In 1998, something amazing happened in the town of Whitwell, a small rural community of fewer than 2,000 people nestled in the mountains of Tennessee.
Whitwell Middle School principal Linda Hooper asked language arts teacher Sandra Roberts and associate principal David Smith to begin a Holocaust education class that would be the basis for teaching tolerance and diversity in a voluntary after-school program. When the students, mostly white and Christian, struggled to grasp the concept and enormity of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, they decided to collect six million paper clips – one for each soul who perished.