With cake and ice cream, Christian Brothers University on Friday, Dec. 2, celebrated the 100th birthday of Brother Terence McLaughlin, a man who changed the timbre of life in Memphis by admitting the first Black student to the Brothers’ local high school before being sent away by church leaders incensed with his independent thinking.

Sixty years ago this fall, Jesse Turner Jr. was 12 and an eighth-grader at St. Augustine’s Catholic School in South Memphis, an all-Black elementary school. The logical path, taken by hundreds before and after him, was to start his freshman year at Father Bertrand High School at 1169 Kerr, a few blocks from the Turners’ home at South Parkway and Bellevue.

But his parents, Allegra and Jesse Turner, were determined that their children receive better educations than was possible in the substandard, segregated schools for Black children.

McLaughlin, the new head of the college and its high school division, had been in Memphis only months when he accepted the Turner application. He conferred with no one. He saw no reason why a boy of any race capable of meeting the entrance requirements shouldn’t attend a Brothers’ school.

“It simply was the right thing to do. He wasn’t trying to be a pioneer. He wasn’t trying to create a movement. It wasn’t any of those things,” said Dave Archer, CBU president. “It came down to the right thing to do.”

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