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An exploration of school desegregation in Clinton, Tenn.
We have lived in Pittsburgh for 32 years but, once a year, we drive to our hometown of New Orleans, La. In Montgomery, Ala., we pass a big green sign pointing the way to several civil rights memorials located there. Every year, we said we ought to stop here sometime. In April 2015, with the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery in the news because of the 50th anniversary commemorations, it seemed we’d be derelict if we didn’t finally make our personal pilgrimage to the place where so many had displayed great courage in the face of great hatred, ignorance and violence.
In Montgomery, we visited the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached. From there, we could see the state Capitol, where the famous march of 1965 had ended. We visited the Civil Rights Memorial designed by Maya Lin, reading the names of all those who died fighting for justice. In the museum nearby, we signed the Wall of Tolerance and saw our names and those of many others, including the white and AfricanAmerican Girl Scouts who were visiting, scroll down the wall like a waterfall.
Then we took the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail, retracing the march in the opposite direction almost exactly 50 years later, reading plaques along the way and visiting an outstanding national museum depicting the history of the event. In Selma, we found the Brown Chapel AME Church, the starting point for the protest, and followed the marchers’ route to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Crossing it, we thought of the men and women on that “Bloody Sunday” — March 7, 1965 — who had met an onslaught of state troopers and a mounted posse. It was an unforgettable trip, one we wished we had made decades ago with our children.
Two months later, we made another pilgrimage, to a lesser-known place — Clinton, Tenn. — that played an earlier role in the civil rights movement. The history-making events there occurred 60 years ago this month.
The Green McAdoo Cultural Center memorializes this formative chapter of the civil rights era, the integration of Clinton High School in 1956. Clinton was the first public high school in the South to be desegregated. Better-known Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas was not integrated until 1957. Clinton also claims the distinction of having the first African-American graduate of a previously all-white public high school in the South.
The occasion for this visit was serendipitous. Donna’s sister, Jeannie, for years had been doing research on Whitson/Gentry ancestors who had settled in Tennessee’s Anderson County, which includes Clinton and is not far from Knoxville. She found that several ancestors had fought for the Americans in the Revolution, receiving land grants in what would later become the state of Tennessee. Those forbears also included a teenager who escaped abuse in England and fought on both sides of that war — ending up on the winning side — and a British soldier who had come to Virginia in 1677 due to Bacon’s Rebellion, the 1676 uprising by Virginia frontiersmen.
Five years after learning about this surprising lineage, the extended Whitson family gathered for a reunion near Clinton. With Jeannie’s prodding, family members chose topics to speak about. Ed chose Bacon’s Rebellion. With memories of our Selma pilgrimage still fresh, Donna chose “Race Relations in Anderson County.”
In 1860, there were about 600 slaves and 6,500 whites in Anderson County. Donna’s family had assumed its forbears were too poor to own slaves; the unfortunate truth is that although the mountainous terrain of the area was conducive to small farms, not plantations, her ancestors had indeed owned slaves from their earliest years in Virginia. On a more positive note, Donna’s greatgreat-grandfather, almost certainly a slave owner, was a Unionist leader in Anderson County, which had voted strongly for the Union in two secessionist referendums.
As was the case throughout the South, schools in post-Civil War Clinton were segregated. In 1869, an African-American church and school were torched by whites. This violence was met by citizens with a resolution: “The people of Clinton and vicinity, without distinction of party or political antecedent, denounce the act [of arson].” Whites took up a collection to rebuild the black church and school, which was renovated in 1947 and renamed the Green McAdoo School to honor a deceased former slave, who had become a U.S. soldier, landowner and employee of the Anderson County Courthouse. Decades later, the old school was restored, and on Aug. 26, 2006, the 50th anniversary of the Clinton High School desegregation, the Green McAdoo Cultural Center opened its doors.
On this day nine years later, we and our relatives were the only visitors. During our two-hour stay, just one other person entered the building. Obviously, this site was not high on the “must-see” list.
Before entering the center, we encountered an impressive, life-size bronze sculpture of the “Clinton 12,” the African-American teens who had courageously integrated Clinton High School in 1956. Inside, there was an excellent documentary telling their story. The building also featured a 1950s-era segregated classroom and several rooms of displays, memorabilia, photos and letters illustrating both the dark and heroic sides of our nation’s first attempt to integrate a Southern public high school.
Prior to 1956, African-American high school students took long bus rides to Knoxville and back because no black high school existed in Clinton. In 1950, some African-Americans filed a lawsuit to desegregate the local all-white high school: McSwain v. Anderson County Board of Education was eventually linked to the more famous Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed “separate but equal” in public schools. The federal judge who had presided over the McSwain suit ordered Clinton High to desegregate in the fall of 1956.
Leading citizens resolved to integrate the school peacefully. Accordingly, the principal sent ballots to the white students’ parents, asking whether they would support or oppose integration; 447 pledged their support, six refused to do so. On opening day, all went well at the school. It seemed that most students and parents had concluded integration was inevitable and should be approached responsibly. According to one of the Clinton 12, white students seemed prepared, at first, to make their African-American classmates feel welcome. This changed, however, when Frederick John Kasper, a racist agitator from Washington, D.C., came to town, followed shortly by Asa Carter and other vocal segregationists from the Northern Alabama White Citizens Council.
These outsiders skillfully unlocked the latent racism of a significant minority of the white citizenry. Soon, violent protests took place in front of the school and in the courthouse square. After Kasper was arrested for inciting a riot, an unruly crowd marched to the mayor’s house and threatened to burn it down. Blacks driving through town were harassed, and one was pulled from his car and beaten. The Rev. Paul Turner, pastor of Clinton’s First Baptist Church and one of three prominent whites who had been escorting the black students to school, was attacked and beaten. Order only was restored when the governor sent 633 National Guardsmen to Clinton.
Throughout the turmoil, the Clinton High School student council and football team played a leadership role in trying to curb white students’ behavior. Likewise, a solid majority of the citizens of Clinton demonstrated where they stood when, on Dec. 4, they defeated the candidates put forth by the racist White Citizens Council in municipal elections.
Although memories of his senior year remain painful even today, in spring 1957, Bobby Cain became the first African-American since the end of Reconstruction to graduate from a previously all-white Southern public school. But sporadic disorder continued until October 1958, when the school was dynamited and badly damaged. No one was injured, but all students had to transfer to a high school in another town until a new one was built in Clinton. Following the bombing, the unrest subsided.
The turbulence in Clinton was covered by national newspapers and magazines; CBS’s Edward R. Murrow did extensive interviews. Yet over time, the story of the Clinton 12’s courageous desegregation of a Southern public high school was all but forgotten outside of Tennessee. Today most Americans believe, as we also had assumed, that Little Rock Central was the first to integrate.
Just before leaving the center, we browsed letters from around the U.S. posted on one wall. Many were angry and laced with racial slurs, but others expressed support for the Clinton 12 and those whites of Anderson County who had stood for a peaceful transition to integration. Ed’s eyes were drawn to letterhead that said “North Catholic High School, 1400 Troy Hill Road, Pittsburgh 12, Pennsylvania.” It was written by Brother Leo Murray to the president and other members of the Clinton High student council, expressing the white religion teacher’s “admiration for your efforts in practicing social justice and charity toward Negro Americans.”
This letter from Pittsburgh, transcending the years and miles, indelibly inscribed the events of 60 years ago on our consciousness.
Edward T. Brett (ed.brett@laroche.edu) is professor emeritus of history at La Roche College. Donna Whitson Brett (donnawbrett@gmail.com) is retired from the University of Pittsburgh’s Advising Center.