Remembering desegregation during Black History Month
'It was scary to go to school everyday'
By Annette Bender
Somewhere - in a 1956 edition of a newspaper or magazine - is a photo of Theresser Caswell stepping off a school bus.
In the photo, the 14-year-old schoolgirl is being protected by the National Guard. Caswell remembers how an armored car circled her as she waited at the bus stop every morning.
She remembers how her photo in a national publication prompted relatives to call her mother, concerned that the violence at a newly desegregated school was too much for a young girl to bear.
But the memory that makes Caswell smile today is of the striped dress she wore in the photo.
"It was white and blue and yellow," she says, resting on a sofa in her Claxton, Tenn., home. "My mother made me that dress. It was so pretty." Caswell, now 62 and retired, is one of a group of African-American students known as the "Clinton Twelve" who made history in 1956. That was the year Clinton High School became the first public high school in the South to desegregate.
A long-time member of Haven's Chapel United Methodist Church in Oak Ridge District, Caswell lives next door to her church. Her house is on the same property where she lived as a child - five miles from the school that terrorized her for two years, until she stopped attending in the 11th grade.
"We never really had a life," she says. "We just went to school. We couldn't go to ballgames or participate in activities... We asked the principal one time if we could go to a game, and he said, 'I can't tell you not to go, but I can't protect you if you do.'
"You just had to accept that, because it was scary to go to school every day."
Other United Methodists are also among the history-makers at Clinton High. Members of the Cain family are long-time members of Asbury UMC in Oak Ridge District. Bobby Cain, who now lives in Nashville, was the first black student to graduate from a desegregated public school on May 17, 1957. A wellknown incident happened at Cain's graduation ceremony, when the lights were turned out, Cain was assaulted, and then the lights were turned back on.
His younger brother, James Cain, who now lives in Knoxville but is still active at Asbury, followed his brother at Clinton High from 1960 to 1964.
"When I got there, we still couldn't participate in sports. There was still a lot of hostility. We weren't received very well."
Clinton High School was the first school to desegregate because of a groundbreaking lawsuit that preceded the historic Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. In 1950, five African-American children and their parents, backed by the NAACP, filed suit against the Anderson County Board of Education to gain entrance into Clinton High School. At the time, the state required segregation in state high schools. Black students in Clinton were designated to attend Rockwood High School in Rockwood or Austin High School in Knoxville.
The 1950 case, known as McSwain v. Anderson County, was eventually dismissed by a Knoxville judge. The decision was appealed but later suspended pending a decision by the Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Theresser Caswell was friends with one of the McSwain children.
"We used to go eat lunch with her mother, who had a job at the jailhouse. After the lawsuit, she lost her job at the jailhouse, and the family was asked to leave Clinton." They relocated to California, Caswell said.
When Brown v. Board of Education called for racial desegregation of public schools in 1954, Anderson County high schools were subsequently ordered to end segregation by fall 1956. Some black students opted to pay to continue to attend Austin High School, which was about a 45-minute trip away, according to Caswell and Cain. The parents in their families, however, didn't give them that option. "I had no other choice but to go to Clinton High," Caswell said.
The Little Rock Nine, who were blocked from entering Little Rock Central High School by the Arkansas National Guard in 1957, are more famous than the Clinton Twelve. But the 12 black students who registered to attend Clinton High came first, and both Caswell and Cain remember the tension they faced daily.
Caswell was never physically harmed, but she remembers how white boys would pretend to smack her head whenever she stood at her locker:
"I was jumpy all the time. And no one ever talked to me. I was the only black freshman, so I never saw any of the other black kids. There were two white people who would talk to me. Can you imagine going to school all day and only talking to two people?"
It was rougher on the boys, Caswell says. "I guess they were more defensive. They carried knives to school to protect themselves, and then they got in trouble for bringing knives."
When Cain attended Clinton in the early 1960s, he was only one of three African-American boys in the school: "The classrooms were fine, but sometimes in the hallways, people would bump against you, say the usual things. We always tried to stay together - stay in groups so you wouldn't have a lot of confrontation."
For years, people remembered the Little Rock Nine more than the Clinton Twelve. But in recent years, research by the Rev. Alan Jones, pastor at Asbury UMC, has brought renewed interest in Clinton High's history. Last May, the Clinton Twelve ceremoniously retraced their steps down a hill to the school - while remembering a particularly hostile day in 1956, when the students had to be escorted to class by three white citizens.
Today, Caswell's three sons and 10 grandchildren, and Cain's three children and four grandchildren, don't have the same experiences as their senior relatives. But through stories told during Black History Month and throughout the year, children of all races can benefit from hearing about what it used to be like, both Caswell and Cain said.
"My children know none of this," Caswell said, referring to the hardships she faced in the late 1950s. "By the time they came along, they were able to play football, basketball. They still had to be defensive, because there was still bigotry. There always will be. But they were able to have friends and do things we could never do."
"Especially with my two older children, I have shared the story of their uncle and his experiences," Cain said, referring to his older brother, Bobby. "It's part of history that shouldn't be forgotten. It helps us look at how far we have come and how far we need to go."
When the Clinton Twelve reenacted their march last May, Caswell said she was aware that some spectators had previously participated in mobs that had waited outside her school - when she stepped off the school bus. She sensed their remorse.
"They were asking us to march. They were asking our forgiveness. They were sorry," she said gently. "It's better now, if not 100 percent better. We need to know what it was like then, so that we can work on making things better.
"Now, those people that were in the mobs can teach their grandchildren not to hate."
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