Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, a federal judge ordered Clinton High School to desegregate with “all deliberate speed” in the fall of 1956. The integration of Clinton High School was forced to be first among Tennessee public schools. Anti-integration campaigners from inside and outside Clinton protested the decision to integrate the high school. After violence was narrowly averted on the lawn of the Anderson County Courthouse on September 1, National Guard troops were called into the city for two months to keep order.

The twelve black students who attended Clinton High School that fall became known as the “Clinton 12.” On the morning of each school day they walked together down Broad Street from Foley Hill to Clinton High. Rumor has it that on one of those mornings, the Clinton Band was on hand to welcome these students to their new school. On the morning of December 4, 1956, Rev. Paul Turner, the white minister of the First Baptist Church, was severely beaten after escorting the twelve students to school. A bronze statue of the “Clinton 12” is now displayed outside a newly remodeled front entrance to the former Green McAdoo School, where the twelve students had attended elementary school.

Early in the morning of October 5, 1958, the Clinton High School building was severely damaged by a series of dynamite explosions. An estimated 75 to 100 sticks of dynamite had been placed in three locations in the building. No one was injured, but Clinton was once again the focus of attention over a crime that was universally assumed to be related to the school’s desegregation. While the school was rebuilt, Clinton High School students were bused to Oak Ridge where the school operated in the recently vacated building that had housed Linden Elementary School. Clinton High School reopened in its own building in 1960. 

Walking Into History includes musical quotes of the Clinton and Oak Ridge alma maters.

 Program note provided by the composer