Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville
John Egerton, Nashville, Tennessee
Essay Sections:
Introduction | Brown Comes to Tennessee | The Nashville Plan | Resistance and Resolve | September 9 |
The Witching Hour | The Turning Point | A Long Road Ahead | Appendices | Recommended Resources
The Witching Hour | The Turning Point | A Long Road Ahead | Appendices | Recommended Resources
Brown Comes to Tennessee:
As late as 1950, one third of Tennessee's counties provided
no high school instruction at all for black students; only those teenagers
willing to pay tuition and commute daily to an all-black facility in
another county had any chance of earning a high school diploma. To rectify
this,
a group of black parents in Clinton, the seat of Anderson County, sued
the school board that year for their children's right to attend the local
high
school. (Their attorneys were Avon Williams and Z. Alexander Looby of
the NAACP, who would file the Nashville desegregation suit five years
later.)
As the Clinton case slowly worked its way through the trial and appeals stages, the Supreme Court was assembling for joint review the cases that would be decided in Brown v. Board of Education. Clinton might well have been one of those — but ironically, by the time desegregation was started there in 1956, it was not even the first school system in Anderson County to remove racial barriers. That happened in September 1955, when Oak Ridge, the sprawling nuclear research facility nearby (a federal installation not subject to state and local governance), merged its separate white and black schools into an integrated system.
As the Clinton case slowly worked its way through the trial and appeals stages, the Supreme Court was assembling for joint review the cases that would be decided in Brown v. Board of Education. Clinton might well have been one of those — but ironically, by the time desegregation was started there in 1956, it was not even the first school system in Anderson County to remove racial barriers. That happened in September 1955, when Oak Ridge, the sprawling nuclear research facility nearby (a federal installation not subject to state and local governance), merged its separate white and black schools into an integrated system.
Beyond the fact that both lawsuits were filed by the same team of attorneys, the Anderson County story is relevant to what was about to happen in Nashville for other reasons. First, Governor Frank Clement and his attorney general, Roy A. Beeler, supported compliance with the law in both places. (As early as August 1954, Beeler publicly proposed that desegregation in Tennessee schools be started without delay and carried out one grade at a time.)
Second, the character of the opposition was also consistent. In Clinton and Oak Ridge, as later in Nashville, the first sign of resistance came from white men who claimed to represent the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, quickly followed by members of the Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan. |
 |
Car at segregationist rally, Nashville, TN, March 1956. |
And finally, the most dominant personality in both counties during their
times of crisis was the same audacious outsider: Frederick
John Kasper, a tall, handsome, twenty-six-year-old firebrand whose drawl
and dress (white shirt and tie, tan suit with matching Texas-style hat) concealed
his
evolving identity as a well-traveled professional agitator from New Jersey.
The picture of Kasper that eventually emerged was a dense tangle of contradictions. At various times he claimed to be president of the Tennessee Citizens Council and an official of the TFCG. His "little black book" held the names and phone numbers of Klansmen and other racial extremists all over the eastern United States. He was said to have earned a degree from Columbia University, operated bookshops in New York and Washington, and befriended the radical poet Ezra Pound, then confined to a mental institution. Kasper, like Pound, was bluntly anti-Semitic — but for reasons unclear, he was openly supportive and friendly toward African Americans until the early 1950s, when a new and menacing personality seemed to take over: Kasper became a rabid racist, burning to make a niche for himself as a roving troublemaker whose mission it was "to protect and defend the purity of the white race."
The picture of Kasper that eventually emerged was a dense tangle of contradictions. At various times he claimed to be president of the Tennessee Citizens Council and an official of the TFCG. His "little black book" held the names and phone numbers of Klansmen and other racial extremists all over the eastern United States. He was said to have earned a degree from Columbia University, operated bookshops in New York and Washington, and befriended the radical poet Ezra Pound, then confined to a mental institution. Kasper, like Pound, was bluntly anti-Semitic — but for reasons unclear, he was openly supportive and friendly toward African Americans until the early 1950s, when a new and menacing personality seemed to take over: Kasper became a rabid racist, burning to make a niche for himself as a roving troublemaker whose mission it was "to protect and defend the purity of the white race."
|
In his first swing through the South in the spring of 1956, Kasper found receptive audiences for his message of militant white supremacy. That fall, as the approach of school desegregation in Tennessee was being reported in the national media, the young rebel hurried to Clinton. He almost succeeded in blocking the admission of a dozen black students to the high school there, but the local leadership was ready and willing to obey the law. And so, while Donald Davidson was sending TFCG lawyers into state court in Knoxville to press for restoration of segregation by legal means (a strategy that would prove fruitless), Kasper was out in the streets of Clinton, thirty miles away, stirring up fury among disgruntled whites eager to answer the law with brute force. |
John Kasper speaking to a crowd, Nashville, TN, September 1957. |
Within two days, this mob had taken on a life of its own. They soon overwhelmed
the six-man Clinton police force and a hastily summoned auxiliary of deputized
citizens. Governor Clement responded swiftly, first with scores of state troopers
and finally, at the end of a chaotic week, with a battle-ready unit of over six
hundred
soldiers from the Tennessee National Guard. They quickly retook the town from
the anarchists, staying on patrol there for almost two weeks. During this surreal
encounter, Kasper and dozens of his followers were arrested, bailed out, arrested
again, charged, tried, acquitted, indicted, charged again, convicted, sentenced,
and released on bond while awaiting appeal. Meanwhile, the black students remained
at Clinton High School, and the entire town seemed to drift unsteadily into a
post-traumatic state of shock.
Eventually, some of the federal charges brought against Kasper — conspiracy, incitement to riot, contempt of court — would be made to stick, and he would be sent to prison for his east Tennessee misdeeds. Until then, he never lacked for money to post bail or appeal a conviction, and even the federal authorities found it hard to put him in jail and keep him there. From the time he first came to the state in the summer of 1956 until he was sent to a federal prison in Georgia in the spring of 1958, Kasper was usually in Tennessee but only rarely in custody. As a freelance provocateur, his services were in demand by one segregationist group or another — the TFCG, the Citizens Council, the Klan. He was living in Knoxville in the summer of 1957 when news came that a federal judge in the state capital was preparing a desegregation order for the local schools. The prospect proved irresistible to Kasper. Nashville was only a three-hour drive away.
Eventually, some of the federal charges brought against Kasper — conspiracy, incitement to riot, contempt of court — would be made to stick, and he would be sent to prison for his east Tennessee misdeeds. Until then, he never lacked for money to post bail or appeal a conviction, and even the federal authorities found it hard to put him in jail and keep him there. From the time he first came to the state in the summer of 1956 until he was sent to a federal prison in Georgia in the spring of 1958, Kasper was usually in Tennessee but only rarely in custody. As a freelance provocateur, his services were in demand by one segregationist group or another — the TFCG, the Citizens Council, the Klan. He was living in Knoxville in the summer of 1957 when news came that a federal judge in the state capital was preparing a desegregation order for the local schools. The prospect proved irresistible to Kasper. Nashville was only a three-hour drive away.
Essay Sections:
Introduction | Brown Comes to Tennessee | The Nashville Plan | Resistance and Resolve | September 9 |
The Witching Hour | The Turning Point | A Long Road Ahead | Appendices | Recommended Resources
The Witching Hour | The Turning Point | A Long Road Ahead | Appendices | Recommended Resources
