Things began peacefully enough. At the end of August, 1956, twelve Black students registered to attend Clinton High. The school’s principal, David Brittain, was committed to following the law, and the white students seemed accepting. Shortly after classes started, though, picketers appeared outside the school, Brittain began receiving ominous phone calls, nightly rallies formed, and the situation rapidly descended into chaos.
It seemed that there was more racial animosity in Clinton than met the eye. By the end of the school year, pretty much every item in the apparatus of Southern civil-rights resistance had made an appearance in Clinton, from anti-Black slurs and heckling to cross burnings, bombings, and Ku Klux Klan night riders. A hundred state highway patrolmen and more than six hundred National Guardsmen drove into town with armored personnel carriers and seven M-41 Walker Bulldog tanks.
The picketers grew increasingly abusive. Cars passing through Clinton with Black passengers were attacked by mobs (activities duly captured by Life’s photographers). White students inside the school started harassing the Black students. A white minister was beaten by a gang of whites after he walked Black students to school. Some Black students dropped out; one was expelled. A few white students refused to attend altogether.
Still, in 1957, Clinton High became the first integrated school in the South to graduate a Black student, Bobby Cain (though white students tried to beat him up after the ceremony), and by the fall of 1957 things were close to normal. The school had a new principal, journalists were barred from the premises, and when nine Black students registered only one protester stood outside. Attendance was full.
It was a false dawn. In October of the following year, Clinton High was destroyed by dynamite. No one was injured, and the bomber was never apprehended. When the county requested federal aid (people were already sending in donations from around the country), Eisenhower responded that the government cannot “step in with money every time something goes wrong with a school from a water faucet on up.” Terrorism, too, was a local matter.
Martin interviewed many of the survivors, including most of the Black students who had formed the Clinton Twelve. Some key actors are dead. Paul Turner, the minister who was beaten, died by suicide in 1980, apparently still traumatized by the experience. Unsurprisingly, Martin evidently had trouble getting many of the anti-integration protesters to talk with her. Most of them probably faded back into the woodwork many years ago, but they are the ones that it would be most interesting to hear from. How do they justify hating on schoolchildren? Martin is a good storyteller, though, and Clinton is a good story.