BEREA — Before there was the Little Rock Nine, there was the Clinton 12.
The first southern high school to be desegregated under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling was not Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, but Clinton (Tenn.) High, 135 miles south of Richmond, in 1956.
Twelve students from Clinton, who otherwise would have been bused to Knoxville to attend a segregated school, became the first blacks to integrate a formerly all-white school under a court order.
The Little Rock case is better known today and has received more media attention over the years, because unlike Arkansas, where the governor called out the National Guard to resist integration, the Tennessee governor used to National Guard to enforce integration.
President Dwight Eisenhower used the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to enforce court-ordered integration in Little Rock.
One of the Clinton 12, Bobby Cain, who has lived in Nashville most of his life, came to Berea College on Monday for the school’s Martin Luther King Day convocation and to receive a medallion from President Larry Shinn.
Cain, who attended Clinton High for his senior year, was the first male graduate of an integrated southern school.
Another of the 12, Gail Ann Epps Upton, now of Sweetwater, Tenn., also was scheduled to attend and receive a medallion, but family illness prevented her.
The convocation included the showing of excerpts from a documentary film about the Clinton 12 created by the Green McAdoo Cultural Center of Clinton. The center is housed in the city’s former segregated elementary school and features life-size bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
The documentary included interviews with the surviving members of the 12, most of whom said blacks and whites had been on relatively good, even if unequal, terms prior to 1956.
The first day of integrated classes went well, reflecting many hours of preparation by the school’s adminstration and teachers as well as community leaders, all of whom were determined that Clinton would obey the law.
Trouble began to brew, however, with the arrival of two white supremacist agitators, John Kasper, a graduate of Columbia University who operated a Washington, D.C., bookstore, and Asa “Forest” Carter of Alabama, who would later become a speech writer for George Wallace, the segregationist governor of that state.
That is when Tennessee Gov. Frank Clement sent the state highway patrol and then the National Guard, including armored tanks, to maintain order.
The segregationist leaders were arrested and put on trial for sedition, but were acquitted. They left town and calm returned until the city’s local election that December.
Kasper came back and pushed the White Citizens Council that he had helped form to field a slate of segregationist candidates for the Clinton City Council.
As tension increased with the election campaign, white community leaders began to escort the black students from their homes in the Foley Hill neighborhood to the the high school, not far away.
After one such escort, the Rev. Paul Turner, pastor of Clinton’s First Baptist Church, was bloodied by segregationists as he walked to his church. Others attacked a female teacher who was the principal’s wife. She was rescued by students who chased away the attackers.
Perhaps because of the attacks, all of the segregationist candidates were defeated. Kasper and Carter again were arrested, and calm returned once more.
While the teachers and principal treated the black students well, relations between black and white students were tentative at best, Cain recalled.
Things got ugly again, however, on graduation day. Cain said he was attacked in a school corridor when someone turned out the lights. The lights were turned back on, and teachers quickly came to restore order.
Cain said he went home angry and remained bitter for years.
In the fall of 1958, someone detonated more than 150 sticks of dynamite inside Clinton High School early one Sunday morning, wrecking the building. For the next two years, all Clinton High School students were bused to a building in neighboring Oak Ridge to attend classes.
Cain attended Tennessee State University in Nashville where he earned a degree in sociology. After graduating, he enlisted in the Army, where he met people of many different nationalities. Only then, Cain said in response to a question from a Berea student, did he determine not to carry the anger from the Clinton experience for the rest of his life.
After his Army duty ended, Cain settled in Nashville, where he worked as a supervisor in the state’s family assistance program. He later joined the Army Reserve and retired as a captain.
He since has been honored by four Tennessee governors and several members of Congress.
Invited back to Clinton to have his name added to the school’s Wall of Fame, Cain said he was amazed when the mostly white crowd gave him a standing ovation.
Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@richmondregister.com or at 624-6622.
Local News
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Bill Robinson
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