The Brave and Tragic Trial of Reverend Turner

The Reverend Paul Turner trudged up Broad Street. He shoved his ungloved hands in his overcoat pockets and pulled his dark fedora low against the misty mountain morning. Leo Burnett, a supervisor at the local hosiery mill, walked beside him. An African-American woman passed them on her way to work. A photographer for Life followed. The two white men were heading into the black neighborhood of Clinton, Tennessee, to meet white attorney Sidney Davis and a handful of black teenagers. Trailing them were two members of the White Citizens’ Council.

“Preacher,” yelled one, “what business have you got up here?”

“If a lot of these ‘Negro lovers’ would keep their noses out of it,” said the other, “things would be all right.”

It was Tuesday December 4, 1956. Desegregation had come to Clinton, Tennessee, and Turner was going to walk twelve students to school.

This was a year before desegregation failed at Little Rock’s Central High, and the governor’s refusal to follow the desegregation plan forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to nationalize the Arkansas National Guard. It was two years before Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its schools and launched a massive resistance to integration. It was four years before little Ruby Bridges walking to school in New Orleans in her white dress inspired Norman Rockwell’s famous painting. Clinton High School was one of several schools around the nation facing court-ordered desegregation. The governor of Texas had sent the Texas Rangers to Mansfield to force its black teenagers to go to school in Fort Worth. Black students in Arkansas and Kentucky were also met by violence and mobs.

Clinton was an unlikely spot for a groundbreaking civil rights struggle. A small town on the edge of Appalachia, only three percent of its residents were black. In 1956, there were fifteen African-American teenagers in Clinton, twelve of whom enrolled in a school with nearly 800 white students. Clinton’s city government agreed to obey the court order, not because they liked it, but for fear of losing the federal money that flowed into Oak Ridge National Nuclear Laboratory seven miles away. Some of their citizens were not so understanding.

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