Back in 1954, Black students in Anderson County were bused to Knoxville to attend Austin High School as there wasn’t a segregated school for them to attend in their home county. Imagine how early you’d have to get up, over 70 years ago, before the interstate highway system existed, to make a 30ish mile bus trip into Knoxville just to go to high school?

Then came the Supreme Court’s landmark 9-0 decision in Brown v. The Board of Education that wiped the “separate but equal” travesty of the knuckle-dragging Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 from the books. Public schools could not exclude students on the basis of race. Decades of systemic educational oppression were set to crumble.

But it wouldn’t happen immediately nor easily. In a lot of areas it took years, in some over a decade (we see you, Mississippi). In general, heels were dragging on integration across the old confederacy. Back in Anderson County (home to three school systems), Oak Ridge schools become among the first in the southeast to desegregate. But those schools fell under the Atomic Energy Commission, a federal agency.

In 1956, the family of Alvah McSwain sued for their daughter to attend Clinton High School. The courts ruled in their favor, ordering all Clinton schools to integrate in the fall of 1956. By the time school was about to start, 11 other students joined McSwain in registering for classes at Clinton High School: Jo Ann Allen, Anna Theresser Caswell, Bobby Cain, Minnie Ann Dickey, Gail Ann Epps, Ronald Gordon Hayden, William Latham, Maurice Soles, Robert Thacker, Regina Turner, and Alfred Williams.

On August 12, 1956, these 12 teenagers were the first to integrate a Tennessee public school. It didn’t exactly go swimmingly. While the first day wasn’t too awful, soon the pointy-hood goon squads showed up to put their hateful ignorance on full display. The Clinton 12 faced verbal abuse and physical violence, eventually leading to the school’s closure and the deployment of the National Guard (at the request of Anderson County Sheriff Glad Woodward) to protect the town and the students.

Upon reopening, the bullying continued, resulting in only six of the original 12 students remaining at Clinton High School for the 1956 school year. Some families moved out of state to escape the violence. Ultimately, Bobby Cain (1957) and Gail Ann Epps (1958) were the only members of the original 12 to graduate from Clinton High School, becoming the first Black male and female students to graduate from an integrated state-run public school in Tennessee.

In 1958, Clinton High School was bombed with approximately 100 sticks of dynamite and destroyed. The school was rebuilt by 1960. No arrest was ever made.

Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.

Sources: The Knoxville Journal digital archives, The Tennessee State Museum, East Tennessee History Center – McClung Digital Archives, Library of Congress

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