Bobby Cain, who integrated Clinton High School in Anderson County as part of the "Clinton 12," died Sept. 22, 2025 at the age of 85. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout).

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.

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 unconstitu

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