NEW:
@TNLookout
Bobby Cain, a towering figure in Tenneseee’s civil rights movement and one of the first Black students to integrate a public high school in the South died Monday at the age of 85 in Nashville.
A former Knoxville Austin high school student and one year before the “Little Rock Nine” integrated Arkansas’s Central High School, Cain was the first African-American graduate of Clinton High School in East Tennessee and was among the “Clinton 12”, a group of Black students who were eligible to attend the school on Aug 26, 1956.
The school’s integration followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. Anderson County ended funding to bus Black students across county lines to Knox County, leaving Cain with little choice but to go to Clinton, a small town located about 30 minutes from Knoxville. It became one of the first communities in the South to implement court ordered desegregation.
Adam Velk, Director of the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, a museum that commemorates the integration of Clinton High School, said that Cain’s contributions are still felt today.
“Every child across our country has access to an equitable public education system because Bobby Cain graduated from Clinton High School on May 17, 1957,” said Velk. “He was given no choice but to be a part of one of the most difficult social experiments in American history. He is a hero not just because he was the first, but because of the circumstances in which he got his education.
Cain was graduate of Tennessee State University, lifetime member of
Omega Psi Phi Fraternity and faithful member of Asbury United Methodist Church in Clinton. He was also an active associate member of Fifteenth Avenue Baptist Church in Nashville.
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