Sponsored by Dinsmore & Shohl, LLP.
In graduate school, Rachel Martin was sent to a small town
in the foothills of the Appalachians, where locals wanted to build a museum to
commemorate the events of September 1956, when Clinton High School became the
first school in the former Confederacy to attempt court mandated desegregation.
But not everyone wanted to talk. As one founder of the Tennessee White Youth
told her, “Honey, there was a lot of ugliness down at the school that year;
best we just move on and forget it.”
For years, Martin wondered what it was some white residents of Clinton didn’t
want remembered. So, she went back, eventually interviewing over sixty
townsfolk—including nearly a dozen of the first students to desegregate Clinton
High—to piece together what happened back in 1956: the death threats and
beatings, picket lines and cross burnings, neighbors turned on neighbors and
preachers for the first time at a loss for words. The National Guard rushed to
town, along with national journalists like Edward R. Morrow and even evangelist
Billy Graham. But that wasn’t the most explosive secret Martin learned...
In A Most Tolerant Little Town, Rachel Martin weaves together over
a dozen perspectives in an intimate, kaleidoscopic portrait of a small town
living through a turbulent turning point for America. The result is at once a
“gripping” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) mystery and a moving piece
of forgotten civil rights history, rendered “with precision, lucidity and, most
of all, a heart inured to false hope” (The New York Times).
You may never before have heard of Clinton, Tennessee—but you won’t be
forgetting the town anytime soon.
Rachel Louise Martin, PhD, is a historian and
writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and Oxford
American, among other publications. The author of Hot, Hot Chicken,
a cultural history of Nashville hot chicken, and A Most Tolerant Little
Town, the forgotten story of the first school to attempt court-mandated
desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board, she is especially
interested by the politics of memory and the power of stories to illuminate why
injustice persists in America today.