Oak Ridge Today

Protesters want life, liberty, justice

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Civil rights leader Reverend Harold Middlebrook tells Black Lives Matter protesters in Clinton on Thursday, June 11, 2020, that the movement will require more than a march. (Photo by John Huotari/oak Ridge Today)

CLINTON—Civil rights pioneer Anna Theresser Caswell asked people to not hate.

Civil rights leader Reverend Harold Middlebrook told local Black Lives Matters protesters that the movement will require more than a march.

Caswell and Middlebrook were two of about a dozen speakers at a Black Lives Matter march and protest that started at the Clinton football field and ended at Clinton Middle School on Thursday. Several hundred people attended.

Clinton Middle School is where the high school used to be. It was desegregated more than 60 years ago. It’s reported to have been the first high school in the South to desegregate under the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.

Caswell, 77, was one of the 12 Black teenagers who walked down from Green McAdoo School on Foley Hill and desegregated the old Clinton High School, which had been all-white, on August 27, 1956.

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WYSH: Green McAdoo soon to be part of state museum system

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Green-McAdoo-Cultural-Center

Information from WYSH Radio

The Clinton City Council on Monday unanimously approved a resolution to transfer the Green McAdoo Cultural Center and Museum to the Tennessee State Museum, a move officials said will ensure that the facility remains open to tell the story of the first black students to attend a previously all-white, Southern, public high school in 1956.

The state budget passed earlier this year included $100,000 to be used exclusively for maintenance and operational expenses at the museum, located on School Street. The museum opened in 2006, on the 50th anniversary of the day in 1956 when 12 black students walked from the former Green McAdoo School down the hill to Clinton High School and into history. Green McAdoo was, at the time, the school for black students in Clinton. [Read more…]