Three months had passed since the National Guard marched into little (pop. 4,000) Clinton, Tenn., to enforce the right of nine Negroes to attend the all-white high school (TIME, Sept. 10). Last week, the peace that seemed to have settled over the town turned out to be no peace at all.
Though most students have grudgingly left the Negroes alone, a minority have made their lives a daily agony. Egged on by their parents and members of the White Citizens' Council, they have jostled the Negroes in hallways, jarred books out of their arms, taken every opportunity to trample on their toes. Then last fortnight John Kasper, 27, the rabble-rousing Washington, D.C. bookseller who was arrested for sedition and inciting riots in Clinton, won an acquittal from a state court.
The segregationists took Kasper's acquittal as a signal to go all out against integration. The Citizens' Council put up its own candidate for mayor, organized a junior auxiliary in the high school. States' rights stickers began to turn up everywhere. White students appeared in class with Confederate flags sewn on their sweaters. They cried ''Nigger bitches'' and "Dirty nigger whore" at the Negro coeds. They threw eggs and stones, poured ink over the Negroes' books and into their lockers. Whenever their enthusiasm failed, members of the White Citizens' Council were ready to keep the trouble brewing.
In spite of telephone threats. Principal D. J. Brittain Jr. stood faithfully by his Negro charges. He threatened to expel their tormentors, but neither he nor his faculty found proof enough to do so. Last week the Negroes stayed away from school in protest. The frightening question that faces them: whether they will ever be allowed to go back to the Clinton high school without suffering even more abuse than they already have.
Whatever the Negroes' future, their enemies seem to be having their day. "We have no support," said Principal Brittain bitterly. "Pretty soon these Citizens' Council people will have the upper hand, and then no one's rights will be safe." This week the School Board formally asked if the Government would enforce the Federal court integration order.