Appalachian History Series – Walking the Hill: The Clinton Twelve and Appalachian Tennessee’s First Integrated High School
A Mountain Town Drawn Into a National Story
On the map, Clinton looks like one more small town in the ridge country north of Knoxville. The courthouse square sits above the Clinch River, with the Cumberland Plateau rising in long, timbered ridges to the west and the Great Smoky foothills not far to the east. For much of the twentieth century, the town’s rhythm followed the schedules of Oak Ridge, Knoxville, and the coal camps and farms that surrounded Anderson County.
In the summer of 1956 that quiet geography collided with a national legal decision. Two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools violated the Constitution, federal judges began ordering Southern districts to dismantle the system of separate schools for Black and white children. In January 1956 a court directed the Anderson County school board to admit Black students to the all white Clinton High School for the coming year, ending a system that had long bused Black teenagers twenty miles to Knoxville for high school while white classmates walked to a brick building on the hill above town.
Clinton was not a big city and it was not a state capital. It was a courthouse and high school town in the Appalachian South. Yet in the late summer and fall of 1956 it became one of the first places in the former Confederacy where a state supported high school actually enrolled Black students under a federal desegregation order, placing the town squarely in the center of the early civil rights movement.
From Green McAdoo to the High School on the Hill
Black families in Clinton had long shouldered the burden of unequal schooling. Elementary age children attended the Green McAdoo School, a brick building on School Street that served as the segregated public school for Black students until the mid 1960s.
When students finished the eighth grade, buses carried them away from their own town to a Black high school in Knoxville. The distance was more than a matter of miles. It meant that teenagers who lived within sight of Clinton High School’s lights could not attend games there, join its clubs, or claim its mascot as their own.
In the early 1950s the McSwain family in Clinton decided to challenge that arrangement. Their daughter Alvah Jay McSwain wanted to attend Clinton High School. With help from civil rights attorneys, the family filed suit against the school board, arguing that Brown v. Board of Education required Anderson County to admit Black students to the white high school in their own town. In January 1956 a federal court agreed and ordered the high school to open its doors to Black students at the start of the next school year.
That ruling gave Black families in the Green McAdoo neighborhood a few months to decide whether their children would test the new order. In the end twelve students registered for Clinton High School. The community would come to know them as the Clinton Twelve.
First Days: Walking Into History
In August 1956 the first registrations took place quietly in the superintendent’s office. On August 27 twelve teenagers left Green McAdoo together, walked down the hill, crossed the railroad, and climbed toward the high school that had been closed to them all their lives. A contemporary summary by the Tennessee State Museum lists their names as Alfred Williams, Alvah Jay McSwain, Anna Theresser Caswell, Bobby Cain, Gail Ann Epps, Maurice Soles, Minnie Ann Dickey, Regina Turner, Robert Thacker, Ronald Gordon “Poochie” Hayden, William Latham, and Jo Ann Allen.
Newspaper accounts and later museum exhibits describe that first morning as deceptively calm. Local authorities had promised to enforce the court order. White students filtered into the building while the Clinton Twelve entered under the eyes of reporters and photographers who understood that a small Appalachian high school was doing something that much larger districts had refused to do.
For the students themselves the experience was anything but calm. Oral histories and memoirs describe the mix of nerves, pride, and fear that accompanied the walk from Green McAdoo to the high school. Jo Ann Allen, later known as Jo Ann Allen Boyce, remembered trying to focus on ordinary things such as her schedule and classmates even as she passed white crowds and felt the weight of national attention.
Mob Resistance and the Coming of the National Guard
Calm did not last. Within days, outside segregationist organizers arrived in Clinton. Activists from White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan used courthouse rallies, handbills, and radio broadcasts to denounce the court order and urge white students to boycott classes. The Equal Justice Initiative’s survey of “massive resistance” across the South describes how agitators such as John Kasper and Asa Carter helped turn local opposition into sustained mob action.
By late August crowds ranged from several hundred to more than a thousand people. They gathered on the hill above the school, on the courthouse lawn downtown, and along the streets the Clinton Twelve had to walk. Contemporary newspaper reports quoted in the EJI narrative tell of teenagers and adults shouting slurs, throwing rocks, and attacking Black passersby as well as white residents who supported the court order. One white minister, Paul Turner of First Baptist Church, gained national attention after he was beaten for walking with the Black students.
As the situation worsened, Anderson County officials appealed to the governor for help. A surviving letter from the county sheriff, now displayed in the Tennessee State Museum’s online materials for teachers, shows local authorities asking for National Guard troops to restore order around the school.
The governor deployed the Tennessee National Guard to Clinton. Photographs from the Knoxville Journal and other regional papers show guardsmen with rifles and jeeps lining the streets as the Clinton Twelve walked between barbed wire and hostile crowds to reach the school doors.
For weeks the Guard’s presence brought a tense kind of safety. Classes resumed, though many white students stayed home. Black students endured harassment in hallways and classrooms, from whispered threats to open insults. Yet they kept coming back, crossing a town square that had become a national symbol of both compliance with federal law and violent resistance to it.
Explosions, Withdrawals, and Hard Choices
The National Guard eventually withdrew, but the pressure around the Clinton Twelve did not ease. Segregationists used dynamite, firearms, and boycotts to try to force an end to integration. In September 1956 explosions rattled a field near one student’s home. Early the next year a coordinated series of blasts shook the Black neighborhood in Clinton.
Under sustained intimidation, some families chose to move away. Others transferred their children back to Knoxville or to private schools. By the spring of 1957 only a fraction of the original twelve remained at Clinton High School. The Tennessee State Museum notes that Bobby Cain became the first Black male student to graduate from an integrated state run high school in Tennessee in 1957, followed by Gail Ann Epps in 1958 as the first Black female graduate.
Violence reached its peak two years after desegregation began. Before dawn on October 5, 1958, a series of explosions ripped through Clinton High School, collapsing walls and shattering windows across the building. Contemporary coverage in the Louisville Courier Journal and later analyses describe the bombing as a professional job intended to destroy the integrated school. Investigators never secured a conviction.
Classes moved to nearby Oak Ridge while the community debated how to rebuild. Despite continuing tensions, the decision was ultimately to reconstruct Clinton High School and reopen it as an integrated school in 1960. By then the story of the Clinton Twelve had been partly overshadowed by events in Little Rock, Birmingham, and other cities. For the families who had stayed, however, the rebuilt school remained a daily reminder of what had happened in their town.
Remembering Through Green McAdoo and the Clinton Twelve Statue
For years the old Green McAdoo School stood mostly empty on the hill where the Clinton Twelve had begun their walk. Alumni associations and local leaders urged that the building be preserved. In 2006, on the fiftieth anniversary of the integration of Clinton High School, Green McAdoo reopened as the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, a museum devoted to the story of the Clinton Twelve and the broader civil rights struggle in Tennessee.
Exhibits inside the former classrooms use photographs, letters, and newsreels to trace the chronology from segregated schools through the McSwain lawsuit, the first day of integrated classes, the arrival of agitators, the deployment of the National Guard, and the bombing of the high school. Visitors can see facsimiles of newspaper headlines and courtroom documents as well as the kinds of desks, textbooks, and chalkboards that framed daily life for Black students in segregated schools.
Outside, a bronze sculpture group stands at the top of the concrete wall that carries the center’s name. Twelve figures stride forward together, books in hand, cast at life size. The statues were installed in 2007 and quickly became the most recognizable image of the Clinton Twelve, appearing in travel guides, civil rights trail materials, and educational resources for teachers across the country.
Lives After Clinton and a Legacy Still Unfolding
The Clinton Twelve went on to careers and family lives that stretched far beyond Anderson County. Some, like Jo Ann Allen Boyce, left Tennessee within a few years of the crisis. Boyce spent most of her adult life in California, working as a nurse and eventually co authoring a young adult book titled This Promise of Change about her months at Clinton High School. She died in 2025, remembered in national obituaries as a civil rights pioneer who never stopped speaking to students about her experience.
Others stayed closer to home. Bobby Cain worked for the Tennessee Department of Human Services and served in the Army Reserve, rarely talking in public about what he had lived through as a teenager. Only later did he begin giving interviews about the strain of being the first Black graduate of an integrated high school in the state. Cain died in 2025, with reporters again reminding readers that his story in Clinton had unfolded a year before the better known confrontation at Little Rock Central High School.
Reunions at Green McAdoo and commemorations on the courthouse lawn have drawn surviving members of the Clinton Twelve back to the town where their lives changed. Documentaries, including Keith McDaniel’s film Clinton 12, and works by historians such as Bobby Lovett and Rachel Louise Martin have placed the Clinton story within the wider history of school desegregation and massive resistance in the South.
Why the Clinton Twelve’s Story Matters in Appalachian History
Clinton’s desegregation crisis can be read as a legal story about court orders and constitutional principles. It can be seen as a case study in organized resistance by White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. It can be remembered as a tale of quiet heroism by ministers, teachers, and students who insisted on following the law despite threats and violence.
For Appalachian history it is also a reminder that the mid twentieth century civil rights movement did not belong only to large Southern cities or to the Deep South. It reached courthouse squares along the Clinch River, schoolhouses on narrow streets, and neighborhoods that had long been described as mountain or small town rather than urban or metropolitan.
The Clinton Twelve were teenagers from an Appalachian town who walked out of a segregated elementary school, climbed a hill surrounded by hostile crowds, and insisted on their right to attend the public high school whose windows they could see from their own front porches. Their story ties the ridges and rivers of Anderson County to a broader national reckoning with race and equality, and it continues to unfold each time a visitor stands beneath the bronze figures at Green McAdoo and thinks about what it meant to walk that hill in the late summer of 1956.
Sources & Further Reading
Hassell, Mamie. “The Clinton 12: The Integration Story of Tennessee’s Public Schools.” Junior Curators Blog, Tennessee State Museum, July 28, 2020. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/the-clinton-12-the-integration-story-of-tennessees-public-schools.
Tennessee State Museum. “Green McAdoo Cultural Center.” Accessed January 15, 2026. https://tnmuseum.org/green-mcadoo-cultural-center.
“Green McAdoo Cultural Center.” Clio: Your Guide to History. Last updated July 4, 2020. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://theclio.com/entry/15576.
United States Civil Rights Trail. “Clinton 12 Statue at Green McAdoo Cultural Center.” Accessed January 15, 2026. https://civilrightstrail.com/attraction/clinton-12-statue-at-green-mcadoo-cultural-center.
Equal Justice Initiative. “Massive Resistance.” In Segregation in America. Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2018. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://segregationinamerica.eji.org/massive-resistance.
Van West, Carroll. “Clinton Desegregation Crisis.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society, originally published October 8, 2017, last updated March 1, 2018. Accessed January 15, 2026. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/clinton-desegregation-crisis/.
Adamson, June N. “Bobby Lynn Cain.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society, originally published October 8, 2017, last updated June 26, 2019. Accessed January 15, 2026. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/bobby-cain/.
Momodu, Samuel. “The Clinton Desegregation Crisis (1956).” BlackPast.org, September 12, 2019. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/the-clinton-desegregation-crisis-1956/.
Library of Congress. “Brown v. Board at Fifty: ‘With an Even Hand’ – Aftermath.” Exhibition, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 2004. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-after.html.
Martin, Rachel Louise. A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Most-Tolerant-Little-Town/Rachel-Louise-Martin/9781665905150.
Boyce, Jo Ann Allen, and Debbie Levy. This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality. New York: Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2019. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/this-promise-of-change-9781681198521/.
Menand, Louis. “Why Did They Bomb Clinton High School?” The New Yorker, July 31, 2023. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/07/why-did-they-bomb-clinton-high-school.
“Green McAdoo Cultural Center.” Civil Rights in America: U.S. Civil Rights Trail – Travel Itinerary, National Park Service and U.S. Civil Rights Trail (overview of the site and its role in school desegregation). Accessed January 15, 2026. https://civilrightstrail.com.
Dennis, Angela. “Bobby Cain, Who Integrated Clinton High School in East Tennessee, Dies at 85.” Tennessee Lookout, September 23, 2025. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/09/23/bobby-cain-who-integrated-clinton-high-school-in-east-tennessee-dies-at-85/.
Schudel, Matt. “A Year Before the Little Rock Nine, Bobby Cain Helped Integrate Southern Schools.” The Washington Post, September 27, 2025. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/09/27/bobby-cain-dead-clinton-twelve/.
Keating, Caitlin. “Cameron Boyce’s Grandmother, Civil Rights Activist and Member of the Segregation-Busting Clinton 12, Dies at 84.” People, June 18, 2025. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://people.com/cameron-boyce-grandmother-jo-ann-allen-boyce-dies-at-84-8659961.
McDaniel, Keith. Clinton 12 (documentary film). 2006. Distributed for public television and educational use; synopsis and educational resources via Green McAdoo Cultural Center and Tennessee State Museum. https://tnmuseum.org/green-mcadoo-cultural-center.
Middle Tennessee State University, Center for Historic Preservation. “The Civil Rights Movement in Clinton – Featured Collections.” Digital Collections at MTSU. Accessed January 15, 2026. https://digital.mtsu.edu/digital/collection/p15838coll4/id/552/.
Author Note: I wrote this piece to follow the Clinton Twelve from Green McAdoo up the hill into a hostile crowd and a changing school. I hope it reminds readers that the civil rights struggle over public education also ran through small Appalachian towns like Clinton, not just the region’s largest cities.