A MOST TOLERANT LITTLE TOWN: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation, by Rachel Louise Martin
In the dozen years since I read “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson’s narrative masterpiece about the Great Migration, one passage has remained embedded in my mind. It is a description of Black men, women and children picking cotton in the 1920s. In just five pages, Wilkerson transported me to their arduous and exploited lives: cramped hands, calloused fingers, hallucinations brought on by exhaustion amid the torrid summer weather, all of it suffered to collect the daily quota of 100 pounds, boll by boll.
I was put in mind of that passage as I read Rachel Louise Martin’s “A Most Tolerant Little Town,” her unsparing account of an early effort at school desegregation in the Jim Crow South. Much as Wilkerson’s writing forced me to revise my generalized vision of plantations and sharecropping, and thus of the economic structure of American white supremacy, Martin’s book provided the disturbing, destabilizing experience of being thrust back into a period of intense racial hatred as if it were happening in real time.
It is one thing to recall famous photographs of police dogs set loose on child marchers during the civil rights movement, or of lynch mobs picnicking around a still-hanging corpse. It is another to be confronted with a meticulous, day-by-day reconstruction of relentless bigotry in action. Nearly every page of Martin’s book brings to life the atrocities inflicted upon Black children and parents, and a handful of white allies, in the town of Clinton, Tenn., during the year after its high school desegregated under a federal court order.
To read “A Most Tolerant Little Town” is to be flooded with cross burnings, mob riots, night-riding raids, bombings, street-corner ambushes and racial slurs. (Martin explains in a prefatory note that she leaves the N-word intact in quotations to show “how racism infected white American culture in the 1950s,” when many people who eschewed even the mildest profanity used the epithet freely, knowing full well the degradation it carried.)
The Clinton tragedy offers no redemptive ending. Rather, some of the most heroic figures in the book wind up psychically broken, or dead at their own hands. Martin deserves particular credit for excavating a piece of school-desegregation history that, despite having been covered by national news outlets at the time, has since been overlooked in favor of better-known battles like those in Little Rock and Boston.
The road to this devastation began with Wynona McSwain, a resident of Clinton’s Black neighborhood, Freedman’s Hill. In 1950, one of McSwain’s daughters joined four other Black teenagers in trying to register at Clinton High School rather than continuing to travel miles away to a sorely underfunded all-Black high school.
When the students were refused, McSwain took their cause to the N.A.A.C.P.’s office in Knoxville. At the same time that a bundle of school-desegregation cases were making their way to the Supreme Court under the umbrella title Brown v. Board of Education, the Clinton litigants pursued justice through federal district and appellate courts. After the Brown decision, in 1954, a judge ordered Clinton High School to desegregate, and the principal and mayor reluctantly decided there was no point to defiance.
So, on a Monday morning in August 1956, a year before the Little Rock crisis, 12 Black students walked toward Clinton High to be educated with about 800 white classmates. As Martin astutely shows, the terrorism to come was not preordained.
“Even though Clinton was segregated,” one former student tells Martin, “it was still one of the most tolerant little towns.”
It sits amid the Cumberland Mountains, which meant the plantation economy and its system of mass enslavement had never taken hold. During the 1950s, when the desegregation mandate arrived, Clinton’s people enjoyed stable working- and middle-class lives, with ample jobs in coal mines, at a knitting mill and at the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The 500 residents of Freedman’s Hill built their own institutions, including two churches and an elementary school, and managed interaction with the town’s white majority without inordinate rancor. Race relations in Clinton, in other words, were not condemned in advance by history, and there were not two sets of have-nots fighting over a shrinking pie.
Indeed, in the early hours of that first day of school, some townspeople saw the prospect of success. While a few dozen picketers, far fewer than expected, protested the entry of the Black students, the white teachers and pupils inside the school doors seemed warily welcoming. “If we can get through the first two weeks,” the principal, D.J. Brittain Jr., told a teacher, “we’ll be all right.”
The calm, in fact, lasted barely a few hours. White protesters threw a bottle at one Black woman, and knocked another to the ground. A fireman spotted a knife left on the sidewalk outside the school. That night, hundreds of residents gathered for the first of many anti-integration rallies. Brittain received a series of hangup phone calls at home, an ominous warning.
The battle escalated over the school year. It tested the stoic persistence of Black families and a few whites like Brittain against the unceasing attacks from an ever-growing and increasingly martial number of racist vigilantes. While the segregationists featured a few lurid, cartoonish villains — a transplanted neo-Nazi from New York named John Kasper and the future George Wallace speechwriter Asa Carter — Martin incisively undermines the illusion that good, decent white folks kept their distance.
The 15 people arrested on charges of intimidation and assault, prompted by the beating of a racially moderate white minister named Paul Turner, included a carpenter, car dealer, firefighter, utilities worker and former deputy sheriff, hardly the rabble that the press reassuringly made them out to be. “The reporters coming to town were talking about the radicalized shenanigans of the white men and boys,” Martin observes, “but Clinton’s segregationist movement had white women at the core of it. … They were working alongside the white men as provocateurs and organizers and protesters and assailants.”
In the end, only two of the initial 12 Black students endured through to graduation. One, Bobby Cain, was so traumatized that, years later, he could barely recall the details of his torment. Both Brittain and Turner ultimately died by suicide. And segregationists blew up Clinton High in 1958 with an estimated 100 sticks of dynamite. (Contributions from around the nation helped rebuild the school by 1960.) Despite a three-year investigation, nobody was ever charged with the crime.
A historian who began researching the Clinton events in 2005, Martin renders them with precision, lucidity and, most of all, a heart inured to false hope. The moral universe in “A Most Tolerant Little Town” is less like a long, advancing arc than like an old LP with a scratched-up side, trapping the record player’s needle in the same furrow over and over again. But given the constant threat of racism to our democracy, including worsening school segregation in districts across the country and the bans in certain states on books about systemic inequality, who is to say that Martin is wrong to leave her readers so overwhelmed by despair?
Samuel G. Freedman is the author of 10 books, including the forthcoming “Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.”
A MOST TOLERANT LITTLE TOWN: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation | By Rachel Louise Martin | 345 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $29.95
