What happened in Clinton was an explosive preview of what happened all across the South during the period when desegregation ran into mass resistance.When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, on May 17, 1954, it was big news. Thegave the story banner headlines and ten pages of coverage. The case had been before the Justices since 1952, and it was common knowledge that a decision had been in the works.
Like many opponents of Brown, Eisenhower ignored the fact that the whole purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment is to make state-ordered discrimination a federal matter. That is why four of the five school-segregation cases that were consolidated in Brown had been filed in federal courts. In the subsequent six and a half years of his Presidency, Eisenhower never endorsed the Brown decision. The most he would say was that if the Supreme Court declared it to be the law he was bound to obey it.
The slightly oxymoronic phrase “all deliberate speed” turned out to be a booby trap. It allowed segregationists to argue that “deliberate” might mean taking, say, a generation or so. That was one problem with Brown II. Another was that, in order to trigger the desegregation process, parties had either to petition their local school boards or, failing that, to bring suit in federal court. Courts could not order a school to desegregate unless someone asked them to do so.
The governor of Tennessee, Frank Clement, although opposed to integration in principle, had vowed to abide by Brown. The state’s senators—Albert Gore, Sr., and Estes Kefauver—were, along with Lyndon Johnson, of Texas, the only Southern senators not to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto, a statement endorsed by some hundred United States senators and congressmen, accusing the Supreme Court of an abuse of power. So no one expected trouble in Clinton.
It seemed that there was more racial animosity in Clinton than met the eye. By the end of the school year, pretty much every item in the apparatus of Southern civil-rights resistance had made an appearance in Clinton, from anti-Black slurs and heckling to cross burnings, bombings, and Ku Klux Klan night riders. A hundred state highway patrolmen and more than six hundred National Guardsmen drove into town with armored personnel carriers and seven M-41 Walker Bulldog tanks.