A Most Tolerant Little Town Quotes

“did forget about Clinton High School, the students and teachers and parents and townspeople affected by the story could not. Their experiences had changed them, scarred them, broken them. Some were able to rebuild their lives, but others were not. Two of the people I’d come to admire—complicated individuals with the hamartias necessary for classical heroes—never recovered. Both would die by suicide. The first lesson of this book is this: History is the story of human beings, individuals responding to events already in motion and seldom under their control.”
― Rachel Louise Martin, A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation

“Or, as one founder of the Tennessee White Youth told me when I asked him for an interview, “Honey, there was a lot of ugliness down at the school that year; best we just move on and forget it.”
― Rachel Louise Martin, A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation

“On January 11, about 180 members of the Anderson and Roane County White Citizens’ Councils had packed themselves into Ann’s Café to talk about integration and pass a joint resolution demanding Clinton city officials ban fluoride in the water.”
― Rachel Louise Martin, A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation

“And frankly, few things were as fundamental to the American way of life as racism.”
― Rachel Louise Martin, A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation