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Picketers congregate outside a Nashville school while two first-graders learn to ''see Spot run'' in a nearly empty classroom.

Desegregation was at work on the morning of September 10, 1957, when Linda McKinley and Charles Elbert Ridley found themselves the only first graders in attendance at Fehr Elementary School in north Nashville. Their presence in the classroom that day helped usher a new age of desegregation among public schools in Nashville – a key city in the Civil Rights Movement.

According to photographer Bill Goodman, who had been covering the story for the Nashville Banner at the time, the classroom itself provided a strange calm at the center of a storm of irate, sign-wielding segregationists.

"I spent most of my time outside," he said, "but every once in a while I would go in, just to check on what was going on. As young as those kids were, I don't think they realized what was happening. It was mostly grownups who were making all the noise."

And what a noise it was: On the other side of the city, police officers and fire marshals were inspecting damage caused by a dynamite blast in the east wing of Hattie Cotton Elementary School, where a six-year-old African American girl had attended class the previous day.

Goodman, 79, worked as a photographer for the Nashville Banner for more than 35 years, but it was during his first ten years – from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s – that he recorded Nashville's biggest changes. According to city records, both Linda McKinley and Charles Elbert Ridley are deceased.

"In Nashville, the [Civil Rights] Movement began in the schools," Goodman said. "And from there it went on to sit-ins in cafeterias and marches through town. The blacks would march by day and the Ku Klux Klan would march at night."

This is the second in our "Our Defining Moments" series, an ongoing ReZoom.com People feature looking back on the moments that, through the power of photography, have been emblazoned into our collective consciousness. To see the first in our "Our Defining Moments" series, click here.