Bobby Cain, a member of the Clinton 12 who helped integrate Tennessee high schools in 1956, has died

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Bobby Cain poses poses for a photo in the Civil Rights Room of the Nashville, Tenn., Public Library in October 2017. (Robin Conover/The Tennessee Magazine via AP)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Bobby Cain, who helped integrate one of the first high schools in the South in 1956 as one of the so-called Clinton 12, died Monday in Nashville at the age of 85, according to his nephew J. Kelvin Cain.

Bobby Cain was a senior when he entered the formerly all-white Clinton High School in Tennessee on a court order. He had previously attended a Black high school about 20 miles (32 kilometers) away in Knoxville and was not happy about leaving his friends to spend his senior year at a new school in a hostile environment.

“He had no interest in doing it because, you know, he’d gotten to rise up through t