The Past is Another Country

... They do things differently there.

The opening lines of English novelist L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between seemed apt on December 7, when I visited the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, TN and the Green McAdoo Center five or ten miles down the road in Clinton.

When I taught American history, my two favourite subjects were the period leading up to and culminating in the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Both of them wobbly bookends on a long shelf of unfinished business, both of them living history.

You get this when you travel to the South, where the public history of the Civil War has a different tenor than in the North. Battlefields North and South are littered with privately or state-raised monuments, each of which bears a distinctively biased 19th century version of the horrible story. In our limited experience, though, historical interpretation in the South sometimes remains mired in the politics and emotions of that time as well.

This little scene below is not a true Civil War re-enactment, but rather a living motif on the grounds of the Museum of Appalachia. A fiddler sits by a campfire while soldiers and an officer confer nearby. The drifts of smoke are from the Museum's nearby reconstructed blacksmith's shop.


This small boy in a Superman cape, who had previously been terrorizing turkey hens in one of the barnyards, was now drawn to this re-enactor's pistol.


It made for an odd, sweet, yet just-so-slightly chilling encounter.

Part of the reason I have always enjoyed teaching this period was that it demonstrated how complex history is. Students who believed that the Civil War was all about ending slavery learned instead that it was about the apportioning of political power. And students who believed it was about high-handed politics learned that it gradually became a war that ended slavery and put the United States, uneasily and at a torturously slow and violent pace, on the road toward new definitions of freedom and equality.

Which brings me forward almost 100 years to the to the civil rights movement, to Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., the 4 little girls in Birmingham, and the Clinton Twelve.

The Clinton Twelve were, as the name suggests, 12 black teenagers who desegregated Clinton High School in 1956 -- one of the first desegregation efforts made possible by the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled that the "separate but equal" doctrine that underlay segregation was inherently unequal.

This is a statue of the Clinton Twelve heading down the hill from their junior school, Green McAdoo, to Clinton High School. It is a breathtaking piece. You get, in a visceral sense, what a lonely and dangerous walk it was for those youngsters. They were threatened and beaten. The school was bombed, and did not achieve full desegregation until 1965.

But in 1957, it graduated the first African American boy and a year later, the first African American girl in a desegregated school in the South. And fifty years later, this beautiful, hopeful sculpture looks toward the future.


James Joyce wrote in Ulysses: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." The Civil War ended up ending slavery but it took another hundred years, and countless lives, to achieve legislated equality. You come to places like Norris and Clinton and you come face to face with that history, and with the South's difficult effort to pull itself to wakefulness.

It is a humbling experience.