When I started graduate school, in 2006, I thought I had found the sort of project every Ph.D. hopeful dreams of: a story with obvious importance and intrinsic drama that no one else had written about. When Clinton High School, in Clinton, Tennessee, de-segregated, in August 1956, it was the first all-white school in the former Confederacy to successfully admit Black students following a court order. And then the town exploded. White rioters rocked the community. The governor sent in the National Guard, but he ordered the men to enforce the order rather than to block it. Eventually, the school was bombed and destroyed and, later, rebuilt by an international fundraising campaign headed up by the evangelist Billy Graham. Throughout all the turmoil, the school never closed, nor did it re-segregate.
What I didn’t realize as I began my research was that today schools in the United States are more segregated than they were in 1968, the year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Instead of seeing how much my work could inform the modern fight to equalize education, I told others I wanted to capture the story before it disappeared. Partly that meant collecting oral histories with participants before they died, but I also believed the hate and vitriol that motivated the violence of 1956 was weakening. I wasn’t naïve enough to think society was “post-racial” (I am a product of the rural South), but surely open inequality was passé.
