Rachel Louise Martin, PhD, is a historian and writer whose work has appeared in outlets like The Atlantic and Oxford American. The author of HOT, HOT CHICKEN (Vanderbilt University Press), a cultural history of Nashville hot chicken, and the forthcoming A MOST TOLERANT LITTLE TOWN (Simon & Schuster), 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 by the power of stories to illuminate why injustice persists in America today. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
She first came to Clinton in September 2005. She’d been sent to the town to launch an oral history initiative, collecting stories about the high school’s desegregation so the community could open a small museum. Though she’d grown up just a few counties away, she had never heard of Clinton High School before that September. That didn’t surprise Clinton’s then-mayor, Winfred “Little Wimp” Shoopman.
What had happened there in 1956 “was swept under the rug for fifty years,” he said. “History, if it was a pie, they were taking a bite out of it every year by not talking about it. Eventually, the pie was going to be eat up and no more story.” What happened in this little town between 1956 and 1958 wasn’t a small story at the time. People around the world followed as twelve Black students braved mobs and beatings and bombings for the right to attend high school in their home county. The events in Clinton challenge how we talk about our civil rights history. It’s a tale of how apathy enables hatefulness. It’s a story of how discord can balloon into violence. It’s an account of how doing the wrong thing gave some people unprecedented power and opportunity. It’s a record of how doing the right thing can leave some individuals permanently scarred, physically and mentally. It’s a chronicle of how a small Southern town can explode, and then a whole entire country can forget.
A MOST TOLERANT LITTLE TOWN weaves together the accounts of students, parents, teachers, and administrators to reveal a forgotten piece of Civil Rights history and a portrait of an American town at the precipice of a turning point in our history. It serves as a poignant reminder of the steep cost of trying to rewrite history and the heavy burden placed on those at the front lines of movements for justice.