ONE

Descending Freedman’s Hill

In the packed schoolyard, the teenagers had divided into their

usual clusters and cliques, the layout of Clinton High’s so-
cial strata mapped so clearly that even the freshmen bused in from the
county’s rural K–8 schools had already found their people. Wannabe reb-
els with duck-ass haircuts and cuffed, fraying jeans lurked on the fringes
or stood on the stacked stone wall edging the campus. A few sported the
black leather jackets that were the uniform of the local gang, creatively
named the Black Jackets. Along the sidewalk, a cluster of clear-faced girls
with curled ponytails and circle skirts bounced nervously in their bobby
socks. Elsewhere, the nerds and the aggies and the cheerleaders had each
carved out their respective places. Jocks in black letterman jackets with
fuzzy orange Cs prowled throughout the crowd, establishing their right
to police the school. Those who had been part of the Bob Neyland Con-
ference Championship teams had tan footballs stitched onto their coats’
right pec.
Yes, on the morning of Monday, August 27, 1956, everything on the
lawn looked as it ought to on the first day of school, and yet nothing was
right. Where was the din? The bustle? The babble? How could it be that
no one, not a single one of the gathered gaggle, was saying a word?
Jo Ann Allen found the silence creepy. She’d prepared carefully for
this, her first day in her new school. She’d sorted through the five skirt-
and-shirt combinations her grandmother Minnie had sewn for her over
the summer, finally settling on her favorite: a prim blouse with cap sleeves
that she’d tucked into a dark, full skirt and cinched to her slender frame
with a snug black belt. She’d curled her bangs and twisted her ponytail into
a ballet bun. Then she’d tucked some small white flowers into her updo.

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 12   A M O S T T O L E R A N T L I T T L E T O W N

Maybe, just maybe, the white girls along the sidewalk would see her and
recognize a kindred spirit, another good girl looking for friends.
As ready as she could be, Jo Ann had picked up her lunch bag and her
notebooks and headed over to Green McAdoo Grammar to meet the nine
other Black students from the Hill who would be walking to school with
her. The twelve teens who’d be desegregating Clinton High that morning
were divided equally between girls and boys, but two of the girls—Jo Ann’s
best friend, Gail Ann Epps, and Anna Theresser Caswell—did not live on
the Hill and would meet them at the school.
Up on the Hill, the ten students held hands and looked toward down-
town while Bobby Cain, one of two seniors, prayed for their safety. His
prayer echoed the words that the Reverend O. W. Willis, pastor over at Mt.
Sinai Baptist Church, had murmured over them the night before. “Help us
to love our enemies,” the reverend had said, “and send our children down
the Hill with peace in their hearts.” After the service, had the adults whis-
pered about what the coming day would bring? Yes, the courts were on
their side, but what would that mean? Could the Supreme Court’s ruling
be enforced? Could equality really be won with pretty words on a page?
Maybe all would be well, the Black students thought. After all, in May
1954, a mere week after the Supreme Court announced its first decision
overturning segregation in education, administrators in Fayetteville, Ar-
kansas, had announced they’d be desegregating their high school. By the
next fall, they’d done so. Now yes, white public outcry had stopped Sher-
idan, Arkansas, from following suit. But both Hoxie and Charleston, Ar-
kansas, had voluntarily and quietly abolished their segregated schools in
the autumn of ’55. The trick seemed to be for towns to do it quickly and
without public stink. Sure, a couple hundred segregationists had shown
up in Hoxie a month and a half after the Black teens had started classes,
having been tipped off by Life magazine. But when Governor Orval Fau-
bus refused to intervene, the local courts issued a temporary restraining
order ending the protests, and that was that. So maybe, the Black students
thought, they’d face a few protestors and suffer a couple nasty glances and
it would be over. Just maybe. The students must’ve worried, however, that
their reception would be worse. They weren’t continuing what the kids in
Arkansas had already accomplished. This was the first time desegregation

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 D E S C E N D I N G F R E E D M A N ’ S H I L L    13

would be forced on a town. And by the feds, no less! If the courts got their
way at Clinton High, no segregated school in America would be safe.
They’d all heard the rumors, the ones that said some white folks in
Anderson County were organizing, that they’d filled up reams of paper
with petitions protesting the Black students’ entry. They’d heard about the
bill filed in Chancery Court just last Wednesday, the one that would strip
Clinton High of state funds if they were allowed to start classes, and they’d
seen the advertisement taken out in the Clinton Courier-News by the Ten-
nessee Federation for Constitutional Government asking people to join
the organization and help prevent “mixed schools.” But maybe the white
folks would stick to petitions and lawsuits and ads.
It was time to test the segregationists’ resolve. Wouldn’t do for the
Black students to be tardy on the first day of school. As the teens gath-
ered their school supplies and began down the Hill, any family members
who could come assembled to see them off. There, spread across Green
McAdoo’s playground and steps, were Jo Ann Allen’s little sister and
Bobby Cain’s younger siblings and some of the Hayden kids and count-
less cousins. (After all, wasn’t everybody on the Hill somehow related to
these groundbreaking souls?) Few of the older folks were around to wit-
ness their trek, however. Most of their parents had already left for work,
some in Oak Ridge, others in shops and homes around Clinton. Across the
county, the adults must’ve glanced up at the nearest clock and whispered
a plea. Perhaps William Turner, janitor at Green McAdoo, stepped out
to the school’s arched brick entryway to watch his daughter Regina stride
forward, notebook and pen in hand, ready for her junior year.
Half brothers Alfred Williams and Maurice Soles walked side by side
down the Hill, a senior and a freshman. Their uncle had brought them
back to Clinton specifically for this day, uprooting them from their grand-
mother’s house in Alabama and transferring them out of their high school
so they could participate in the Clinton High experiment. No matter how
the coming year went, they knew they needed to have each other’s backs.
Neither one was real tall in stature. No, they were about the slightest of the
group, but at least they could stick together.
Up until a few weeks before, Alfred and Maurice and the other Black
students had paid scant attention to the judicial battle over Clinton High’s

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 14   A M O S T T O L E R A N T L I T T L E T O W N

desegregation. Sure, folks had talked six years earlier when a handful of
Black teens had sued for the right to enter Clinton High. There was no
Black high school in the county, so the administrators had bused students
to a failing high school in LaFollette an hour away and in a totally different
county. The students and their lawyers had called the arrangement sepa-
rate and unequal. No one was surprised when they’d lost at trial—white
students from rural parts of the county were bused at least as far as the
Black students were, the judge reasoned—and the case spent years pend-
ing in the federal court of appeals. Most felt the lawsuit had accomplished
some good, though, because the county transferred the Black kids from
failing LaFollette Colored High to the much more academically rigorous
Austin High in Knoxville. But then in 1954, the Supreme Court released
their first decision ending school segregation. They followed up that rul-
ing in 1955, announcing that desegregation needed to happen with “all
deliberate speed.” Based on that, the judge hearing the Anderson County
case had declared that Clinton High would desegregate in the fall of 1956.
A handful of other judges mandated a similar timeline for pending cases in
Kentucky and Texas, but those schools wouldn’t open until after Labor Day.
Even after the ruling, most of the Black teens in Clinton didn’t think
desegregation would happen, not there. Segregation defined every action
off the Hill from shopping to eating to working. Who could imagine life
without those strictures? Surely, the white people would find some way to
sidestep the court ruling. Separate Black schools were even written into the
state’s constitution. Any school that refused to abide by segregation was to
lose state funding. Who would upend a structure that buttressed an entire
culture?
And so when the 1955–56 school year ended in May, they’d made
plans to return to Austin High School in Knoxville. Bobby Cain put down
a deposit on his senior prom. Regina Turner adjusted her class schedule
and hoped the talk of desegregation would disappear. She didn’t want to
go to Clinton High, didn’t want to try to convince the white people she
was good enough for their school. Alfred Williams assumed he’d graduate
with his friends back in Anniston, Alabama. But then his uncle Steve had
told his nephews they’d be coming to live with him in Clinton that year.
He and the rest of the teenagers’ parents and guardians had agreed that the

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 D E S C E N D I N G F R E E D M A N ’ S H I L L    15

teens would force Anderson County to follow the court order. These kids
would claim the promise of the American dream for all future Black and
brown children. They’d prove Brown v. Board could be forced upon the
South, and it could happen immediately.
The ten students crossed the railroad tracks and followed West Broad
Street as it descended toward Hillcrest Street. Jo Ann was surprised and
relieved to see that there weren’t many protestors awaiting them. Accord-
ing to local gossip, Mayor W. E. Lewallen and Principal D. J. Brittain Jr.
and Clinton Courier-News editor Horace V. Wells all thought their town
was ready to change American history. Looking now at the small group of
people awaiting the new students, Jo Ann thought that maybe they were
right. Maybe Clinton really was “one of the most tolerant little towns” in
America.
No one would later agree on how many protestors had been there that
day. Less than a dozen? Thirty? Fifty? Closer to seventy-five? The number
depended on who was doing the reporting: a segregationist, a town offi-
cial, or one of the handful of local journalists covering the event (and it
was mostly local reporters for now, plus one stringer from Chicago’s Black
paper). Let’s go with the most likely one, the one Horace Wells printed in
the Clinton Courier-News. Twenty or so older white men stood, watch-
ing the Black students approach. Just past them was a clump of some
thirty-odd white protestors, mainly women and a handful of teenage kids.
Or perhaps it was thirty teenagers and twenty-five adults. The kids—Jo
Ann’s classmates?—carried handwritten signs: “We the students of Clin-
ton Hi don’t want Negroes in our school” and “Integration? No” and “We
don’t want to go to school with niggers.” Papers fluttered in their hands,
pamphlets to be handed out to passersby warning that the fluoride in the
water was a secret government mind-control mechanism, Eisenhower was
a tyrant, “Race mongrelism is contempt for the Creator,” and they should
“Destroy the reds. FIGHT RACE HATERS.”
One of the teens outside the school that morning was John Carter,
a smooth-faced kid with a lanky build and close-cropped, light-colored
hair. Lately, he’d been something of a local celebrity. It started the previ-
ous March when a rabid fox had attacked his pet dog. Enraged, John had
grabbed a shovel and bashed the fox about the head. John won the fight,

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 16   A M O S T T O L E R A N T L I T T L E T O W N

but before it died the fox bit John on both hands. Testing showed the fox
was rabid, so John had to undergo a painful and expensive treatment:
twenty-three abdominal inoculations. A few weeks later while still getting
shots in his stomach, John stepped back into the local news by winning
the district 4-H speaking championship. His address was “Responsibilities
of Good Citizenship.” And John had lived out his good citizenship: 4-H
chapter secretary one year, vice president the next, and now three years
as president. He’d also won multiple trophies for his beef cattle projects.
And he was a member of the Clinton High football team. For his prowess
in composing and delivering his address, the district office awarded him
twenty-five dollars and took him to Nashville to compete at the state level.
That August, John should have been starting his junior year at Clinton,
ready to thrive as an upperclassman. Instead, he stood on the street outside
the school door with a poster strung around his neck: “WE WON’T GO
TO SCHOOL WITH NEGROES.” For him, this was the next iteration
of good citizenship: fighting for the white Southerners’ way of life and
maintaining the racial order set up by God.

Looking at the ragtag assembly—a pitiful sight, really, when you thought
that today might be the loss of all that white Southerners supposedly held
dear—the assistant police chief told a journalist that the low numbers
proved that desegregation wasn’t going to be a big thing. Even the ones
who had shown up with signs didn’t really mean anything by it. “They’re
just boys from the country come to see the show,” he said.
The low numbers were a disappointment to the protest’s organizers.
“There was supposed to be a lot more of us, but they didn’t show up,” a
picketing teenager told a local reporter. “They just talked big.”
The network of segregationists had mobilized the previous January
when the federal courts had ruled on Clinton High. They scaffolded their
efforts on those begun a year earlier in neighboring Oak Ridge. Built as
one of the Manhattan Project’s secret cities, Oak Ridge was transformed
into a military installation after World War II. Now it was being slowly
transitioned to civilian control. It had been subject to the executive or-
ders desegregating the armed services beginning in 1948, but because of

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the base’s peculiar position, the schools had remained untouched until the
Supreme Court announced their first Brown v. Board verdict. With that
decree, the Atomic Energy Commission ordered the community to obey
it. The decision to integrate the base’s schools, adding eighty-five Black
students to Oak Ridge classrooms, had frustrated many white folks, but
few were ready to challenge the federal government while living and work-
ing on a federal installation. And so the problems had stayed within the
high school: a few fistfights, a smattering of hollered slurs, a couple graffiti
incidents. Other moments seemed hopeful. Some of the white students
even stood up for their Black peers, like when the physics and chemistry
classes went on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville, Alabama, and
a restaurant refused to serve the one Black student in the group. All the
white students walked out alongside him.
Overall, Clinton’s white leaders thought, the lesson from Oak Ridge
High and the schools in Arkansas was that desegregation was going to hap-
pen, at least in the short term, whether they liked it or not. And none of
them liked it. But they were balancing their beliefs against other political
and professional goals. They would not aid desegregation. They would not
plan for it. They would never support it. Neither would they take to the
streets against it.
For other white people, however, Oak Ridge taught a different lesson.
It showed that segregation was not the foregone establishment they’d as-
sumed it was. Oak Ridge answered to the feds, but if Clinton High deseg-
regated, it would set a precedent for other schools in Tennessee and across
the nation. The stakes were too high for them to meekly obey. When the
federal judge mandated Clinton High enroll Black students, members of
a group calling itself the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Govern-
ment assembled a mailing list of sympathizers. Soon chapters had popped
up across the state, and the clubs sent money back to Anderson County to
fund resistance efforts there. They also sent lobbyists to Tennessee’s legisla-
ture, asking the representatives to obey the state constitution and pull state
funds from any desegregated schools.
One of the local leaders for the Tennessee Federation for Constitu-
tional Government was Oak Ridge machinist Willard Till. The Tills had
only been in Anderson County for a couple years, coming from Raleigh,

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 18   A M O S T T O L E R A N T L I T T L E T O W N

North Carolina. They’d probably moved because of the amazing career

opportunities Oak Ridge offered to inventive machinists. Willard was a
tinkerer, always coming up with ways to improve the gadgets around him.
In 1948, one of his inventions, “Auxiliary Support for Use with Ironing
Boards,” had even merited a patent.
A sturdy man—six feet tall with gray eyes and brown hair—Willard
had once been a boxer, competing in the local Golden Gloves competitions
and making his way to the North Carolina state finals in the light heavy
division. In 1940, he’d put his boxing days behind him when he married
Frances Amanda Williams in front of a justice of the peace. The young
couple was fun and not opposed to a little showboating, so they’d planned
an unconventional ceremony performed before a couple thousand barn
dancers gathered for a Saturday night hoedown. “That’s the biggest audi-
ence for a wedding that I have ever seen,” their officiant told a reporter for
the Raleigh News and Observer. They didn’t have long to settle into family
life. Within a few months, Willard’s draft number came up. He enlisted in
the Civilian Air Patrol, became a pilot, and was made a lieutenant. Then
he helped drive German submarines away from the Eastern United States.
When he returned from war, Willard and Frances started on their family,
having a daughter in 1946 and a son in 1949.
Willard was a God-fearing, churchgoing man, so as soon as the Tills
arrived in Clinton, they’d gotten themselves settled into First Baptist
Church. Then they’d stepped on up when asked to take over leadership
positions in the congregation. Willard had never smoked and never drank
and held no grudges against anybody. Sure, he opposed the mixing of the
races in that high school, but it wasn’t because he was a hateful man, he
told himself as he geared up for the fight ahead. It was because he was a
good man, a steadfast man, a man who knew the difference between right
and wrong, a white man who was willing to do what was uncomfortable
to protect the Southern way of life, that way of life that generations of his
forefathers had been willing to die to save because they understood that it
was the way God had arranged the world. And being an American meant
standing up to tyranny.

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 D E S C E N D I N G F R E E D M A N ’ S H I L L    19

Racism was an essential ingredient in the potent mix of hatred and activ-
ism that was stirring in Clinton’s white neighborhoods, but local white
people were also sick and tired of the federal government meddling in their
lives. They thought desegregation was Clinton’s Fourth Reconstruction,
the fourth federal incursion into the community. The first happened when
the Union Army seized control of the region, freed the slaves, instituted
martial law, and disenfranchised unrepentant Confederates. The sec-
ond occurred in 1936 when the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) con-
structed Norris Dam just seven miles from town. The project created jobs
and wired the mountains for electricity, but it also cost local farmers thir-
ty-four thousand acres of rich bottomland, land the federal government
confiscated at a questionable rate, forcing many farming families into the
textile mills and coal mines. In addition, it killed the Clinch’s oysters, end-
ing the pearl trade. What one local historian called “the third invasion of
the damn Yankees” came a few years later when President Roosevelt de-
cided to place one of the three Manhattan Project sites seven miles to the
other side of Clinton. Oak Ridge ate up another fifty-five thousand acres
of farmland. Some farmers were evacuated before they’d even had time
to gather up their livestock. The secret city drew in outsiders, all those
physicists and secretaries and engineers and administrators with their elite
educations and liberal ideas. Many white locals felt dispossessed politically
and geographically and economically. Some were about ready to win one
of these skirmishes with the feds.
The first step was assessing who was an ally of the segregationist cause.
Over the summer of ’56, members of the Tennessee Federation for Con-
stitutional Government circulated a petition protesting desegregation.
Four hundred and twenty-four local white folks—almost 11 percent of
Clinton’s total population—signed it, scrawling their names and addresses
on the five-by-eight sheets of folded white notepaper. “We (the under-
signed) are against Negroes entering Clinton High School or any other
White School in Anderson County, Tennessee,” someone had typed across
the top of all twenty-one pages. They submitted the petition to the local
court system on August 12. The judge denied their request. They filed the
motion to strip Clinton High of state funds about a week later.
Local white leaders—the mayor, the newspaper editor, the school

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 20   A M O S T T O L E R A N T L I T T L E T O W N

superintendent, every white pastor in town—also publicly opposed deseg-

regation, but most weren’t willing to march for it. Theirs was a pragmatic
decision. Over the preceding decades, they had forged valuable relation-
ships in D.C. Their influence was disproportionate to their size. State
senators, cabinet members, and other officials now made tours through
Anderson County, currying favor with the Clinton politicians who had
made the TVA and Oak Ridge possible. In 1956, both presidential candi-
dates would make detours to drive through, delivering speeches. Some local
white officials also benefited economically by playing nice with Washing-
ton. The federal projects of the Second and Third Reconstructions had
made Anderson County the wealthiest county in Southern Appalachia.
Local businesses profited off the new residents who came to work at the
sites; federal agencies invested money in the county’s infrastructure.
And so municipal leaders decided they would obey the letter of the
new court ruling but not the spirit of it. They would concede to the federal
authorities that the law of the land called for desegregation . . . but they
would refuse to help implement it. They would not even set up policies
for how a desegregated Clinton High School would function. And they
would protect the town’s white spaces and white institutions from any
trouble that might arise. They were prepared to squash any person who
threatened Clinton’s good name, people like those rabble-rousers calling
themselves the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government who
had promised to make a scene on the first day of the new school year.
Would the white officials be protecting the Black community, though?
Well, they’d stirred all this up for themselves, hadn’t they?

Though the picketers had been shouting and booing throughout the morn-
ing, they stilled when the ten Black students appeared. The phalanx of
Black teens also stopped talking as they continued along the concrete side-
walk toward Clinton High. Kinda eerie, Jo Ann thought, this unnatural
silence on the first day of school, when everyone who’d been away at camp
or on vacation met up with those who’d stayed behind, helping out around
the house or watching younger siblings or holding down summer jobs.

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 D E S C E N D I N G F R E E D M A N ’ S H I L L    21

Now the Black students had reached the corner of the school’s prop-
erty. Clinton High had been built into the bottom edges of the Hill, and
the sidewalk continued on down the embankment for a while before a set
of stone steps on the left took visitors up to the building’s front doors. At
the upper corner of the grounds, the ten Black students were eye level with
their new classmates, but every step inched them farther down the Hill
until their heads were below the white teens’ feet. Had they ever noticed
this before, how vulnerable the sidewalk made pedestrians on this stretch
of road? Then the ten teenagers turned left and climbed the stone steps up
to the schoolyard, toward the building. They walked through the assem-
bled white high schoolers.
Alfred Williams recognized many of his new classmates. Some were
nodding acquaintances. A few were fishing buddies. And there were the
white boys he’d played football with over the summer, meeting up in the
fields and glades around town where segregation wasn’t as tight, at least
not for kids. The games weren’t official, of course, just ad hoc matches put
together when teens found themselves with little to do. Now he looked the
other boys over. How large some of them were, about like grown people!
As they trudged along the path, Jo Ann saw some of the white kids
sneaking looks at her, studying her from behind new notebooks. Others
took quick, shy glances, making eye contact, smiling slightly, then turning
back to their friends. One group of white boys gathered by the front door,
jeans freshly pressed and short-sleeve shirts tucked in, sneered at the Black
students as they climbed the final five steps into the building. A young
woman in a black sailor dress a size too large stood on the first step, nostrils
flaring as though she smelled something unpleasant.
But the Black students—Jo Ann Allen, Bobby Cain, Anna Ther-
esser Caswell, Minnie Ann Dickie, Gail Ann Epps, Ronald Hayden, Wil-
liam Latham, Alvah Jay McSwain, Regina Turner, Maurice Soles, Robert
Thacker, and Alfred Williams—had breached the double glass doors of
the school without incident. Surely, that alone counted as a success.

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