Transcripts For CSPAN QA 20240704

Host Rachel Louise martin the story you tell in your new book, a most tolerant little town, centers around clinton tennessee in the 1950s. Where is that and describe what it was like . Guest clinton is right on t appalachia. Tains that make it is about an hour north of knoxville and it is right on the gateway to coal mining country. Host if you and i were there in the 1950s what kind of a community would we find . Guest it was an interesting place in the 50s. It was very mixed up about itself. On one hand it was a small rural southern appalachian town full of coal miners and farmers and local business people. But it was also 7 miles from oak ridge, which was a secret city built as part of the Manhattan Project that built the first atom bomb and it was also about seven miles from nora stamm. Norris dam. So while it was isolated and small it was also very connected. In 1956 it was the sort of place that oak president ial candidates felt like they had to go and Campaign Even though there was only a couple 1000 people there. Host so the story about clinton you tell is about the first school under federally mandated desegregation. How did it come to your attention, because as you point out we all know about little rock but not so much about clinton tennessee. Guest it started out as a work assignment, after i finished my ma i took a year off before finishing the rest of my graduate degree. I worked as an oral historian for the center for Historic Preservation at middle Tennessee State and there i was sent into lots of different tiny southern towns. I was usually supposed to do somewhere between five and a dozen interviews, that would help support a National Register for nomination or a new museum which is what was happening in clinton, or Something Like that. I would come in, do a bunch of interviews for a couple days, i would take them back, transcribe them and move on. Clinton stuck with me. I had never heard the story. I found what i was learning about it very compelling, i found the people very compelling. I ended up working on it for the next 18 years. Host what kind of reception did you have at the time when you are asking people to tell up memories from so many decades back . Guest the very earliest one, because i was there working with the town i did have to set up many i did not have to set up many of my interviews, that was done for me. I was going to people who are ready to talk. Many of them had not ever told their stories before, definitely outside their families, sometimes even to their own families. There were moments when they would get uncomfortable with the storytelling process, but they were all people who were very eager to share. As i got deeper into the research and started trying to push out beyond the folks were already involved with the museum or with the commemorations that had started happening, there was a lot more resistance. Host how did clinton come to be the first federally mandated desegregated school . Guest it was because a woman named wynonna mick frame, she was a black woman from the area, when she was coming up through school they actually did not have any sort of secondary education available to black teenagers at all. When they would graduate from junior high, they would either have to drop out of school or if their parents had enough money they could get shipped off to a boarding school somewhere but obviously we are talking about rural appalachia. There were not many parents who had that sort of income available. Her education ended when she was 13. She always wanted more, she loved learning and she really believe that learning was essential. When her own kids were born, she had a number of them, she began working toward improving education in Anderson County. Which is where clinton is based. She had a lot of different ways that she went about this, at one point she actually convince the county to pay for her kids to get sent away to school, to boarding schools. Her son went to nashville and worked with her sister there and went to a school there. Her daughters were sent off to a Methodist Boarding School in the mountains. By 1950, the county had decided they were not going to pay for that anymore. So wynonna was told her kids were going to have to go to a failing black school a county away. She said absolutely not. That is an inherently unequal education, Clinton High School is one of the top rated high schools in the state, you are not going to send my kids off to a Terrible High School when they have an amazing High School Just down the way. Her children who were of High School Age, along with some other kids of High School Age in the town and their parents, marched into the Principals Office one day in 1956, or 1950 excuse me. And asked to register for classes. The principal said absolutely not, they went to the superintendent, she said absolutely not. So they sued the county. And that became the case and in 1956 forced desegregation. Host what should we know about the federal judge that issued the ruling in their case . Guest Robert Shiller was a fascinating guy. He had deep roots in tennessee politics, his dad and his uncle had both been governor and had actually competed against each other for various lyrical posts over the years. There are all sorts of stories about that. He was someone who really tried to use his position for a better life for people in his district as a federal judge. At the same time he was absolutely a segregationist. After the ruling was placed in brown v. Board of education, and he is told that desegregation is now the law, that separatism is inherently unequal he had quite a conundrum. He becomes one of the first of the local citizens to say i may not agree with desegregation but i will follow the law. I call him the law and order segregationist. He ended up mandating School Desegregation even though he does not believe in it because it is federal law. He ends up having to enforce it. He attested multiple times there were many times he could have walked away and really decided not to pursue the implementation of his court order and instead he sticks with it. He makes it all the way through. Host how much time was there between him issuing the order and the start of the desegregated school year . Guest he issued the order in january of 56 and the School Year Starts at the end of august. Host so not much time. How did clintons population and the school board and school react to the judges order with so little time to prepare . Guest there were very different reactions. I think a lot of people in town, both blackandwhite, really never believed it would happen. Some of the students who ended up desegregating the school actually went back to their high school and bought tickets to their senior prom because they assumed they would still be going to their black high school. That there was no way they would end up in a White High School the next semester. The School Board Just refused to deal with it at all, they did not meet with the principal to discuss the implementation of the court order. Until almost the end of the first semester of school. They did many things to try to stop it from happening, through basic inertia. They did not accept that it was happening for a long time that you have someone like the principal, dj britton junior, he was one of the people none of the white people in town ever at this point said they believed in desegregation, he openly said i am a segregationist. Nevertheless, this is the law of the land. And as a principal i am responsible for giving all of my students the best education possible. And so beginning that Spring Semester before desegregation he started planning for it. He met with teachers, he found a teacher who would act as the black students unofficial guidance counselor and she began meeting with them about what classes to take. They were given exactly the same entrance exams that any other teenager coming in to that high school would receive and based on those scores several will put into the College Preparatory track. He really tried to treat them fairly, at the same time saying we do not want you here. And he also said i am legally mandated to desegregate academically, socially nothing is going to change. Black students are not allowed it any of the social events, they cannot participate in plays, they cannot join sports teams. He drew a lot of lines around how far desegregation would actually go. Host i read in your book that segregated schools was actually part of tennessees constitution at that time. Guest yes there was a set of white adults in clinton who actually sue arguing the school should be stripped of all state funding because they have desegregated. Legally, obviously morally it was a terrible argument but legally it was not a terrible argument. That is with the state law said. Host but in this case federal law superseded it. Guest yes. So the ongoing battle over states rights. Host the way you describe it it sounds like principal dj britton was acting without any guidance on how to proceed, no support from the school board. Where do you think he understood how to make this work . Even if he was opposed to it and wanted to make it work, how do you think he operated in the months planning that opening day . Guest that is a question that has really fascinated me. I wish i could read his notes from that era, he ordered his family to burn all of his papers from that season of his life after his death. Goingo have to go off of supposition. First, he was a very methodical man. And someone who understood people quite well. And understood teenagers remarkably well. He had great instincts as to how to interact with and handle people in a moment of difficulty. And he knew how to defuse situations very effectively. I think a lot of it for him was years of teaching and experience, he came from a long line of educators as well. His dad was principal at another nearby high school. One of his uncles was a school superintendent, his mom was a teacher, his wife was a teacher. I imagine the author turned to them and said what would you do here . How would you handle this . And he was a consensus builder. He spent a lot of of time meeting with parents, both blackandwhite, he also met with students and he spent a lot of time in faculty meetings. Getting everybody at least to the point of saying we will obey the law. He recruited the football team, even though many of them did not want to do it. He really worked within his sphere of influence and trying to build the best solution he could. It ended up getting out of his control but i really think he did everything within his ability. Host opening day of school in clinton was monday, august 27 1956. I wanted to get their names on the record, can you list all of the students the black students enrolled on the first day . Guest i absolutely can but because we are doing this on television i am going tpanic and worry i am going to miss somebody s goi to pull my book. Ando a cheat sheet. The 12 black students names, alphabetized because im using my cheat sheet were joanne allen, bobby kane, anna teresa cadwell, marianne dickey, gail and ronaldden,illiam latham, albert james, tina turner regina turner, robert sachar and alfred williams. Host thank you for that, the black parents that enrolled their kids in Clinton High School were knowingly sending them off to the front lines of the Racial Justice movement. The Civil Rights Movement in this country. How prepared do you think they were, and their children were, for what would lie ahead . Guest on the one hand, they had all at least spent considerable time in the segregated south. Many of them had lived in the south all of their lives. Many of them had lived in clinton or Anderson County all of their lives. They really knew how deep this commitment to White Supremacy went within their world. At the same time, nobody had done this before. So they were going without any real guidance, the closest anybody had come was at nearby oak ridge. Where they had been forced to desegregate their schools a year earlier because they were a military base. But because they were a military base that was done under federal protection, everybody living on base was dependent upon the federal government for their housing, no one owns their own homes at this point. They were dependent on the federal government for food in their income, and for anything else. So they had seen oak ridge successfully desegregate. And that gave them some hope, that they would have a similar experience and so at the beginning of the semester many of them went into it saying of course there will be some namecalling. There will be a little resistance. They knew that there had been some folks who had sued, for instance suggesting that the state strip clinton high of its funding. They knew there had been petitions that have been circulated among adults white adults around clinton were hundreds of them had signed it pledging the resistance to desegregation. I think at the beginning of that first day everybody hoped that would be about as far as it went. A quote from one of my narrators, that clinton was a most tolerant little town. There would be some folks who didnt like it but everybody would end up in there would be law and order. Host what was the first day like . Guest for many it was very helpful in the beginning. There were 50 to 75 protesters outside. They stayed on their side of the street. Black children were able to walk into school, pretty much unmolested. The first day one of the black girls was elected as the Vice President of her homeroom. Her name is joanne, i had to give her her own little plug. She has a book out for middle grades and its fantastic if you have a kid who is looking to learn more about desegregation. She was elected Vice President of her homeroom. Other kids, it was a typical first day of school thing. How was your name tell us your name and tell us what you like to do, all of those introductory questions you ask a new student. At the end of the day, a couple of the boys tell a reporter things are going so well they might let us try out for basketball next semester. Principal britton is going to see if this is successful. Unfortunately by the end of the day all of that has fallen apart, after school had let out a black woman who was walking by his push down. Her glasses get broken. Another woman has a bottle thrown at her. Some kids try to rough up black teenagers who had nothing to do with the desegregation. And then that night, white segregationist protesters take over the Courthouse Square in host the first of a series of nightly rallies. Getting everybody all riled up about desegregation and what is happening. By the next morning, there are many more people outside the school and it is a lot more contentious. And heading towards violence very rapidly. Host you mentioned talking to a reporter, had this already come to the attention of National Media by day one . Guest day one they are doing basic reports, picking up stuff from local media. So it is primarily folks who live nearby who are getting their own reporters in there. So the National Paper as they are, the clinton paper as they are, the oak ridge paper is there. But on that first day, it is pretty lowkey. Host and it eventually comes to the attention of a very wellknown cbs reporter and he created an hourlong program about clinton. We have several clips that show principal so our audience can see and hear some of the people involved in this. What do you want to tell me a little bit about edwards program , it comes later in the story but the fact that he was interested enough to send a whole cbs news crew down and with the addition of the National Media on that town did to the people of that town . Guest yes, edward is one of the last of the journalist to come to town actually. By thursday of that week there are reporters in town, multiple photographers from magazines. Everywhere. They created an incredibly rich trove of photographs of life in clinton, the New York Times has one of their big reporters in town. There are reporters from paris and london, literally around the world covering the clinton story. When murdoch comes to town he does bring his entire documentary team with him to report what has happened. There are a lot of people in town, especially the law and order segregationist folks who say that the reporters are making everything worse. They are turning it into a circus. That they are spreading the word and causing more outsiders to come in to protest this. There are some that really blame a lot of the violence on the reporters being there. Some of the officials who start trying to get control of the world, also here is a thing about the reporters, many of the black residents in clinton feel differently. And it is exactly what we see today. So much violence, especially racial violence, can be ignored or denied or blamed on the community being attacked until you have a camera rolling. And when you have actual documentation of what is happening to the people, all of a sudden the world begins to pay more attention. The pressure on local officials and state officials and federal officials increases rapidly. And honestly i think that especially during those first few weeks the presence of the national and International Press may have saved some lives. Just because there were cameras there. Host t story of little rock year later would b one of troopselng to ensure student safety. In those first couple days to they have any support from Law Enforcement or from the federal government which had mandated this order or were they really on their own as they navigated through the protesters . Guest they were completely on their own. The black students and the black families. They lived in a neighborhood overlooking downtown. It was originally called friedman help because that is where people had moved after emancipation, that got shortened by 1956 to short to simply the hill. The Police Provide them with zero support, zero protection. As a result, the black men, many of whom are veterans, began organizing themselves in order to provide protection for their families. And they deployed themselves that night around the hill with their own squirrel rifles or inherited pistols or whatever else they had on hand, to try to protect their kids. Because the clan was riding through, the White Citizens Council was writing through, other rough hands were coming through. It was a real serious and dangerous moment for the black families. Host lets listen to the first of these clips. This is a scene you referenced earlier telling cbs what it was like being a student that first year of integration. In the morning when we started school there were only a few people around and i thought they just wanted to see us come in and that they would leave later. But then the next day when more people came and a young boy started walking with a sign i began to wonder and think maybe they are not going to accept this like i thought they would. On wednesday morning i almost cried and went back home because there were so many people and they look so mean and they look like they just wanted to grab us and throw us out. They did not want us at all, you could see the hate in their hearts. When we got inside the school, lots of the children were very nice to us and there were some uchitel did not want us there. Host as the semester progressed what was the learning situation like for both black and white students with all of this attention on the town, all of the people protesting outside . Were they out truly able to learn . Guest i think it was a terrible learning situation, particularly for the black students. At the moments of crisis there were a couple times when the riots outside the school get particularly bad and happened during the school day. At that point a lot of the white students disappear from classes and just stay home. Their parents say this is not safe for you we are getting you out. Or they join the protesters themselves, that is the other thing that happened. During those weeks of the year, everyones education suffered. For the rest of the time, i think many of the white students go through their school day just like it is normal. For the black students, it never normalizes. They are hushed and harassed in the halls. They come into their classrooms and they would find tax tacks on their seats or racial slurs on their desks or they would have their hair pulled. The girls particularly would have their hair pulled. They were never safe. They could never settle in. That level of vigilance, that level of fear changes the way our brains functions and makes it much harder for kids to absorb new knowledge. To make those new neural pathways that you need to be making as you are trying to pick up algebra or physics or french or whatever your classes. It really stymies your learning and they had a really hard time. Host lets see the perspective of dj britain from the same cbs documentary. For myself the first day and night my telephone rang incessantly. I guess my life was threatened 10 or 12 times by anonymous telephone callers who will hang up. I have since had my phone number changed four times. To keep from getting these annoying calls. I have received letters, many through the mail. I received two today, one of which was an unsigned letter of course. But it said that they felt i was a lowdown person and used other vile names and felt that someone should throw acid in my face or the face of someone in my family. And that i was not fit to live. Host when you hear him describe that what is your reaction . Guest there are a few people from the story who haunts me. Who really broke my heart as i learned about them and principal britain is one of them. He began the year as a law and order segregationist, he actually ended up being a fairly committed integrationist and later in his career made some dramatic changes implementing black studies curriculum at the new district he was superintendent of an equalizing racial this experience really changed him. He is someone who grew quite a lot but it also broken. And i dont think we have spent nearly enough time talking about how fighting for justice and equality can cost people an incredible amount. The black students, many of them walked away with symptoms of ptsd. Some of them continue to struggle with some of that to this day. And people like principal britain, they were really broken by what happened. Host agitating even further were people from around the country. One person who makes many appearances is a man by the name of john casper. We are going to play a clip from him so people can hear what he had to say and then you can tell us who he was and what role he played in clinton tennessee effort to desegregate. I say integration can be reversed, it can be stopped anywhere. A violent attack was made at every single level, but meetings of the county court are attended to, demands are made. People keep hitting the judge. Who made the original ruling. The pressure, tremendous pressure that is brought to bear on that school principal, on the school board, on the local newspaper, or whoever it is, it has to be responsible. There is no sense any longer appealing to senator so and so or the president or the Supreme Court judge. There has got to be a pressure down here which is more or less like a stick of dynamite. When you throw it in there let them catch it and then they can do what they want with it. Host rachel martin, who is john casper and what did he do in inton that changed the situation . Guest john casper was quite a character. He was originally from new jersey, and educated at columbia. And while he was at columbia he fell under the influence of e fascist poet ezra pound who w in jail for having supported hitlers and mussolini. Pound and casper exchanged multiple letters. They averaged about one letter a week from what i could calculate , over the next decade. So casper adopted a lot of pounds philosophies around racial equality, he became a virulent antisemite. Partially because of ezra pound. He was basically a neonazi. He ended up learning about clinton and the saturday before School Desegregation happened he rode the bus into the middle of town, he had a pocket full of dimes, and he started calling people. He walked around some of the white neighborhoods and try to meet people. The local officials hear about him and say oh this guy cannot be allowed to continue this work. They actually arrested him on sunday for disturbing the peace. He at that point was also attempting to foment a riot, but im not positive. He was kept in jail until thursday until the first week of school. He would tell you if he was still alive, he would claim and many of the law and order segregationist would also have said, that everything in all the violence that happened after that was because john casper came to town. That it was his fault. As i dug deeper into the story, the evidence did not tear that out. Bear that out. He was one of several national segregationists who attempted to use clinton to build their own reputation, their own name, their ability to lead the growing White Supremacist Movement that was happening across the country. He definitely talked about having been a leader in clinton but he was an Ivy League Educated yankee who was in town for less than 24 hours before school started. He was not trusted by the local white supremacist. He was not offered leadership of their organization. In fact i always get the names backwards but one group found the Anderson White county Citizens Council and then i believe john counts casper founded his own and they are rival organizations. They banned him from all of their meetings, he only has about a dozen people in his organization and there are hundreds in the locally run organization. The local tavern also bans them from their meeting and by december everyone is so sick of him that somebody bombs his headquarters to let him know you have to get out of town. If you dont leave here, next time it is your life. He is blamed for a lot of the violence. But it was very much a homegrown movement, from everything i can tell. Host he made reference to the stick of dynamite and throughout your story there is one bombing after another during that first year of Clinton High School. Its so much dynamite in that town, why was that . Guest there is so much dynamite in that town. It is coal mining country. About a quarter of the men in the county were at one point employed in the mines. So plus it is a rural county. You would need to blow up tree trunks and get rid of stumps. Explosives are very common. In any time there had been any time of labor protest in the town there had always been the threat of dynamite being used. And with the desegregation consulate dynamite actually is used. But it is such a common thing, the first explosion is actually done with blasting powder not dynamite and the sheriff says that was not real. If they wanted to do damage they would have. The first explosion kind of explained away or laughed at because Everybody Knows that blasting powder does not do anything. It is a very different world. Host your book provides a real detailed look at the fall semester with the students in a long series of protests, harassments, arrest, violence. I want to fast forward to election day, and introduce another person into the mix. Reverend paul turner. We do have a clip from him, do you want to tell me about reverend turners involvement in length and high schools in year of desegregation . Guest paul turner came from west tennessee, he was not a local. He was a Southern Baptist pastor, who had been raised within the segregated south. Raised to be a good white supremacist like everyone else around him. When he went off to seminary, his main advisor was a man named olin frankly who was a white man who really believed that the bible preached racial inequality. And he used his position in this Southern Baptist seminary to try to encourage his students to embrace that belief as well. Paul turner does this but he explores the theological backings behind this argument. When he came to clinton, he took over the First Baptist church. It had already been the largest Baptist Church in town but then paul turner was young, he was charismatic, he began drawing in all sorts of additional people. People who left their smaller churches to join him and it became a powerhouse. He was the leader of the local temperance movement, politically he was very engaged and active and by the time desegregation begins had to fight a bit in the town. In the beginning he said integration is right, he did say we must be christians first and segregationists second. He attempted to encourage his parishioners away from violence, he did not succeed. But he really wrestled with these questions as the school year were on. Host in the cbs documentary on clinton tenancy here is the pastor. One of the Citizens Council members had stationed himself with about three other men on the corner as i made my way to the corner, they jumped me. One man successfully held my arms down and allowed the number one man of their gang to land a pretty good blow upon my nose. It was at that time that i realized i had to defend myself in some way so i took off after the man who had slugged me, pinned him against the car and immediately ate to 10 people were on our backs. Host the beating did the beating of reverend turner work for the segregationists . Guest no it backfired. At the back story to that story, at the end of november the black students had actually stopped going to school to protest the amount of violence they were facing and paul turner volunteered to walk them into the school building, which is what led to him being beaten up. It was the same day as the local election and the Anderson County White Citizens Council as well as the tennessee white youth had endorsed a slate of white supremacist candidates. I dont know that they would have one but they were expected to put in a pretty good show at the polls that day. But when the news comes out the turner had been attacked and beaten up, people who fell on the law order side were irate. This personalized it in a way that none of the other violence had, this was their pastor, they loved him. They could not believe a man of god, a white man of god in particular had been beaten up. So they lined up to vote for anybody except for the white supremacist candidates. There are stories of people coming home from college in philadelphia to vote. People leave their business trips early to make sure they get back in time to vote. It really worked against the White Supremacist Movement to do this. Host by the time the new school year began, the second semester of the First School Year how many of the 12 were still left in high school . Guest about half of them had left. By the time january rolls around. We heard from joanne allen, her family had evacuated to california. Because of all of the violence that she had faced, her father had also been a target of some violence because of the stance they were taking. Several of the boys had decided they do not want to put up with this anymore and they dropped out of school and decided to go elsewhere. But by the beginning of the Spring Semester the numbers were much lower than they had been. Host the focus in the second semester for many of the protesters and White Supremacists was one student, bobby kane. Why was he of particular interest . Guest he was one of two black seniors at Clinton High School that year. There was a real feeling it is one thing if a freshman or sophomore made it through a year of school, you can still force them out of school or force their parents many of the black students parents lost job. You could force them out that way and they were not included in the School Yearbook so you could pretend it never happened. If someone graduated from clinton high and got a clinton high diploma the feeling was the school at that point was permanently disaggregated. You could never deny or pretend, it was over. So the other black senior was a kid named alfred williams, he was much older. He struggled academically and early in the second semester the tennessee white youth drove him out of school. They provoked a fight, he was already struggling with his classes. The violence had kept him from being able to do well in his classes and so he gets expelled from the school. That was only bobby kane left as this existential threat. So he was the focus for the rest of that school year. As they tried to make sure he could never get that diploma. Host one week prior to graduation, described the size of the local rally that took place . Guest it was massive. There was a white teacher Margaret Anderson who live nowhere near where the rally took place but said she could see the reflections of the flames from the fire in the night sky that night. It was huge. People around the town could hear the shouting and chanting. It was part of what had been basically nine months of similar campaigning and violence. It was a real demonstration for people who lived in clinton that nothing had changed. They were as vulnerable as they ever had been, they were no closer to winning this fight then when they had started in august. The White Supremacists had not given in, they had not resigned themselves. It was not going to get better anytime soon. Host was bobby kane able to graduate . Guest he was. And he even was able to walk across the stage. I think that should have been a very special moment for him, a moment of real triumph. Unfortunately, after he graduated when he was taking off his graduation robe and attempting to finish off his day he was attacked again. He was not even allowed to have that moment. Host but he did have quite a summer after school ended. What happens over the next couple months . Guest he was the first black graduate from a formerly allwhite school that had been desegregated as a result of brown versus. So civil rightstutis and large blacches around the on bught him in. He appeared at one point with Jackie Robinson at a massive rally and in new york city. He hosted several of the large black churches up north, and then one of the black papers says oh my goodness, his dad had struggled to find work as a result of desegregation. His family financially had been impacted by this. They began taking up a collection to find his college tuition, so that bobby kane could go to college. It ended up being enough to let him graduate debt free. He had quite the summer after it all happened. Host when the new school year opened in 1957 without principal britton who was exhausted and set down, the new principal came in to place. Was he better able after a year of experience to navigate what the second year would be like . Guest the new principal was a very rough man. Very different from dj britton. He was quite a bit taller, quite more intimidating, did not care if people like him at all. Also at this point bobby kane had graduated so they had already tossed that marker of existential dread that the segregationists had had. So in some ways, i think that next school year was much more peaceful. There were not the protesters out in the streets. There had been a big federal case that Robert Taylor had overseen over the summer where many of them had been convicted on federal charges as a result of their actions. He inherited a different situation inside the school, so it was still very hard for the black students. They still were extremely isolated, they did not have friends among their white classmates and in many classes it was only one black teenager in a sea of white kids. They were also still targets of the same harassment, the insults, the threats of violence or actual violence happening. So it was better, but much remained exactly the same. Host and it only lasted until sunday, october 5, what happened on that day . Guest that was actually the next school year. It was basically the third year, 10 5 1958. Theoretically unknown, people in clinton say they know exactly who it was but theoretically unknown, instigator put about 100 sticks of dynamite at key places around Clinton High School. Again these are people who know and understand dynamite, they are not just sprinklinit i put it exactly where they knew it would do the mo dage. And they blow up high school. And destroy it. It was completely gone. Host what was the reaction . Guest the teachers and the students say you dont get to win and monday morning, 24 hours after the explosion, classes still happened. They all met up, it was a beautiful fall day so everybody sat on the schoolyard around their bombed building and held classes and kept going. A lot of the other white law and order segregationists find abandoned Black Elementary School in oak ridge and do their best to retrofit it as a high school. They begin using that as their high school, local officials start trying to figure out how to rebuild the high school. Lots they go into basically damage control mode but they also say it is time for us to come to some sort of detente. I dont think you can say that they found peace but everyone basically quit talking about what had happened in 1956 and 57 and said in order for us to coexist, we just have to stop. At that point many people really quit talking about the issues in the town, about the violence that had separated them. About any of these other larger situations that desegregation had brought to light. Host after the bombing of the school to National Figures became involved in clinton to help them move forward. Drew pearson, for people who do not know he was enormously influential at that point in his career. A nationally syndicated columnist and also the evangelist billy graham. How did they assist clinton and how impactful were they . Guest drew pearson was one of the first people on the scene. He was there long before any of the other National Media arrived and he began writing about the high school and the destruction of it and what had led to this. He concocted a plan that he asked other teenagers around the nation to give up a coke. At that point a coke cost a nickel and a brick to rebuild Clinton High School cost a nickel so he asked kids to skip a coke for that day and send their nickel to Clinton High School. And basically those donations, one nickel at a time, or much of the money that went to rebuilding the school. The federal government sidestep their responsibility, eisenhower refused to even meet with the officials from Anderson County when they came to try to drum up federal support to rebuild the school. So they really needed those donations. And that is what drew pearson did. Ellie graham, billy graham had not yet gone as far as he would but mike olin hinckley had decided that segregation was ungodly. So he had begun insisting on preaching at integrated places and he came to clinton in december of 58 and he preached about the need for racial reconciliation. And he did so before an integrated audience. The only thing that survived the bombing was the gymnasium, he did it there. That forced everyone would come to count town to walk past the bombed out school and see the effects it had had on the community. Host the new school opened in 1960 and as the story moved on, you talked about how the black students had integrated the schools, many suffered from something we would call ptsd today. Two of the most tragic outcomes of this are dj britton and paul turner. Tell the story of what happened to both of them. Guest both of them tried to move on with their lives, dj britton earned a degree in education and became a superintendent of a School District in new jersey where he implemented measures working towards racial equality. Paul turner ended up first taking a church in nashville which had just survived its own desegregation crisis, and he tried to work with them. He became eventually a professor of divinity in california. But neither of them recovered. They were both really broken by the hatred that they had received and by what had happened. Both of them ended up committing suicide and their families all said that it was a result of what had happened to these two men in 56. Host if you went to clinton day what would you find . Guest certainly a ton of stuff, especially downtown, looks so similar to 56. If you pull up life magazine photos and look at downtown you are going to say oh my gosh i know exactly where i am. At the same time, obviously it is almost 70 years later. It has changed quite a bit. If you do go to clinton i encourage you to head past the courthouse, go past the rebuild high school which is now clinton middle and go up the hill because at the top of the hill is what used to be the Black Elementary School and it has been transformed into a fantastic exam. Dedicated to the black community up there and to the 12 bck teenagers who had desegregated clinton high. This is very moving, a lifesize statue of the 12 of them walking down the hill the first day of school. It is a moving commemoration. Host and you noted that the story of clinton is how people persevered, they were everyday folks notable for their ordinariness. Guest we had this myth that somehow change is expected from heroic figures, incredible speakers, change is a matter of people like you, like me, very normal people showing up and doing the hard work in their own Little Corner of the world. And these were some people who did that. Their radical actions was that they went to school and they demanded to learn. Host rachel martin, as we close or how do you see Clinton High School and the people of clinton fitting into americas modern civilized history . Guest i think it is very unfortunate that they have been overlooked. Because they offer a different lesson than little rock or new orleans or ruby bridges or some of the other places do. Clinton high school is a story of students and teachers, parents both white and black, finding their way through and persevering. As such, i think it gives us a real model for what it takes to work toward equality within our nation. Today schools around the United States are more segregated than they were in 1968, the year that Martin Luther king jr. Was murdered. We are resegregating our schools rapidly, and i think the dedication and determination of the students and educators is the sort of daily grit that is required for us to reverse that trend and find Actual Solutions to the problems we face as a nation. It is not easy, it takes every one of us being committed and continuing to show up and that is what the students and teachers model for us. Host the book about clinton tennessee is called a most tolerant little town the explosive beginning of School Desegregation, Rachel Louise martin thank you for giving us an hour of your time. Much more detail in stories inside of the book and thank you for sharing so many today. Guest i have appreciated this thank you so much for wanting to highlight the story. 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