Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 413

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation in America," by Rachel Martin.

 

Deciding what narrative—or, more accurately, whose narrative—to feature in the exhibits would be more challenging. The battle over the story of Clinton’s desegregation is part of an ongoing national struggle over the politics of memory. History, like all things involving power in America today, is seen as a zero-sum game. But our memories are not time machines. They reveal something much deeper and truer and more personal than a simple timeline of events. We choose what we want to remember, and we also choose what we will forget. 

I was able to reconstruct these previously unknown stories because the people of Clinton were generous with their memories. My narrators taught me to think of memory as being like music. The basic building blocks are the solos: one voice telling its story. As soon as more voices join in, the music of the past becomes more complex. Some people have held on to perspectives that harmonize, differing only by gradations of nuance, but more often the various voices are in discord and disagreement. This is the most troubling part of memory, but it can also be the most revealing. There is power in the complexity of a community’s story, when it clashes like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. If you stand next to only one voice, the rest of the orchestra seems to be in chaos, but if you can step back and listen to the whole of the group, the differing narratives become the melodies, harmonies, and descants of the piece.

But national news organizations sensed a story unfolding in Clinton. Didn’t seem either side was like to give in anytime soon, which meant it could be a town on the verge of exploding. They sent staffers, stringers, and freelancers to town, just in case, filling up Clinton’s two hotels. While in Clinton, these reporters—mostly white and uniformly men—formed a farcical organization they named the Southern War Correspondents Association. (Someone proposed naming it the Southern War Correspondents Association, Suh, a play on the stereotypical enslaved pronunciation of “sir,” but this idea was shot down.) They quickly settled on their motto: “Discretion Is the Better Part of Valor.” To that end, the membership cards were two-sided: one labeled “Integrated” and the other “Segregated.” The men flipped the card to whatever side they thought might be most palatable to the person asking them for identification.

But word had trickled out to the protestors that the football players weren’t on their side, that they’d protected the Black students, that they’d helped keep the school open and desegregated. As the lettermen walked through the crowd, noticeable in their school jackets, some of the protestors yelled, “You people are a disgrace to the county!” and “Going to school and playing football while we’re out here defending you!”

None of the white adults organizing the new school arrangements suggested resegregating the student body—at least not publicly. Most were simply resigned to the situation. For a few of them, however, the events of the past few years had changed them from reluctant participants in desegregation into committed integrationists. Margaret Anderson didn’t want her town to be misconstrued by journalists parachuting in to cover the bombing, so she wrote an article for the New York Times. In 1956, she’d been one of the many white people who pledged to follow the law. Now she wrote: “Integration will work. It is already working in many places. It will continue to work because it is just and right and long overdue.” Setbacks—even the violent destruction of a school—should not “stop integration, for that would be to go backward.” Still, she believed too much of the fight had fallen on her students. “Today’s children are having to pay such a high price emotionally, socially, and academically,” she told her readers. “Are we taking every precaution to guard the safety of these children from enemies we do not know, or cannot identify?” The rubble around her was her answer.

 

 

The local police so badly bungled the investigation that some concluded the officers were colluding to protect the perpetrators. For Robert Cain Sr., Bobby Cain’s father, the damning evidence was that the police did not immediately go to Clinton High School to investigate. When he heard the first blast, he rushed to his front porch. Despite the darkness, he could tell something had happened down at Clinton High. He could also see a police car parked by Asbury Methodist even though the officers seldom patrolled the Hill. The car wasn’t moving. It stayed put until after the second blast went off.

Evangelist Billy Graham joined the effort. On December 14, 1958, he conducted a one-day revival in Clinton. His sermon that day was the first time he spoke to a community that had recently experienced racial violence, and it was the first time he directly connected his work as a Christian evangelist to his support for the growing civil rights movement. Billy Graham was a social conservative on many issues, but he believed in racial equality and integration. He insisted on preaching before an integrated audience, a position he took no matter where he preached in the South or across the globe. When the local segregationists heard of his stand, they threatened his life. The evangelist replied that their threats proved he was doing the right thing.

Over the coming months, contributions to rebuild the school continued to pour in from around the nation. The Franklin Institute squadron of the civil air patrol in Philadelphia contributed their weekly dues. Builders’ unions volunteered their labor. “People may have mixed opinions about integration,” the president of the Building Trades Council wrote Drew Pearson, “but none of them have mixed feelings about using bombs to retard school children. We want to help.”