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A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation - Hardcover

Martin, Rachel Louise

 
9781665905145: A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 166590514X ISBN 13: 9781665905145
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A “masterful” (Taylor Branch) and “striking” (The New Yorker) portrait of a small town living through tumultuous times, this propulsive piece of forgotten civil rights history—about the first school to attempt court-ordered desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board—will forever change how you think of the end of racial segregation in America.

In graduate school, Rachel Martin was sent to a small town in the foothills of the Appalachians, where locals wanted to build a museum to commemorate the events of September 1956, when Clinton High School became the first school in the former Confederacy to attempt court mandated desegregation.

But not everyone wanted to talk. As one founder of the Tennessee White Youth told her, “Honey, there was a lot of ugliness down at the school that year; best we just move on and forget it.”

For years, Martin wondered what it was some white residents of Clinton didn’t want remembered. So, she went back, eventually interviewing over sixty townsfolk—including nearly a dozen of the first students to desegregate Clinton High—to piece together what happened back in 1956: the death threats and beatings, picket lines and cross burnings, neighbors turned on neighbors and preachers for the first time at a loss for words. The National Guard rushed to town, along with national journalists like Edward R. Morrow and even evangelist Billy Graham. But that wasn’t the most explosive secret Martin learned...

In A Most Tolerant Little Town, Rachel Martin weaves together over a dozen perspectives in an intimate, kaleidoscopic portrait of a small town living through a turbulent turning point for America. The result is at once a “gripping” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) mystery and a moving piece of forgotten civil rights history, rendered “with precision, lucidity and, most of all, a heart inured to false hope” (The New York Times).

You may never before have heard of Clinton, Tennessee—but you won’t be forgetting the town anytime soon.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachel Louise Martin, PhD, is a historian and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and Oxford American, among other publications. The author of Hot, Hot Chicken, a cultural history of Nashville hot chicken, and A Most Tolerant Little Town, the forgotten story of the first school to attempt court-mandated desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board, she is especially interested by the politics of memory and the power of stories to illuminate why injustice persists in America today. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Prologue: Coming to the Clinch, September 2005

PROLOGUE Coming to the Clinch, September 2005
The town of Clinton curls into the cup of land formed where the Clinch River turns sharply to meet the Tennessee, a fertile, gently rolling valley that fosters the community of some ten thousand residents. Behind the town square, the hills crack into a series of long, narrow ridges—ancient fold-and-thrust belts formed when the mountains rose up some 480 million years ago. Veins of coal lay pressed between the strata of rocks. When the land stopped shoving upward, sharp peaks pierced the sky, gathering the morning fogs from the valleys around them. Erosion and time have worn the mountaintops into the hills and hollers of Tennessee.

The first people moved to the mountains at least twelve thousand years ago, and possibly much further back than that. From the Clinch, they gathered mollusks and mussels and fish and turtles. They hunted muskrats and geese and otters on the valley floor and stalked raccoons and rabbits and bears and deer and bison on the ridges. Through careful cultivation of the surrounding forests, they grew nuts and berries for food; they harvested vines and canes that they transformed into baskets and clothing. When they wanted to visit neighboring villages, they navigated the Clinch River, but they also carved a path through the mountains that linked them into an intercontinental network of trails, a trading web stretching from Northern Canada to central South America and from the sea islands of the mid-Atlantic to California. Some of them called their home the Ouasioto Mountains. Then about 250 years ago disease and warfare and the American government drove the Indigenous residents away.

White settlers renamed the peaks the Cumberland Mountains, an homage to Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. They founded Clinton and made it the seat of the newly created Anderson County. Then they set about extracting wealth from the hills. Coal miners burrowed and blasted and picked tunnels deep into their hearts. Farmers and bankers and textile workers staked lives on their steep sides and verdant vales, the monied along the river basin, and crofters out in the ravines and glens where planting was hard and seasonal storms washed away the topsoil. Since the rugged landscape wasn’t good for large-scale plantation-style farming, slavery never took hold in the region the way it did deeper south, but the richest white leaders still bought and sold the enslaved, shoring up their assets and power in human bodies.

After Emancipation, many of the county’s five hundred or so newly freed Black residents moved into Clinton, settling on the first ridge overlooking downtown. They worked wage-earning jobs that protected them from the sharecropping system taking hold of the agricultural South but sent them into the white neighborhoods where segregation and racism reigned. To shelter themselves and their families from hate, they built a neighborhood. They erected houses around two churches—one Baptist and one Methodist—and a small primary school. Soon the district had become known as Freedman’s Hill, which locals shortened to simply the Hill. (Ninety years on, the journalists who covered Clinton High’s desegregation assumed this was the same as Foley Hill, a white enclave a couple miles away, a confusion both Hill communities found distressing.)

Like most other Black neighborhoods around the South, the Hill’s population fell during the early twentieth century as its young fled north and east and west seeking better lives and more opportunities. But the area’s numbers rebounded in the 1940s thanks to a cluster of federal projects nearby. By the 1950s, the region supported a small Black business district that included a nightclub and a sandwich shop, but the heart of the community was still the school, by then called Green McAdoo Grammar School, which stood on the crest of the Hill, flanked by Asbury Methodist and Mt. Sinai Baptist.

Downtown, postbellum prosperity had transformed the by-water town into a center of commerce. Back then, industry thrived. Railroad cars heaped with coal lumbered through, coasting out of the mountains to fire the nation’s power grid. Many local men, both white and Black, worked in the mines. Another quarter of the town’s white adults were employed at Magnet Knitting Mills, a brick industrial complex two blocks from the square. A handful harvested and traded freshwater pearls plucked from the oysters that thrived in the Clinch River despite its annual floods.

Two highways intersected at the square. US 25W, or the Dixie Highway, shuttled drivers from Ohio to Florida; though these travelers didn’t realize it, they were following the trail originally opened by the county’s first residents. SR61 went into the mountains, connecting the coal miners to the rest of the nation. In 1890, the community had erected a two-story Romanesque brick courthouse with a clock tower and covered porticos in the center of the town square to house the Anderson County Court. Offices and restaurants and shops and one hotel popped up on the streets around it, all catering to white customers, of course. White travelers stopped in Clinton to buy food and gas and rent rooms for the night.

Clinton doesn’t bustle any longer, although its population today is the largest it’s ever been—about triple what the town’s size was in 1956. Globalization and the interstate highway system have contracted the community from being a regional hub into a typical small Southern town with a few historic homes, some rows of empty storefronts, and a smattering of modernist monstrosities, all radiating from the town square.

The coal industry left the county when the veins around Clinton played out, devastating the economy. And then Magnet Knitting shut down, its hosiery farmed out to other parts of the world. Over the next four decades, its redbrick buildings crumbled, a reminder of what the town used to be but was no longer. When I-75 replaced the Dixie Highway, travelers stopped trekking downtown for supplies or a place to sleep. Local boosters have turned Market Street’s abandoned shops into an antiquing district, but younger generations prefer a more minimal style of decorating. Only a handful of tourists bother to make the drive.

I first came to Clinton in September 2005. That year, I was a research fellow at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Historic Preservation, and I’d been sent to the town to launch an oral history initiative. I was to collect stories about the high school’s desegregation—it was the first instance of court-mandated desegregation in the South, one year before Little Rock—so that the community could open a small museum. Though I’d grown up just a few counties away, I had never heard of Clinton High School before that September. That didn’t surprise Clinton’s then-mayor, Winfred “Little Wimp” Shoopman. What had happened there in 1956 “was swept under the rug for fifty years,” he told me. “History, if it was a pie, they were taking a bite out of it every year by not talking about it. Eventually, the pie was going to be eat up and no more story.”

That first visit, Clinton’s downtown snuck up on me. One stoplight, I was surrounded by car lots and fast-food joints and other architectural detritus left by 1970s-era urban redevelopment. Next, I was peering at the abandoned Magnet Knitting Mills. Then I pulled...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
166590514X
ISBN 13 
9781665905145
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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