Bobby Cain, the first Black student to graduate from a public high school in the South under court-mandated desegregation, who braved white mobs when he and 11 other Black students entered a formerly all-white school in Tennessee, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Nashville. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Yvette Cain-Frank.
As a 16-year-old senior, Mr. Cain was the informal leader of the dozen Black students who integrated Clinton High School, in rural Clinton, Tenn., northwest of Knoxville, on Aug. 26, 1956. During the first week of classes, he led them in morning prayers for their safety before they entered the school through a crowd of white segregationists shouting racial slurs and shaking signs declaring, “We won’t go to school with Negroes.”
Mr. Cain, one of two Black seniors, was bumped in the corridors, beaten after school with the sticks from the protest signs and, moments after receiving his diploma in May 1957 — and while still in his graduation gown — jumped by a gang of white youths.
The school integration crisis in Little Rock, Ark. began the next fall. In the annals of civil rights history, Little Rock has almost entirely eclipsed the ordeal of the Tennessee students who became known, as their stories were brought to light, as the Clinton 12.
Historians say those stories have emerged only relatively recently, in part because many Black former Clinton students, including Mr. Cain, were reluctant to speak about what they went through. White residents of Clinton, a town of some 9,000 in the Cumberland Mountains, had largely swept the ugly events of their segregationist past under the rug.
“It was just a journey he had to go through that he suppressed,” Ms. Cain-Frank said of her father.
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