal expenses. Additional financial support came from Thurgood Marshall’s Legal Defense Fund. Mrs. Nutter also attended the court hearings, traveling to and from Topeka as necessary. As the only certified teacher employed at the Walker School, she alone was qualified to testify about the conditions at the school. Mrs. Nutter’s efforts on behalf of the Walker School students did not go unnoticed. In December 1948, the Berry family and the students presented Corinthian with a Bible and a handwritten thank-you note which read, in part, “you will forever be our dearest friend and teacher.”
Corinthian Nutter moved to Kansas City from Texas in the late 1920s. She worked as a hairdresser to pay for her education and began teaching in 1938. In the mid-1940s, she moved to Shawnee and taught in South Park until 1948. After the Webb case was settled in 1949, Mrs. Nutter taught in the Olathe School District for another 25 years. Throughout her career, she returned to the classroom to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Corinthian Nutter and her former Walker School students still know one another. Many visit her when they return to South Park or nearby Shawnee. She delights in sharing the accomplishments of her former students who are now lawyers, doctors, and teachers.
--ALBUM vol. 8, no. 1 (winter 1995)