A Most Tolerant Little Town

January 1, 2023

As a graduate student participating in a Southern oral history project, Martin visited the small town in Tennessee whose school became the first in the former Confederacy to undergo court-mandated desegregation. She found to her dismay that people weren't eager to talk. Years later, she returned, interviewing over 60 townsfolk--including some of the first students to desegregate the school--to ferret out secrets and discover what really happened in 1956.

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May 1, 2023
Historian Martin (Hot, Hot Chicken) paints a compassionate and nuanced portrait of the Black community of Freedman’s Hill in Clinton, Tenn., and its struggles to achieve equality following the passage of Brown v. Board of Education. In August 1956, “twelve Black students braved mobs and beatings” to attend Clinton High after the NAACP won a six-year court battle to desegregate the school. Previously, Martin explains, the school board had “systematically underfunded Black education,” expecting Freedman’s Hill Black high school students to travel 25 miles away to attend “failing” LaFollette Colored High. Clinton High principal D.J. Brittain Jr. hoped that keeping the races apart during after-school activities would satisfy white families, but a segregationist group called for his resignation, leading to protests and violence. In October, someone planted 100 sticks of dynamite in Clinton High and blew it up. Though the FBI suspected the Ku Kux Klan for this and subsequent arsons in town, no arrests were made. Telling the story in flashbacks and vignettes, Martin, who collected oral histories for 18 years, strikes an expert balance between the big picture and intimate profiles of the families involved. The result is a vivid snapshot of the civil rights–era South.

May 1, 2023
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.

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June 1, 2023
Nashville-based historian Martin (Hot, Hot Chicken, 2021) first came to Clinton, Tennessee, in 2005 to begin an oral history initiative about the local high school's integration in 1956, the first instance of court-mandated desegregation in the South following Brown v. Board of Education, one year before Little Rock. The story begins on August 27, the first day of school, when 12 brave Black teenagers arrived together to make history. The school day went surprisingly well, but that evening, the first sign of trouble manifested itself: a rally of several hundred white residents who would become the Anderson County White Citizens Council to prove that Clinton was anything but a most tolerant little town. Just how intolerant Clinton was is Martin's carefully researched, heartfelt story, brought to dramatic life by the 67 oral history interviews conducted for the project (not all by the author). Although she asserts that the mini-war engendered by Clinton's forced integration attracted national attention at the time, it is now largely forgotten. This important book will remedy the shocking oversight.

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