National Affairs: The Battle of Nashville

Dawn broke overcast and muggy over Nashville (pop. 187,000), the graceful and leisurely capital of the state of Tennessee. It was back-to-school week, and for the first time in the city’s history Negro children would go to school with white children. The way had been prepared carefully; the integration would be selective and limited. Only twelve carefully chosen little Negro children, first-graders all, would go to five schools that were previously all white. But the air was charged with tension. “We are in the backwash of a thing that’s going on too close to us,” said School Superintendent W. A. Bass. “The Little Rock situation is giving the impression of possible victory to those people who would defeat the Supreme Court decision.”

Nashville’s city officials, though brought up for the most part to believe in racial segregation, were determined to preserve the law as a necessity of their community’s everyday life. “Desegregation,” said School Board Chairman Pro Tem Elmer L. Pettit, “is something that has become law, and we must learn to live with it.” Back of the local officials stood Tennessee’s Governor Frank Goad Clement, who called out the National Guard last year to enforce integration and the law in Clinton, Tenn., and this year sharply turned down a segregationist delegation that urged him to follow the lead of Arkansas’ Orval Faubus.

“Pull Their Black Curls!” Before 7 a.m. on back-to-school day crowds of white people began to gather outside the schools where Negro children had been registered—and it was clear that Nashville was in for serious trouble. There were scrawny, pinch-faced men in T shirts and jeans, vacant-faced women in curlers and loose-hanging blouses, teen-age boys in tight pants and greased ducktail hairdos. They flaunted Confederate flags and placards, e.g., WHAT GOD HAS PUT ASUNDER LET NOT MAN PUT TOGETHER.

“Here come the niggers,” was the first battle cry as two six-year-old Negro girls in neat green dresses, their hair done up in braids, came into view. “Pull their black curls out!” screeched one white woman. As the Negro six-year-olds tripped quietly into the schools, the crowds grew wilder. A white waitress raised a tattooed arm, threw a rock and hit a Negro woman on the chest. A Negro woman guided her grandchild quietly through a gauntlet of hissing whites until she broke under the strain, undid one button of her blouse and drew a knife. “If any of you jump me, I’m going to use this,” she cried. All pretense at education collapsed as the Battle of Nashville got under way.

“Bloodthirsty Race.” That evening white crowds concentrated outside the War Memorial Building beneath a granite-carved quotation from Woodrow Wilson:

America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.

From the steps of the state capitol Frederick John Kasper, 27, the tall, hawk-faced agitator from Camden, N.J., began to whip up the crowd. “The Constitution of the U.S. gives you the right to carry arms,” he said. “If one of these niggers pulls a razor or a gun on us, we’ll give it to ’em . . . When they fool with the white race they’re fooling with the strongest race in the world, the most bloodthirsty race in the world.” Hot-eyed Rabble-rouser John Kasper mentioned the name of one of Nashville’s Negro civic leaders and dramatically held up a rope, then talked hazily about dynamite.

City officials stood by, disdaining to interfere for fear of infringing the right of free assembly. They knew that the tradition of segregation was hard to break, and they were tolerant of the protesting crowds, which broke up without open disorder. But before another dawn Nashville was to be blasted into a changed mood.

Half an hour after midnight the city was rocked by a thunderous dynamite blast that shattered a wing of the seven-year-old, $500,000 Hattie Cotton Elementary School where one five-year-old Negro girl had registered the day before. The blast ripped doors off hinges, cracked plaster and scattered bricks and glass in thick, ugly layers across the surrounding schoolyard and walks. “A hellish explosion—just like God had whispered in my ear,” said one nearby resident.

The Realization. Dazedly the good people of Nashville began to recognize the horror of what had occurred. Those elements of officialdom, press and public that had stood aside from the battle were shocked into a new appreciation of law and order. “Ain’t things got terrible?” wailed one frail old woman who had demonstrated against integration only the day before. “This is no longer a matter of segregation or desegregation,” said one school official. “This is a matter of sheer lawlessness. We’re up against thugs.”

When white segregationists rallied outside the schools for a second day’s harassment of Negro children, they found themselves facing hard-eyed policemen and barricades, backed by a city of conscience aroused as rarely before. At one point a Negro minister escorting a little girl from school was bombarded with stones; he turned upon the white crowd and drew a pistol. The police arrested him, but he was quickly freed on bond. After the minister made a public statement regretting his resort to force, one of the arresting officers spoke with a kind of tolerance that was different from the previous day’s. “These people,” he said, “have been pushed pretty hard.”

Day in Court. Next day the Battle of Nashville moved to a climax in the courts. The first blow was struck by City Judge Andrew Doyle, who read a crushing lecture to Rabble-rouser Kasper, hauled up during the week on charges that ranged from parking in a no-parking zone through vagrancy to incitement to riot. “I consider you guilty of the lowest possible degree of vagrancy,” said Judge Doyle. “You came into this town to cause racial disorder. You and others like you are responsible for any blood that may be shed. I only wish we had enough policemen to take you by the seat of your britches and the nape of your neck and throw you outside the city limits.” At week’s end Kasper, in the county jail on charges of incitement to riot, and unable to raise $2,500 bond, was confronted by new testimony, relayed by the FBI, linking him to the dynamite bombing of the Hattie Cotton school.

To guard against future violence, Federal Judge William Miller, who issued the original integration order, now issued a sweeping restraining order against any more interference with integration of the Nashville first grade. The effect: anybody who shows up outside the schools and demonstrates against integration can be haled into court for contempt.

Thus the weight of law and order, misused in Little Rock, aroused in Nashville, achieved a notable triumph. By week’s end even the weakening rabble-rousers were beginning to reconsider. No Nashville white had shouted more loudly against integration than a burly, tattooed man named George H. Akins, who had been arrested by the police after some disorderly conduct. As he stood trial in City Judge Doyle’s court, his eight-year-old daughter standing beside him began to cry, anguished by the spectacle of her father at bay. The man saw the child’s distress, reached out one hand and smoothed down her blonde bangs, pulled out a handkerchief and began to mop her eyes. Suddenly a look of pain broke across his face. “I didn’t go out there to cause any trouble,” he blurted. He too burst into tears.