"This wasn't going to be a normal day" Bobby Cain remembers being the first black kid -- ever In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education ordered public schools across the United States to desegregate, leaving the specific timetable for this to lower federal courts. In the fall of 1956 Clinton High School became the first high school in the South to integrate. One of the 12 black students to attend Clinton that year was Bobby Cain, who recalled the experience when interviewed as a part of the Nashville Public Library's Oral History Project. Bobby Cain walks to Clinton High School in August 1956 "As we started down the hill, the closer we got to the front of the building, there was a throng of people out there hollerin' and jeerin' and calling us names. I realized, and I'm sure the others did, too, that this wasn't going to be a normal day. We hurried up those steps to get through the crowd and into the school. There we were met by Mr. D.J. Brittain, who was the principal, and he kind of put us at ease and took us to the assembly hall where all the other students were, because that's where we were going to get our classroom and homework assignments . . .  I was very nervous and the others were very nervous that first day. ". . . It [the tension] was there every day. As you were going through the hallway, you might get bumped or whatever, or someone would call you a name . . . It was there on a daily basis and especially there on the first day in terms of pushing and shoving and little hostile remarks coming from me as well as from them. I tried to make little hostile remarks back to them as they were made to me. I guess there was a lot of hostility. Bobby Cain (left) with U.S. Rep. John Lewis in August 2006, at the opening of Clinton's Green McAdoo Cultural Center PHOTO: Green McAdoo Cultural Center "I remember one significant event for me that year . . . the gym instructor set up a 100-yard dash with the local track star and he paired us off . . . at the end of the heat I beat the young man by a couple of strides. That got into the school and people started coming up to me and said, 'I heard you beat him,' and they started talking to me gradually, but not on an ongoing basis, maybe in the hallway or the classroom. That was a historic event for me because it really broke the ice. But this was maybe in the spring. "But there was definite fear in the community. One night we thought that the people from downtown were going to come up the hill, because we heard a lot of jeering and hollering and whatever. And as I remember, one of the most beautiful sites that I ever saw was one night, when I thought they were coming up the hill, I saw one, two, three, and consequently 30 red lights coming into town. Those were the state troopers being sent in to quelch the disturbance downtown." (Bobby Cain is retired from the Tennessee Department of Health and Human Services, and lives in Nashville. Meanwhile, the story of the so-called "Clinton 12" (the 12 African American students who attended Clinton High School in the fall of 1956) is now told at the Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton. Click here to be taken to its web page.) COPYRIGHT -- the Civil Rights Oral History Collection of the Nashville Public Library, Special Collections Division