May 17, 2007, was the fiftieth anniversary of Bobby Cain’s graduation from Clinton High School. At two that afternoon, he and eight of his black classmates reunited in the parking lot of the renovated Green McAdoo Elementary School in front of more than four hundred dignitaries and townspeople who had gathered to commemorate the event.
Tennessee Governor Phil Bredeson—who had donated three hundred thousand dollars to the museum—stood at the head of the parking lot and addressed the crowd. Behind him, a zigzagging ramp climbed to the top of the Hill, tracing its way up a large concrete wall. A quote from a 1957 sermon by the Reverend Paul Turner ran along the top of the wall. “… but we are positively and definitely against the disintegration of our community and our body politic that we cherish above all things,” Turner had proclaimed, “realizing that where anarchy prevails, none of us have anything of any value and none of us have any freedoms any more.” Above Governor Bredeson, a black plastic tarp hid a recently installed
Leslie W. Dunbar, Foreword to “The Desegregation of Southern Schools,” by Robert Coles (New 37
monument. When the sheets fell away, they revealed twelve bronze statues, life-size sculptures of the black teenagers. Poised above the audience, they stood looking down the Hill as though they were about to begin the long walk to school (See Image 1.1). 38
The idea for the statues had arisen early in the museum’s planning process when the Green McAdoo Cultural Organization’s members read news coverage of the 2005 dedication of “Testament,” statues of the Little Rock Nine installed on Arkansas’s capitol grounds. Believing that the Clinton Twelve deserved similar treatment, the organization commissioned sculptor William F. Duffy of the Large Art Company from Baltimore, Maryland, to create the memorial. He patterned the statues on news photographs taken of the teenagers. 39
For the twelve, the statues were more than a simple commemoration of their bravery. “‘I never thought this would happen,’” Bobby Cain Jr., told a reporter for The Oak Ridger. “‘The “Clinton Twelve” has been recognized,’” Jo Ann Allen Boyce, another one of the twelve, agreed. “‘I’m blown away,’” she said. “‘I’m overwhelmed. I’m humbled.’” She admired the dignity and determination shown in the statues’ countenances and saw the posture as a reflection of the grace with which the twelve had met their adversaries. “We
“Governor’s Budget Includes Money for ‘Clinton 12’ Statues,” The Oak Ridger, May 29, 2006,
38
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?
p_action=doc&p_docid=111EC05348FB644E&p_docnum=25&p_theme=gatehouse&s_site=TORB&p_produc t=TORB; Large Art Company, “The Large Art Company Completes Historic Sculptures in Tennessee,” 2007, http://largeart.com/press/Custom-Commission-Bronze-Sculpture-Clinton-12-Green-McAdoo.aspx; “Opening/ Dedication,” Green McAdoo Cultural Center, http://www.greenmcadoo.com/grandopening.html.
“Clinton 12 Immortalized,” The Oak Ridger, May 18, 2007, http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/
39
Archives?
p_action=doc&p_docid=119430EE85A22B50&p_docnum=9&p_theme=gatehouse&s_site=TORB&p_product =TORB; “Large Art Company”; “Opening/Dedication.”
always walked with our heads high,” she told me proudly. “We held our heads high, and we continued to walk, [and] we walked steadily.”40
The process of constructing the museum and the celebrations that attended its opening helped the twelve transcend some of the anger that had haunted them since their days at Clinton High. The commemoration marked the first time many of them spoke publicly about that year. They had kept silent, even within their families, refusing to share their memories because they feared that their bitterness might infect those closest to them. They had 41 remained silent with other Clintonians because they did not know how to discuss that year without ending the tense truce they had negotiated with whites in the town.
At first, they clung to the idea that they had made important strides for civil rights, and they comforted themselves with the thought that the rest of the nation appreciated their sacrifice, and a few of them—particularly Bobby Cain—did receive recognition from civil rights groups across the country. But as the years passed, fewer and fewer Americans included them in the litany of civil rights heroes, replacing their names with the students in Little Rock, Birmingham and elsewhere. Their silence expanded to include outside
researchers and scholars. They believed that no one else cared about what had happened to
“Clinton 12 Immortalized;” Jo Ann Crozier Allen Boyce, interview by Rachel L. Martin, digital
40
recording, July 20, 2009, in the possession of the interviewer, Durham, North Carolina; “Large Art Company”; “Opening/Dedication.”
In this, they had some wisdom. Memory theorist Marianne Hirsch describes the effect of what she
41
calls “postmemory” on the children of Holocaust victims. She catalogues how those children “‘remember’” the experience of their parents through the stories they hear. “Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment and creation,” Hirsch wrote. “That is not to say that survivor memory is itself unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up
dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that they can neither understand nor recreate;” Hirsch, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural
Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan V. Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College,
them, and they grew to resent the attention given to the Little Rock Nine, who also had to brave angry mobs but who had followed behind the Clinton Twelve and learned from their experiences. “Why did the Little Rock Nine receive a presidential medal?” several of them 42 asked me.
Puzzled by the lack of interest in their stories, they had come to believe that the historical silence must be purposeful. Fifty years after the events of 1956, several of the twelve were hesitant to speak with me. “I’m going to be honest with you, … when I read the letter [from you], I said, ‘I am not going to do this,’” Cain admitted to me toward the end of our conversation. The only reason he responded to my interview request was that he realized I was a graduate student. “I’m glad you are getting your PhD, and so I said ‘Let me call her first and see.’” During that phone call, he asked me about my work and then asked if I had spoken with any of the others. “If you had not told me [that you were a graduate student and that you had approached all of us for interviews], I probably wouldn’t have done this,” he concluded. 43
Residents and activists in Little Rock carefully watched the situation in Clinton, looking to learn
42
from the experiences of the mountain town. To pay their defense attorneys, Arkansas’s segregationists partnered with the Freedom Fund Incorporated, which was originally founded to fund the defense of the individuals arrested for the Clinton riots; “Outgrowth of School Disorders,” Herald Journal, October 10, 1957, http:// news.google.com; “Attorneys Heard in Desegregation Case,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 29, 1958, http:// news.google.com; “U.S. Offers Plan for Little Rock,” Warsaw Times,September 10, 1958, http://
news.google.com.When the violence erupted in Little Rock, journalists and politicians referred hopefully to the relative peacefulness of Clinton High’s second year; James Russell, “Deny Racial Trouble Hurts Dixie
Economy,” The Times-News, October 17, 1957, 2, http://news.google.com; Thomas L. Stokes, “Someone Will Always Meet the Challenge,” Lewiston Morning-Tribune, September 11, 1957, http://news.google.com; “Lawyer Glad Army Is in Little Rock,” The Afro-American, October 5, 1957, http://news.google.com. Governor Orval Faubus’s decision to use the National Guard to resist the court order may have been informed by public anger toward Tennessee Governor Frank Clement who used the Guard to enforce the federal injunction; “Arkansas Troops Stand Guard Over Basic Rights of the Republic,” The News and Courier, September 4, 1957, 10-A; “Even a Governor Should Obey the Law,” Sunday Herald, September 8, 1957, 18.
Bobby Cain Jr., interview with Rachel L. Martin, digital recording, July 18, 2009, in the possession
43
The opening of the Green McAdoo Cultural Center and the events surrounding it prompted the black students to speak publicly about that year. In addition to giving voice to their stories, the commemorations officially recognized the twelve as groundbreaking participants in the struggle for educational equality. 44
While the black students know they deserve more attention than they have gotten and appreciate that they are finally being recognized for their actions, many of them have mixed feelings about how they are being commemorated. “I’m not a hero,” Alfred Williams
insisted. “I had no alternative but to go to school.” They had enrolled at Clinton High 45 School because they hoped that the school, which was an hour closer to their homes than their all-black school had been, would allow them to more fully enjoy their high school experience. When the rioting erupted, the twelve struggled with the knowledge that while desegregation was not what they had chosen, they were the ones who had to make it work.
So often in American social memory, the black teenagers who desegregated
America’s schools, sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counters or joined the Children’s Crusade are depicted as heroes who choose to walk down those painful paths because they had a degree of insight and strength that sets them apart. These stories make the teenagers’ bravery into a mythical exploit that others in their society cannot emulate, which exculpates the rest of us from having to take up their battles. But Jo Ann Crozier Allen Boyce, Bobby Cain, Anna Theresser Caswell, Ronald Hayden, Minnie Ann Dickie Jones, Alva Jay McSwain Lambert, William Latham, Regina Turner Smith, Maurice Soles, Robert Thacker, Gail Ann
Ibid.; interview with Jo Ann Boyce.
44
Johanne Jean-Jacques, “Love Overcomes a Young Man’s Anger,” Clinton Courier-News, June 4,
45
Upton Epps and Alfred Williams were just twelve American teenagers who loved rock-and- roll and dreamed of going to their senior prom. What made them different was that when their community called upon them, they responded. They got up and went to school. And some of them even graduated from that school. Today they debate whether the cost
outweighed the value of their educations, but they also know that their determination gave their siblings, their children and the children of their enemies a better, more equal future. These students’ stories can begin to do something truly remarkable. Their voices can inspire us to continue the fight toward racial equality in America.
BEFORE DESEGREGATION:
The twelve black students who walked into Clinton High School on August 27, 1956, were not the five students named in Joheather McSwain v. Anderson County School Board, the 1950 lawsuit that had ended segregation at Clinton High School. But when they learned that federal judge Robert Taylor had ordered Clinton High to desegregate, the guardians of the twelve agreed that their children should act upon the court order brought by the older students. They understood why the other students and their parents had sued for the right to enroll at the all-white school. The twelve’s parents recognized that attending Clinton High could improve their children’s future opportunities. One of the easiest ways to prevent Clinton’s black community from rising economically had been to limit their educational possibilities. “Every time black people would get a job, they would be thrown out … because of a lack of education,” recalled Mattie Bell Henley, Gail Upton Epps’ aunt and one of the matriarchs of the African American community. “We began to realize … that our children
should have equal rights and go to school, that [if they did] they would be prepared for better jobs.” 46
Even before the judge ruled in the favor of Clinton’s black teens, the lawsuit had already improved their educational opportunities. When the families asked for admittance to Clinton High in 1950, white municipal leaders had tried to placate them by transferring their children from the unaccredited black school in LaFollette to Knoxville’s black high school, highly-ranked Austin High School. But the black families still believed their students were missing out on all that a secondary education could offer to them, opportunities they would receive at Clinton High.
It took almost an hour to commute to from the bus station in downtown Clinton to Austin High. In most of the black families, both parents worked, so the teenagers rode to and from school on the public bus that ran between the towns. Clinton’s black students and their parents especially worried about the times when the high schoolers could not make it to school at all. Winters in Appalachia can be unpredictable, and the two-lane highway connecting Clinton and Knoxville ran through a narrow mountain pass. During inclement weather, the mountainous road quickly became impassable. Anderson County’s educational administrators seemed unconcerned about this problem, even if the students were out for several weeks. Anna Theresser Caswell, for instance, lived about five miles outside Clinton. When the state decided to repave her road, the bus stopped coming for her, “so we just didn’t
Mattie Bell Henley, interview by June Adamson, analog recording, July 12, 1978, University of
46
go to school until the road was fixed,” she told me. “I know it was over two weeks that we didn’t go to school. … Just stayed at home.” 47
Black students from Clinton also were unable to participate in extracurricular activities. Bobby Cain, for instance, recalled that if he had joined the basketball team, he would have had to wait until almost midnight to catch the bus back to Clinton. Jo Ann Allen Boyce attended only one social event at Austin: the homecoming football game during the fall of her sophomore year. In celebration, she bought a new coat, and she fondly recalled feeling that she was “so gorgeous … sitting up in the stands with my friends and yelling for the team.” 48
That spring as their parents discussed where to enroll their children for next year, the students themselves remember paying little attention to the court’s decision. “It was kind of like water on a duck’s back,” Bobby Cain recalled. “We didn’t think it was going to happen. … I was going through my routines as I had been at Austin, thinking I would be going back in the fall, even though I read about Clinton.” He even paid a deposit so that he could attend Austin’s senior prom the following spring. “I didn’t know anything about the school being integrated until two or three days before we were to go … [when] we were called to a meeting at Green McAdoo School,” Regina Turner Smith remembered. “It was a really big shock to me. … I could see the sense in going [to Clinton High],” she continued, “I was just looking forward to [my junior year at Austin].” Alfred Williams remembered that he did not want to transfer to Clinton for his senior year. “I didn’t want to go to school down there with
Jo Ann Allen Boyce, “My Autobiography,” the Clinton Twelve, http://www.greenmcadoo.org/
47
clinton_twelve.html; Anna Theresser Caswell, interview by Rachel L. Martin, digital recording, October 22, 2005, MTSU Center for Historic Preservation, Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Interview with Bobby Cain; interview with Jo Ann Boyce.
them any more than they wanted me to be down there,” he told me. “I preferred to have stayed over there at that all black school, … but that was the law.” Steve Williams, his uncle and guardian, insisted he join the others.49
At the end of the 1956 spring term, the black families began making preparations to transfer their children to Clinton High School. Though Principal D.J. Brittain Jr. and other school administrators permitted the African American students to enroll, they refused to go out of their way to facilitate the process. As a result, though fifteen black teenagers were eligible to enter at Clinton High, only twelve did so. The other three had trouble getting their paperwork in order. One of these was Alfred Williams’ half-brother Eddie Soles. His
transcript never arrived from the high school he had attended in Anniston, Alabama. Eddie Soles remembered that his guardian Steve Williams “meant for us to go to school in Clinton or … not go at all.” This meant the end of Soles’ formal education. Those whose paperwork did clear by the beginning of that academic year knew that they would either go to school “down that hill, just two-tenths of a mile, or never go again.” 50