‘I’m very proud it’s there’: how Tina Turner’s one-room school became a museum

The Flagg Grove school at the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center. Photograph: Adrian Sainz/AP

When Tina Turner, resident in Switzerland, read in Bilanz magazine that her old school in Tennessee was being turned into a museum, she assumed it must be a local white school from the era of Jim Crow racial segregation, perhaps with her name appended after the fact.

Then she realised it really was Flagg Grove school, the one-room schoolhouse attended by the young Anna Mae Bullock (AKA Tina Turner), having been built by her great uncle in 1889. “Immediately then I became excited and got involved,” Turner says in a video on the website of what is now the Tina Turner Museum containing memorabilia including costumes, gold records and her high school yearbook.