Clinton

This small, East Tennessee town became famous, or infamous, in 1956 when 12 black students enrolled for the first time at Clinton High School, which had a total of 806 students. Anderson County schools were ordered to desegregate by Federal judge Robert Taylor in the wake the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v Board of Education that "separate but equal" schools were unconstitutional. Judge Taylor ruled on January 4, 1956 that Anderson County schools should desegregate by the fall term of that year, so the stage was set.

Segregationists from out of town--a reverse version of the progressive "outside agitators" blamed for later civil rights confrontations--stirred up locals, who opposed integration with cross-burnings, gunshots, and dynamite blasts.

Then Governor Frank Clement called out the national guard, and photos of Clinton were soon splashed over national newspapers and magazines as a forerunner of school troubles that would occur in other southern states.

Further dynamite bombings triggered a change in attitudes among locals, who realized that things were getting out of hand. The black students stayed, and Clinton slipped out of the news,surpassed by civil rights outrages elsewhere. Fifty years later, the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, which tells the story of the 1950s confrontation in a museum, opened on August 26, 2006. Clinton had come full circle.

Today, Clinton is a pleasant place to visit. Getting off I-75, take Hwy. 61 to the West. Downtown Clinton has a wonderful art deco movie theater adjacent to a Hoskins Drug, which has been in the same location since the 1940s and has preserved the look of that time. For further adventures, take Hwy. 25W, one of the great Blue Highways of America, south to Knoxville. On the way, you will pass Ciderville and, in the town of Powell, a wonderful gas station built to resemble an airplane.