Prologue: Coming to the Clinch, September 2005 PROLOGUE Coming to the Clinch, September 2005 The town of Clinton curls into the cup of land formed where the Clinch River turns sharply to meet the Tennessee, a fertile, gently rolling valley that fosters the community of some ten thousand residents. Behind the town square, the hills crack into a series of long, narrow ridges--ancient fold-and-thrust belts formed when the mountains rose up some 480 million years ago. Veins of coal lay pressed between the strata of rocks. When the land stopped shoving upward, sharp peaks pierced the sky, gathering the morning fogs from the valleys around them. Erosion and time have worn the mountaintops into the hills and hollers of Tennessee. The first people moved to the mountains at least twelve thousand years ago, and possibly much further back than that. From the Clinch, they gathered mollusks and mussels and fish and turtles. They hunted muskrats and geese and otters on the valley floor and stalked raccoons and rabbits and bears and deer and bison on the ridges.

Through careful cultivation of the surrounding forests, they grew nuts and berries for food; they harvested vines and canes that they transformed into baskets and clothing. When they wanted to visit neighboring villages, they navigated the Clinch River, but they also carved a path through the mountains that linked them into an intercontinental network of trails, a trading web stretching from Northern Canada to central South America and from the sea islands of the mid-Atlantic to California. Some of them called their home the Ouasioto Mountains. Then about 250 years ago disease and warfare and the American government drove the Indigenous residents away. White settlers renamed the peaks the Cumberland Mountains, an homage to Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. They founded Clinton and made it the seat of the newly created Anderson County. Then they set about extracting wealth from the hills. Coal miners burrowed and blasted and picked tunnels deep into their hearts.

Farmers and bankers and textile workers staked lives on their steep sides and verdant vales, the monied along the river basin, and crofters out in the ravines and glens where planting was hard and seasonal storms washed away the topsoil. Since the rugged landscape wasn''t good for large-scale plantation-style farming, slavery never took hold in the region the way it did deeper south, but the richest white leaders still bought and sold the enslaved, shoring up their assets and power in human bodies. After Emancipation, many of the county''s five hundred or so newly freed Black residents moved into Clinton, settling on the first ridge overlooking downtown. They worked wage-earning jobs that protected them from the sharecropping system taking hold of the agricultural South but sent them into the white neighborhoods where segregation and racism reigned. To shelter themselves and their families from hate, they built a neighborhood. They erected houses around two churches--one Baptist and one Methodist--and a small primary school. Soon the district had become known as Freedman''s Hill, which locals shortened to simply the Hill. (Ninety years on, the journalists who covered Clinton High''s desegregation assumed this was the same as Foley Hill, a white enclave a couple miles away, a confusion both Hill communities found distressing.

) Like most other Black neighborhoods around the South, the Hill''s population fell during the early twentieth century as its young fled north and east and west seeking better lives and more opportunities. But the area''s numbers rebounded in the 1940s thanks to a cluster of federal projects nearby. By the 1950s, the region supported a small Black business district that included a nightclub and a sandwich shop, but the heart of the community was still the school, by then called Green McAdoo Grammar School, which stood on the crest of the Hill, flanked by Asbury Methodist and Mt. Sinai Baptist. Downtown, postbellum prosperity had transformed the by-water town into a center of commerce. Back then, industry thrived. Railroad cars heaped with coal lumbered through, coasting out of the mountains to fire the nation''s power grid. Many local men, both white and Black, worked in the mines.

Another quarter of the town''s white adults were employed at Magnet Knitting Mills, a brick industrial complex two blocks from the square. A handful harvested and traded freshwater pearls plucked from the oysters that thrived in the Clinch River despite its annual floods. Two highways intersected at the square. US 25W, or the Dixie Highway, shuttled drivers from Ohio to Florida; though these travelers didn''t realize it, they were following the trail originally opened by the county''s first residents. SR61 went into the mountains, connecting the coal miners to the rest of the nation. In 1890, the community had erected a two-story Romanesque brick courthouse with a clock tower and covered porticos in the center of the town square to house the Anderson County Court. Offices and restaurants and shops and one hotel popped up on the streets around it, all catering to white customers, of course. White travelers stopped in Clinton to buy food and gas and rent rooms for the night.

Clinton doesn''t bustle any longer, although its population today is the largest it''s ever been--about triple what the town''s size was in 1956. Globalization and the interstate highway system have contracted the community from being a regional hub into a typical small Southern town with a few historic homes, some rows of empty storefronts, and a smattering of modernist monstrosities, all radiating from the town square. The coal industry left the county when the veins around Clinton played out, devastating the economy. And then Magnet Knitting shut down, its hosiery farmed out to other parts of the world. Over the next four decades, its redbrick buildings crumbled, a reminder of what the town used to be but was no longer. When I-75 replaced the Dixie Highway, travelers stopped trekking downtown for supplies or a place to sleep. Local boosters have turned Market Street''s abandoned shops into an antiquing district, but younger generations prefer a more minimal style of decorating. Only a handful of tourists bother to make the drive.

I first came to Clinton in September 2005. That year, I was a research fellow at Middle Tennessee State University''s Center for Historic Preservation, and I''d been sent to the town to launch an oral history initiative. I was to collect stories about the high school''s desegregation--it was the first instance of court-mandated desegregation in the South, one year before Little Rock--so that the community could open a small museum. Though I''d grown up just a few counties away, I 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 told me. "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.

" That first visit, Clinton''s downtown snuck up on me. One stoplight, I was surrounded by car lots and fast-food joints and other architectural detritus left by 1970s-era urban redevelopment. Next, I was peering at the abandoned Magnet Knitting Mills. Then I pulled up alongside Hoskins Drug Store. In another community, this pharmacy/lunch counter/gift shop would have closed decades ago. It would have sat abandoned until some local kid came back to remodel it, replacing its pumpkin-colored vinyl booths with sleek kitsch. The food would have been billed as "homestyle" or "haute Southern." But in Clinton, Hoskins has survived by selling its customers--mostly lawyers doing business at the county courthouse--the same lunches they''ve always ordered: small hamburgers on ready-made buns, grilled cheese sandwiches, malted milkshakes.

Past Hoskins, I saw the recently remodeled Ritz Theater, all art deco curves and sporting its original marquee. In the 1950s, it was the place to be on a Friday or Saturday night. The weekend after the high school desegregated, the feature film was The Fastest Gun Alive , starring Glenn Ford and Jeanne Crain. That Saturday night, the local white boys who usually gathered out front to court local white girls had faced down the Tennessee National Guard under the Ritz''s lit sign: two rows of lanky, white teenagers, most of whom did not yet need a daily shave. One line wore khaki uniforms with lacquered steel pot helmets. The other had rolled jeans and slicked-back hair. The Clinton boys had pressed into the Guards'' bayonetted muzzles, pushing forward until the weapons had left crisp creases in their starched button-downs. On the lawn across the street, outside the county courthouse, sat the war memorial where machinist Willard Till announced the formation of the Anderson County White Citizens'' Council.

Neighbors had queued up to pay their three-dollar membership fee; they leaned on the monument, signing their registration forms on the rock upon which was carved "Lest We Forget." Over 150 joined the group within the first two hours. Just past the courthouse, I saw the rebuilt high school, though it now housed the city''s middle school. There was the stone wall supporting the school''s embankment where Clinton High''s first twelve Black students turned, climbed the steps, and waded through the crowd of white teenagers. The white kids had simply watched the Black students enter the school on the first day, but soon they were jeering and then heckling and then assaulting their new classmates. Starting up the Hill, my vehicle jud.