A MOST TOLERANT LITTLE TOWN

Historian Martin recounts an opening salvo in the 1950s push to desegregate public schools.

In the years before 1955, Clinton, Tennessee, had a Black enclave whose high school–aged youth were bused an hour into Knoxville each day. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that desegregation should occur with “all deliberate speed,” Clinton complied, if reluctantly. That move was fraught: On one side stood a small number of Black civil rights activists and a few White allies, on the other was a sizable contingent of KKK members, segregation-forever types, and ordinary citizens resistant to change. There were a few surprises in the standoff as well. Some White students, including members of the football team, stood up for their new Black classmates, while Gov. Frank Clement, who sent in the National Guard to restore order even as he insisted that he was not an integrationist, argued that if the anti-Black mob “can take over Tennessee because of one issue, they can take it over others.” Early on, violence was threatened but mostly averted, but then “outside agitators,” as the saying has it, entered the picture, with some supposed anti-integrationists working the anti-Black mob for money and others planting bombs, one of which destroyed the old Clinton High and resulted in a highly publicized trial. The verdict went against the perpetrators, an outcome no one would likely have predicted. As Martin writes, “What white Southern jury had ever incarcerated other white Southerners for maintaining racial order?” At the end of her wide-ranging history, based on extensive interviews with contemporaries, the author explains that despite such turns of events, the wounds of that time have yet to heal, and the monument erected to commemorate Clinton High’s desegregation, she notes pointedly, “fails to note that the fight for integration has yet to be won.”

A timely contribution to the literature of the post–Brown v. Board Civil Rights Movement.