On August 27, 1956 in Clinton, Tennessee, twelve African American students made history when they were the first to walk through the doors of a legally desegregated high school. On that day, integration in the South formally moved from the courtroom to the classroom. Author Doug Davis was a frontline witness to history. His mother was an English teacher at the high school, and his father was a lawyer in the initial court case. Although school opened with minimal disruption, the first week ended with tanks rolling into town to keep order. Later, when the parents of the black students were reluctant to send their children to school, the author's father was one of three who escorted the students through a gauntlet of angry racists that had gathered in protest. Davis was just eight when this happened, and the memories of those tense days were the inspiration for this story. The conflict followed the family home and included the burning of a cross in their front yard. The family members were eyewitnesses to their hometown's turmoil, conflict that escalated from riots and protests, culminating in the destruction of the high school with one hundred sticks of dynamite. Th e people of this ruptured community bore the brunt of this momentous era of societal change in America. Here, childhood memories of family and community shed their light on the story.
Gifts Given
Family, Community, and Integration's Move from the Courtroom to the SchoolyardBy Doug DavisiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Doug Davis
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-5732-0 Contents
Letter #1: The blast that launched this ship (1951-1962, the back story begins plus a glance at 1935 and 2006).....................1Letter #2: Crime to start, then the tale of Buster and Anne (2006, then Davises from 1900-1960)....................................20Letter #3: Death and damage, near miss and salvation (1942 to 1958, Long loss and Clinton arrival).................................26Letter #4: Green McAdoo, Edward R. Murrow, and Eleanor (1956-1959).................................................................37Letter #5: Dad starts law school, Doug's 2nd grade (1940, then 1954-1957)..........................................................43Letter #6: Sid Jr. in the field and my parents in college (1951, then 1936-1938)...................................................48Letter #7: Igloo to start, then wedding, war, and planned-parenthood (1957, then 1940-1945)........................................53Letter #8: Post-war: Clinton with newborn, toddler, and "apavasifiddity" (1946-1949)...............................................62Letter #9: I arrive Dad takes his shot (1948-1950).................................................................................67Letter #10: Cute beyond memory, trampolines and attempted brain damage (before 1955, then a peek at 1964)..........................71Letter #11: Only parents remember, then wedding and the appearance of youth (1955, then 1961)......................................74Letter #12: Carlson and Burpo cousins post-wreck, then golf without a Sherpa (1960-66, 1955).......................................80Letter #13: Yard and charred (1957-1958)...........................................................................................85Letter #14: Bathing with Presidents, let the games begin (1957)....................................................................90Letter #15: Piano, music, and a duet for the ages (1930-1961)......................................................................96Letter #16: Males and development, baseball and Britannica (1957)..................................................................100Letter #17: Sleepover and scoreboard (1956-1957)...................................................................................105Letter #18: Saturday, Dad's curios, and Québec (1957).........................................................................110Letter #19: Kasper on trial, food, and football (1956-1958)........................................................................120Letter #20: Disease, comics, and holiday damage (1958).............................................................................127Letter #21: Age inversion (Uncle John), Mom's cataract, Anne's tobacco, and Isaiah speaks (1910-1964)..............................132Letter #22: Scene stealing and dungeon mayhem (1949, 1959-1960)....................................................................141Letter #23: Urgency intrudes, then growth hormones (1956 or 1958)..................................................................145Letter #24: Skill acquisition and dynamite (1958, plus 1939-1945)..................................................................151Letter #25: Cock-eyed optimist and growth pains (1955-1961)........................................................................160Letter #26: Family routines and B-ball (1959)......................................................................................169Letter #27: Tournament ball and diabetes (1959)....................................................................................175Letter #28: Cotillion and "chasin' rabbits" (1959).................................................................................179Letter #29: Politics and KKK (1910-1971)...........................................................................................182Letter #30: Fiefdoms (1960)........................................................................................................187Letter #31: Brains and brawn, St Louis and forgiveness (1960)......................................................................192Letter #32: The challenge and "busting a move" (1959-1960).........................................................................195Letter #33: Parties, Westerns, and Work (1960).....................................................................................200Letter #34: Sid's baseball, ROTC, and the "wild card" (1960).......................................................................203Letter #35: Neighborhood Olympics and new moves (1955, 1960).......................................................................207Letter #36: Harry's Human web, Holtsinger, and Hopson (1960-1961)..................................................................212Letter #37: Harry's ready attack, my lack, and Mother's courage (1956-1960)........................................................217Letter #38: Marriage, friends, and community (1950's)..............................................................................220Letter #39: Eleanor's grand vision and chemical storms (1930-1960).................................................................224Letter #40: Stunning shape, a bit of comic relief (1958-1961)......................................................................228Letter #41: Sid to Harvard, the Math and Spanish encounter (1960-1961).............................................................231Letter #42: Freshman basketball and the miracle worker (1960-1961).................................................................234Letter #43: Little League: baseball's perfect replica (Summer, 1961)...............................................................238Letter #44: All-star status, Clinton to Athens (Summer, 1961)......................................................................243Letter #45: Terrible things and the need for forgiveness (1958)....................................................................249Letter #46: Armory and football (Fall, 1961).......................................................................................253Letter #47: Boxing and 2nd team discoveries (1961-1962)............................................................................258Letter #48: Focus expands and piano ends (1961-1962)...............................................................................264Letter #49: Dad from law to sci-fi, then a medical shift (1961)....................................................................267Letter #50: Sanity set aside (2010)................................................................................................271Letter #51: Square dancing? Singing! (Spring, 1962)................................................................................273Letter #52: Center-stage and the threat (Spring, 1962).............................................................................276Letter #53: The spawning of a garage band (Spring, 1962)...........................................................................280Letter #54: Clinton's conscience and a narrowing of focus (1956-1964)..............................................................285Letter #55: Second year, second team, New Testament, and Mother's clarification (1961-1962)........................................291Letter #56: Sid's return, Doug's valedictory, and Dad's final word (Spring, 1962)..................................................297
Chapter One
Letter #1: The blast that launched this ship (1951-1962, the back story begins plus a glance at 1935 and 2006)
Danny,
May your life be "mighty fine." Ten years ago, I remember a young man with a head topped with red and quite a bright mind stationed inside. Your youngest, I assume. Every time I greet your wife, I am reassured that you have a clearly demonstrable grasp of what's important. Being grateful seems like a proper response. Well, this could be seen as the appropriate and requisite amount of diversion, but yet, I continue. May your children give you more children. May your body allow you to crawl around eye-to-eye with the smallest head in the room, and if you've got a genetic connection, well all the better. May your mind give you a moment of peace, and may you have the wisdom to sustain that moment for the duration. At that point, others will begin to call you Daniel, a book I recommend you not read.
Why not write a book instead! Assume that this was a bright idea. Creating "stuff" is our natural state, the whole "image" of the Boss thing. If you need any evidence, just look around. Yes, the need for editing might also surface, but my recommendation is never censor; that is the definition of the iconic Judas (a book that might be of interest to read). May the real Judas be grateful. (I'm sticking to my thought of the "only proper response.")
So create. Let your spirit soar, glide, careen, and envision. If there's a you you spy in the process, then let it be defined as WILL, a will that does not allow the "Judas" of self-destruction to intervene. The real Judas I'm sure was just another slice of creation talking to himself.
"'Tween what we see and what be, is blinds. Them blinds' on fire."
—which is to say, we might see Heaven, if Hell didn't come to mind.
"Hard work, Boss ... Waitin' for the Word."
More on Clinton and '56, the year America tries out court ordered integration in my hometown.
"Just the facts, Ma'am" (Hope these tidbits and back story can help you.)
My oldest brother, Sidney, was a freshman in high school at the start of integration's inaugural year. He remembers a smallish group of demonstrators gathered just off school grounds on the first day of school. Maybe there were 10 to 20 demonstrators with placards revealing names he had never associated with the Negro community. (We are years away from James Brown's "I'm Black and I'm Proud.") By the end of the first week, I guess all hell broke loose, and we had tanks in town. Some things a kid doesn't forget. At that point, Sid says the protesters were seldom seen or stopped all together. In his class, there were only one or two black students, and he recalls a plan to have two white students escort each black student to their next class throughout the day. He wasn't sure about other classes, but it was safe to assume that all 12 black students had similar escorts as a buffer against any problems. I'm sure student leaders like Jerry Shattuck were a part of the plan, as I'm also sure that there were many instances of both prejudice and conscience.
Sid remembers one incident in particular. He noticed a commotion in the hallway at school and saw a white and black student with knives drawn. Surrounding them was a circle of students expecting a moment that they would surely regret watching for the rest of their days. Suddenly, he saw our mother moving through the crowd and stepping forward to the center of the conflict directly between the two young men with their knives pointing at each other. Once she had positioned herself between the knife points, she turned to the Negro student and held out her hand. She didn't say a single word. Her actions were the only ultimatum she needed. The black student simply put his knife in her hands. She then turned to the white student and, as Sid says, gave him "the look," which he thought was only seen within the domain of our family. With those coal-black eyes, this English teacher never needed to say a word.
Her look and the outrage, disappointment, or anger it could deliver could not possibly have a more powerful grip on the mind by the mere addition of words. That penetrating gaze was always sufficient. In fact, withholding her thought would allow any eventual utterance to gain an even more excruciating impact on delivery. Needless to say, the white student folded the knife and released it to a higher power.
Sid, of course, was not an unbiased bystander, but his memory imbues our mother with a position of power and authority among her peers. In fact, he felt that the administration was barely able to hang on against the intense pressure bearing down on them. I'm sure that word of this incident and our mother's actions spread throughout the school. I know that my mother always took pride in the fact that she could handle any and all classroom situations and viewed "sending a student to the office" as a sign of weakness, a capitulation of a teacher's authority and power.
Growing up, my mother had focused her passionate intensity into her piano studies. All her children heard the performance of selected Beethoven sonatas (the Pathetique, in particular) and Schumann's Fantasy pieces. Her piano performance defined what human expression was capable of—simply a maximum of nuanced intensity with an extraordinary variety of touch and attack. No wonder she held onto some works of rapturous expressivity and dramatic power throughout her life. She went to Milligan College, which had a policy of providing practically a free education to all "valedictorians" of secondary schools. That's right. She was one of those people who didn't allow herself to make less than an "A" and could obviously back up such a point of view. She grew up in Etowah, Tennessee, a bustling town of 3,000, and Milligan was 150 miles away and about as far away as her dad was willing to let her go. Her piano teacher wanted her to enter the Julliard Conservatory, but New York was out of the question for her dad. She was his first-born. Her dad, Harry Warren Long, was a railroad engineer on the L&N Railroad, and we all called him "Pop." He was either one-half or one-quarter Cherokee Indian. His mother, whose maiden name was Crowe, was either a full-blooded or half-blooded Indian, and his dad (my great-granddad) had a farm on the outskirts of Athens in McMinn County, 10 miles from Etowah. My granddad's two sisters lived in Athens, and both had the black hair and black eyes of my mother. My brother Harry points to Pop's two sisters as the clearest evidence that our mother was one-quarter Indian and we boys were one-eighth because the two sisters in Athens could easily pass for full-blooded Cherokee squaws. My great-aunt Nell was like Pop, a creature built from goodness and a love of others. Pop was a touch long and lean, whereas Nell was broad and sturdy. Their sister Midge was slender and always stylish with those famous piercing black eyes to guide.
Back to '56:
Although there was relative calm once the National Guard arrived, the threats to everyone associated with the integration never stopped. Pressure on some was merciless. We learned that some of the racists drove through the African American neighborhoods on Foley Hill during the first week of school. Shots were fired into homes, and, in one case, dynamite was thrown. Luckily, no life was lost, but the nightly terror and tension had to be a terrible burden to those families. Makes me mad as hell to think about it.
In late October, my brother Sidney remembers walking from the gym to our dad's law office after basketball practice when he spotted a group listening to a speaker near the courthouse and suddenly heard the man talking about our mother. The speaker was John Kasper, a central figure in Clinton's integration story as a prime organizer of racial hatred. Kasper had attended Columbia University and worked in a New York City bookstore that was supposedly a center for interracial gatherings. Who would have imagined this avowed disciple of Ezra Pound would launch his career as a far-right activist by coming to our small Tennessee town to foment hatred and fear of racial interaction. When Sid first heard him, Kasper was talking to the crowd about why they should not be influenced by the examples of my parents. "It is obvious if you look at Eleanor Davis that she is a woman with Negro blood in her veins, and Sidney Davis is a man who obviously married a mulatto, and their progeny are thus evidence of the mongrelization of the races, which every white American rightly fears will be the result of a mixing of the races in our school system. The evidence is incontrovertible. Just look at Eleanor Davis with her big lips, black eyes, and black hair. No wonder she and her husband are protecting the Negro children. Don't let them spread their mongrelization by integrating our school system."
Sid Jr. continued on to our dad's law office and told him about what Kasper was telling the crowd and asked him if it was true that our mother was part-Negro. Dad responded, "Well, as a Southern family, there might very well be some Negro heritage in the family tree, but in the particular case of your mother, what's undoubtedly true is that she is part-Cherokee, and that explains those black eyes and hair."
We lived on the edge of town, miles away from the courthouse and school. I'm sure I had little understanding of what was going on in our community. I would catch a glimpse of my parent's anxiety or anger directed at forces removed from our home life. There would be an occasional flurry of phone calls or a heated exchange that was connected to the integration, but it all seemed distant and unconnected to my world. I felt safe and unaware of any threats. I was the youngest and probably the most carefree. I would soon be eight years old in the fall of 1956.
My parents always took great pride in the fact that they had executed their plan for a family even with the obstacle of World War II. The plan was to have two years of marriage without kids, followed by having three children spaced three years apart. They married after graduating from Milligan in 1940. Sid was born in December '42, Harry in January '46, and me in November '48. I guess I'm the ultimate fulfillment of my parent's grand scheme. (The concept of planning did not enter the picture for the next generation of Davises.)
There were only a dozen or so houses in our neighborhood along the highway toward Oak Ridge. Each home was situated about fifty to seventy yards away from the road and was perched on the spine of a modest ridge that looked down at the highway below from both sides. The size of each lot of land was ample, about two to four acres. A couple of properties were considerably bigger and gobbled an expanse of land beyond their home. Our home was initially a most modest place, four small rooms and a bath above an open garage and laundry area below.
As kids at the house on Oak Ridge Highway, some form of fun was always happening. During the day, our games in the yard would include our neighbor Ricky Sharp. Sid and Ricky were typically on one team and Harry and I on the other. Sid would handicap himself in some way to make the proceedings fair, given the fact that he was 14 and playing with 11 and 8-year-olds. The greatest gift Sid gave to Harry and me was his willingness to figure out a way to play with his two younger brothers. Ricky, being my age, was the perfect addition to the mix. For football, Sid would move in a modified slow motion, maybe a touch slower than the fastest of us. Gang tackling became our specialty against "Big Sid." Indoors we had "monkey" football, a full-contact game played entirely on our knees. The living room, which had little more than a piano and a couple of chairs sitting on its hardwood floor, was the perfect indoor "football" field.
As for the night that a cross was burned in our front yard, we three boys were in the house alone. So assuredly, we were up to something fun when one of us must have noticed the fire in the front yard. Sidney had gotten an archery set the previous summer, complete with a straw bull's-eye target plus bow and arrows. My Granddad Davis had tried to take his first grandchild out to shoot a shotgun earlier that year, and that was when Sid decided he had no desire or need to shoot a gun ever again. In any case, when we noticed the fire, Sid went to get his bow and arrows. The cross was burning near the Oak Ridge Highway in our front yard, which was about 150' from our house, maybe even 200'. There are a considerable number of trees in our front yard, and I think Sid imagined he would have excellent cover to take aim toward the burning cross and discourage anyone from coming closer. A burning cross is an excellent beacon in the Southern autumn night. Who knows what creatures might be attracted? I guess this is one of those moments when Hell rather than Heaven might come to mind. As my friend Henry, as created by the poet John Berryman says, "Henry liked Fall. He was prepared to live in the world of Fáll, forever. Impenitent, Henry."
I don't know if Sid actually shot an arrow at anybody or not. I'm pretty sure that I didn't go outside because I knew some form of nightmare had begun. Where were our parents during these couple of hours? I have no idea, a PTA meeting at school, perhaps. I do remember that we weren't sure that calling the fire department or police was going to do us any good. I fear that we suspected there might be a bigot or two on the force. Maybe there was a riot downtown, and the authorities were trying to figure out how in the hell do you deal with that! As I recall, the cross simply burned itself out after a few hours.
I do remember carrying the cross around to our backyard. It seemed to have been covered in cloth. I assume it was made out of rags and old bedding wrapped and tied around the 2-by-4's of wood. Maybe it was doused in gasoline to get things off to a rousing start. I know that I have no memory of our neighbors contacting us that night or in the weeks ahead for that matter. To an extent, no one wanted to be the focus of the forces that were gathering and emerging in our community, forces as old and divisive as one tribe's fear of another.
The charred cloth on that cross remains a vivid memory of that time for me. I guess I was in the third grade. That year I had the dubious honor of racing from the classroom to get outside for recess and, unfortunately, hitting a broom handle on the way out that managed to fall into a Coke bottle on a shelf above my teacher's desk. That Coke bottle fell and struck Mrs. Ridenour's head, knocking her out cold. I think I found out about it while playing dodgeball or kickball or alternately chasing or being chased by Mary Lou Sweeney or Mary Jane Macres.
By the way, Mary Jane's aunt was my dad's secretary at this time. Her name was Helene Macres, and she had a daughter named Gretchen who was the best flutist in our high school her final years. I remember being invited to an Easter celebration at Big Ridge State Park that allowed me to get a glimpse of the Greek Orthodox tradition. Other than the two Macres families, I'm unaware of other Greek families in our community at this time. So I imagine this gathering of Greeks, complete with lambs being roasted on spits, must have encompassed a few Tennessee counties' worth of Greek ancestry. Because all the Macres girls were so beautiful, I'm sure some concept of adding Greek blood into the Davis mongrelization of races was an idea that would be firmly in place soon.
(Continues...)
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