Conversations: Rachel Louise Martin
'Most Tolerant Little Town' author talks about first Southern school to desegregate after Brown — and the consequences still felt today
Rachel Louise Martin was in graduate school when she volunteered for a Southern oral history project that would change her life. She went to Clinton, Tenn., a small town in the Appalachian foothills, to interview residents about the integration of its high school.
In the fall of 1956, two years after Brown v. Board of Education and a year before the Little Rock 9, Clinton High School became the first in the former Confederacy to take part in court-mandated desegregation. Sadly but not surprisingly, longstanding tensions in the heart of the Jim Crow South, what happened was predictable and depressing.
The school’s 12 Black students and their families, along with a handful of white supporters, endured death threats, cross burnings, and assaults. Only two of the students made it to graduation.
Martin chronicles these events, as well as the 1958 bombing and subsequent rebuilding of Clinton High School, in A Most Tolerant Little Town. Her gripping and evocative book, both an excavation and detailed rendering of a forgotten time in history, was released in June to rave reviews.
The New York Times praised Martin for her “precision, lucidity and, most of all, a heart inured to false hope.” Publishers Weekly says it “strikes an expert balance between the big picture and intimate profiles of the families involved” for “a vivid snapshot of the civil rights–era South.”
Given my work and continued interest in Briggs v. Elliott, another mostly forgotten — if not ignored — landmark in Brown and its aftermath, I devoured Martin’s book. I greatly admired her research and reporting, which started as her dissertation project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and storytelling style.
Ironically, A Most Tolerant Little Town was released as the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. Martin and I spoke by phone only a few days before the Supreme Court ruling against UNC-Chapel Hill and Harvard University.
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Your book intrigued me because of the work I did in Summerton, S.C., on Briggs v. Elliott, the first of the five cases that led to Brown. I was surprised the lawsuit in Clinton, which was filed around the same time, was not part of that bundle. Why?
The NAACP lawyers did not think the folks in Clinton had a good case. When they originally brought the lawsuit, the kids were being bused out of county, but to a failing school. Clinton High School had been given A ratings, and town attorneys had gone to the school board and said, “You will lose the case because of this fact.” So they transferred the kids from the failing school to Austin High in Knoxville, which was another A-rated school.
Then the NAACP attorney said (to the plaintiffs), "Look, yes, your kids are getting bused out of county. They're being bused 45 minutes or an hour away. There are white kids in Anderson County who ride the bus that long too." The judge is not going to say this is unequal because everybody's getting bused.
It's a rural county, and they were right. The original ruling went against the Black students in Clinton because the judge said, "Look, yes, your kids are getting bused, but everybody's being bused."
So it was “equal."
Yes. It was left out of Brown for that reason.
Was there anything else that made Clinton’s circumstances different from the other lawsuits?
The Black community in Clinton was so small and is still so small. There were only a dozen, 15 kids of high school age who were eligible and interested in going to high school in 1956. The numbers are not that much larger now. Proportionally, within the school, it's still a case where Black students spend the majority of their time in classrooms where they are the only person of color, which means those sorts of isolating experiences are still occurring.
We’re talking a few days before the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to overturn affirmative action in college admissions, so in some respects your book could not be more timely. It’s a fascinating piece of history and at the same time, such an excellent cautionary tale. That's why I wanted to talk to you.
Thank you. We’ve had so many opportunities to make true lasting change, and at best, we seem to go for stop-gap measures. I guess at this point, I'm not surprised or shocked. I don't have questions about why we make that choice, but I am continuously disappointed.
I think both desegregation and affirmative action are examples of that. Neither were the solution, but they should have bought us enough time by now to have actually created greater equality in our society. Instead, we've handled this question with such token measures.
What made you interested in Clinton?
I had been sent there around the same time you were going to Summerton, in 2005, for a research fellowship. They wanted to open a museum for their 50th anniversary, and they needed somebody to collect oral histories for that. I had never heard of it.
I was between my M.A. and my PhD, so I went, assuming I would do a handful of oral histories, take home enough money to pay my rent check, and move on with my life. [Chuckles]
And here we are 18 years later. What made you decide to turn it into a book?
I quickly realized it was an unusual situation in which there was this important moment in American history that nobody had talked about, not even with each other. That meant there were big differences in what people remembered having happened. That just fascinated me. I am intrigued by memory and by what I call “the politics of memory” — how we remember and how we choose to forget.
It just seemed like a perfect case study to dive into those questions and just see what was there, what I could learn.
I ended up getting the PhD because I wanted to write the dissertation because I wanted to write the book. I knew I didn't have the research skills or the theoretical knowledge to get into this topic as deeply as I wanted to. I got the PhD in order to do this. It was a side benefit along the way.
Did you expect it to take this long?
If I'd had any clue, I probably would've refused to go to Clinton the first time. I finished the dissertation and then immediately started trying to find an agent. I did a couple of different rounds of that. I had multiple agents who would say, "Oh, I'm interested. Send me your full proposal." Then they would write back and say either, "This story is not important enough," or, "Your writing doesn't connect with me," or "I'm just not interested." Those were the three big ones, but a lot of it was actually about my writing not connecting with people.
How did you address that?
I tried to learn how to be a better writer. Eventually I published an essay out of it in Oxford American. My agent read the essay. She got in touch and said, ''Hey, tell me about the Clinton project.'' I told her nobody wanted that project and offered her some other book ideas. She said, ''That's great. Maybe those'll be later books but just tell me about the Clinton project.'' That's how it happened.
What did you learn about writing in this process?
The importance of detail. Academic writing and even a lot of journalistic writing focus on big picture elements. The way I tell the story is through the tiny closeup details that most folks look past. They're details that hopefully expose important elements of who someone is, where they are, or how the world around us shapes us on a daily basis. That was one of the biggest things I had to learn.
The images you typically see are short-haired crew cut white men — many of them young — spewing vitriol at black children. But your book also looks at the role women played in the segregation movement, which I haven’t seen often talked about in these types of stories. Tell me about that.
Other scholars over time have attempted to find them. I just thought, “I know they're there.” The fact that a handful of these girls went out and found the Tennessee White Youth makes it so very obvious they were. That was a bit of a gift.
I wasn't surprised they were there. I'm from the Rural South, so I'm very familiar with the ways that white women buttress support and perpetuate white supremacy. Often, yes, it happens within families or within churches, or behind closed doors. They are usually a very small percentage of the group that is actually doing the rioting.
It's a lovely myth that somehow women are innocent in all of these issues, but it's not true. Once I started looking and just paying attention, faces, and names quickly started popping up. I think it's more unusual for them to take such an obvious stand. I say that, but think about how much trouble we're still working through today because of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
When I interviewed Richard Riley (former South Carolina governor and U.S. Secretary of Education under Bill Clinton) as part of my work on Brown, he said something that really stuck with me: “Integration will not occur to our satisfaction until we've lost multiple generations of people. We’ve made progress, but you have to remember that the older people who are in charge of Congress and state legislatures are still products of segregated schools.” That was almost 20 years ago, and now, almost 70 years after Brown, that remains true today.
I'm afraid that's very true. Also, for schools, it's so much bigger than just the system. We're also talking about residential segregation and economic segregation. Our banking systems, our government. There's so much we have to be willing to address and take on and change about our society in order for our schools to change.
The conversation always seems to be about how schools affect communities. Because everyone has an “I was in school” experience, they are quick to declare themselves the experts when it comes to education. We don't talk much about how communities affect schools.
That's a conversation we desperately need to be having. We've left our schools so vulnerable. Look at Moms for Liberty and the whims of a very small group of people who have managed to radically change what's happening in schools across the nation.
It's something, especially for white Americans, we have to be very careful with. I was in a conversation a few weeks back with a Black woman who teaches Black history through ice cream and our memories of it. It's so cool. For her, the word nostalgia has great radical political power.
It was really interesting. For me, when I hear nostalgia or I see somebody getting nostalgic, I go on guard. In my world, where I was raised (in Lascassas, Tenn., a “stop sign about 45 minutes outside Nashville”), nostalgia doesn't take us back to anywhere good.
Unfortunately, we are seeing this seething passion surface again over social justice issues, mostly in the South, instead of the whispered undermining that replaced it for decades. What is it like in Clinton now?
There have been other problems in the not-very-distant past. In 2007 or 2008, a kid of mixed race was playing basketball and some other kids threw Oreos at him. Another white kid at the high school actually had a case go to federal court over whether he was allowed to wear Confederate paraphernalia in school. There's still lots of those moments happening.
At the same time, Clinton's not a big town. It doesn't have a massive Black population, but they had a Black Lives Matter movement. They had protests and folks marched after George Floyd in 2020. One of the women who desegregated the school was one of the keynote speakers at the George Floyd rally.
I see Clinton as being very similar to everywhere else in America.
It's a mixed bag.
It is a mixed bag. There are still people there who have this belief that we can be better and they're still fighting for it. The fact that they are still fighting for it, that's maybe what shocks me.
For more than two decades, I’ve had an ongoing discussion about race with a good friend of mine, Ed, a Black attorney from New York who works in education policy and law. At the start of the George Floyd protests, he predicted little true change would occur because most people do not have the fortitude to do what it takes to see it through. And he was right. Why do you think this happens?
I think a lot of politicians and civic leaders have learned that if they just wait it out, give it a week or two, the passion will fade. The protestors will leave the city streets and they can go back to doing whatever it is that they wanted to do.
There have been moments that have challenged that concept. I'm thinking specifically of the Moral Monday protests that were taking place in North Carolina at one point, which went on for months every Monday. There have been times when folks have stuck it out longer, but it's hard. Working people have to take time off work.
You risk the violence, the getting in trouble with the law. I understand why the passion fades, but I think it does mean that protests are not as effective any longer. They just get winded out.
On a good note, The New York Times review should be one that you have framed and poster-sized in your house.
That was a very surreal way to start off the launch day. I never expected it. [Laughs]
I'm surprised you don't have it as a billboard in your backyard.
There are many plans in the works. We'll see what happens.