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 the edge of the mountains that make upppalhia. It is about anof 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 m 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. I am going to 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 to panic and i amoing to miss somebody so i am going to pull boo and do a cheat sheet the 12 black stu names, abeted because im using my cheat sheet were joan allen, bobby kana tesa cadwell, marianne d gai and ronald hayden, william laam, 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 toown 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 the story of little rock year ler would be one of troops helping 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