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
Resistance and Resolve: In the sultry heat of late July, more than a month before the beginning of the new school term in Nashville, John Kasper seemed to emerge out of nowhere as the sparkplug of a string of protest rallies in the city. He claimed to be president of the Tennessee Citizens Council, but reporters quickly learned that he was the "outside agitator" who had stirred up a rebellion in Clinton (where he was still causing turmoil with a "White Nationalist" newspaper called the Clinton-Knox County Stars and Bars). "I'm not through up there," Kasper told an audience in Alabama. "It may mean going back to jail, but I'm going back to fight." First, though, he turned toward Nashville, and soon the
local rhetoric was as hot as the stifling summer air. |
 |
Protesters,
reporters, and plainclothes police in front of Glenn Elementary,
Nashville, TN, September 1957. |
The school board's attorneys advised their clients on August 1 that there
was no way to dodge the start of desegregation, saying in effect that it
would be safer and wiser to begin — and shift the blame to "a meddling federal
court" — than
to refuse and risk being held in contempt by Judge Miller. The board and
administration unanimously accepted this advice. Then, perhaps to placate
their more vocal
critics, they gave Kasper a forum at their meeting on August 8, and sat glumly
as he read them a long list of criticisms and demands that included a call
for the board's mass resignation in protest of the court order.
Kasper also announced that the Tennessee Citizens Council and units of the Ku Klux Klan would soon hold a mass rally in Centennial Park. By then even some of his former allies, including the TFCG, were becoming wary of Kasper. A local Klan leader, Emmett Carr, told a reporter that "one or all three of these things about him is true: He's an integrationist working backward, a government agent, or he hasn't got all his marbles."
Kasper also announced that the Tennessee Citizens Council and units of the Ku Klux Klan would soon hold a mass rally in Centennial Park. By then even some of his former allies, including the TFCG, were becoming wary of Kasper. A local Klan leader, Emmett Carr, told a reporter that "one or all three of these things about him is true: He's an integrationist working backward, a government agent, or he hasn't got all his marbles."
On another front, a delegation of more than a hundred people calling themselves
the Parents School Preference Committee went to see Mayor West, telling him they
intended to boycott the schools if desegregation was allowed, and demanding that
he endorse their defiance. West not only refused, but told his visitors — with
reporters present — that his six-year-old son, Jay, would enter the first grade
that fall at Ransom School, in their home neighborhood. Ransom was one of fifteen
schools on the published list of prospective desegregation sites. |
 |
Section from Tennessee White Citizens' Council Application, Davidson County, TN. |
The Nashville Community Relations Council, a biracial group of moderates and activists, published the names of almost a thousand people who pledged their support for the grade-a-year desegregation plan. In response, a coalition of white groups handed the school board stacks of pages containing an estimated six thousand signatures in opposition to any sort of desegregation. Some Protestant churches and civic clubs formally pledged support to one side or the other, but by far most such institutions and groups avoided taking a stand.
Through the weeks of emotional give and take, there was little doubt that most white Nashvillians opposed desegregation, but in the main, theirs was a "passive resistance" characterized by indirect action and foot-dragging tactics. It was rare in Nashville for deep and serious disagreement on social issues such as this to spill out into public displays of animosity or hostility. Elsewhere in the South, white reaction to the remotest prospect of racial change, especially in the public schools, tended to be more extreme and unrelenting. The commonly used descriptive term for such all-out hostility was "massive resistance."
Through the weeks of emotional give and take, there was little doubt that most white Nashvillians opposed desegregation, but in the main, theirs was a "passive resistance" characterized by indirect action and foot-dragging tactics. It was rare in Nashville for deep and serious disagreement on social issues such as this to spill out into public displays of animosity or hostility. Elsewhere in the South, white reaction to the remotest prospect of racial change, especially in the public schools, tended to be more extreme and unrelenting. The commonly used descriptive term for such all-out hostility was "massive resistance."
 |
A special pre-registration
of first graders was announced for August 27. When a small number of
black parents and their six-year-old children arrived at five soon-to-be
desegregated
schools, white demonstrators organized by Kasper were already marching
around the buildings. Some of them carried signs proclaiming segregation
to be "the will of God," a basic right of white people, and a patriotic
duty under the flags of the United States and the old Confederacy. In
this tense environment, only thirteen black children were registered.
With Kasper, the Klan, the Citizens Council, and others of the same persuasion
roaming the city under the watchful eyes of Nashville police — and
with special security teams shadowing some public officials who had received
anonymous threats — the countdown to September 9, the first day
of school, proceeded in an atmosphere of mounting anxiety. |
Fred Stroud leads protest against desegregation, Nashville, TN, 1957. |
And, to make matters worse, trouble was also brewing elsewhere in the South.
On September 4, Governor Orval Faubus precipitated a major crisis when he called
out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from enrolling
at all-white Central High School in Little Rock. Before that conflict ended,
the President of the United States would have to nationalize the guard and send
additional U.S. Army troops to the beleaguered school to protect the new enrollees
from raging mobs of whites. On the same day desegregation began in Nashville,
a combined total of twelve black teenagers gained admission to previously all-white
high schools in the North Carolina cities of Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem,
in spite of disruptive opposition. And in Birmingham that day, a black minister
and his wife, with their teenage daughters, were set upon by a mob of white men
outside the segregated high school to which they had gone hoping to enroll the
two girls. Police were present but did nothing to protect the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and his family, who barely managed to escape without serious injury.
Nashville's power structure — its political and economic elite, exclusively male and Caucasian — saw themselves and their city in a different light: as segregationists, to be sure, and as champions of white privilege, but not as militant, violent reactionaries prepared to abandon the rule of law in order to perpetuate the many racial inequities that supported their "Southern way of life." Official Nashville was not willing to defy the federal courts; instead, it was offering, three years after the Brown decree, a modestly crafted desegregation plan that was the essence of tokenism — and its school leaders, politicians, police officials, and opinion makers (including the morning Tennessean and the more conservative Nashville Banner) reacted with varying degrees of acquiescence.
Out of an estimated fourteen hundred black children expected to begin the first grade, only 126 — not even one in a hundred — had been declared eligible for rezoning to fifteen all-white elementary schools closer to their homes than the nearest all-black one — and more than three-fourths of those families eventually requested transfers to avoid the change. Some black parents received anonymous threats on the phone or in the mail; others were told that their jobs would be in jeopardy if they sent their children to white schools. The success or failure of Nashville's first step on the long road of desegregation would depend in the end not on white acceptance but on black courage. When Monday, September 9, 1957, finally rolled around, only nineteen apprehensive black six-year-olds walked with their adult escorts past agitated crowds of whites to present themselves for admission at seven previously all-white elementary schools.1
Nashville's power structure — its political and economic elite, exclusively male and Caucasian — saw themselves and their city in a different light: as segregationists, to be sure, and as champions of white privilege, but not as militant, violent reactionaries prepared to abandon the rule of law in order to perpetuate the many racial inequities that supported their "Southern way of life." Official Nashville was not willing to defy the federal courts; instead, it was offering, three years after the Brown decree, a modestly crafted desegregation plan that was the essence of tokenism — and its school leaders, politicians, police officials, and opinion makers (including the morning Tennessean and the more conservative Nashville Banner) reacted with varying degrees of acquiescence.
Out of an estimated fourteen hundred black children expected to begin the first grade, only 126 — not even one in a hundred — had been declared eligible for rezoning to fifteen all-white elementary schools closer to their homes than the nearest all-black one — and more than three-fourths of those families eventually requested transfers to avoid the change. Some black parents received anonymous threats on the phone or in the mail; others were told that their jobs would be in jeopardy if they sent their children to white schools. The success or failure of Nashville's first step on the long road of desegregation would depend in the end not on white acceptance but on black courage. When Monday, September 9, 1957, finally rolled around, only nineteen apprehensive black six-year-olds walked with their adult escorts past agitated crowds of whites to present themselves for admission at seven previously all-white elementary schools.1
In the waning days and hours before that Monday, the loudest voice in town belonged to John Kasper, the outsider. He had enlisted the help of a defrocked Presbyterian minister named Fred Stroud for a last-ditch effort to stop desegregation in its tracks at the schoolhouse door. Stroud, previously dismissed by one Nashville congregation, had started another called Bible Presbyterian Church. To him, segregation was the binding will of God, and his mission was to preserve it or die trying. Kasper had no such religious or messianic motivations, but he saw Stroud as an indispensable ally among the local white citizenry. |
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Police and reporters surround parents and children at Fehr Elementary, Nashville, TN, September 1957. |
A few blacks may have been registered, Kasper told a crowd of about three hundred
followers outside the War Memorial Building on the eve of school opening,
but "blood
will run in the streets of Nashville if nigra children go to school with
whites!" A
rallying cry swelled up from the crowd: "Not one, not now, not ever!" Police
officers, including some in plain clothes, were scattered throughout, stone-faced
in response to the fiery rhetoric but alert to any signs of violence. Kasper
saved his most provocative words for rump sessions after the Capitol Hill
crowd had dispersed.
"Our country was born in violence," he told them. "Tomorrow is the day. Every blow that you strike will be a blow for freedom." In another context, he was more explicit: "I say that integration can be reversed. It has got to be a pressure down here which is more or less like a lit stick of dynamite, and you throw it in their laps and let them catch it, and then they can do what they want with it — let them worry about that."
Police Chief Douglas Hosse issued a general warning that disorderly conduct would not be tolerated anywhere near the schools, and he stressed that "all parents can be assured of their children's safety." Hosse cancelled all personnel leaves and assigned two hundred officers — nearly two-thirds of the entire force — to work twelve-hour shifts in the vicinity of the desegregating schools. Mayor West expressed confidence that all would go as intended. Superintendents Bass and Oliver urged "kindness and fairness for all," calling on teachers and school employees to "carry out the mandate of the federal court with the highest respect for law and order . . . and the welfare of every little child, white and black."
Writing in the Sunday New York Times, reporter Robert Alden sketched a city holding its breath. "No one knows what is going to happen tomorrow, or how much support the segregationists will be able to draw from the general white population." But Nashville, he wrote, "is by nature a law-abiding city."
"Our country was born in violence," he told them. "Tomorrow is the day. Every blow that you strike will be a blow for freedom." In another context, he was more explicit: "I say that integration can be reversed. It has got to be a pressure down here which is more or less like a lit stick of dynamite, and you throw it in their laps and let them catch it, and then they can do what they want with it — let them worry about that."
Police Chief Douglas Hosse issued a general warning that disorderly conduct would not be tolerated anywhere near the schools, and he stressed that "all parents can be assured of their children's safety." Hosse cancelled all personnel leaves and assigned two hundred officers — nearly two-thirds of the entire force — to work twelve-hour shifts in the vicinity of the desegregating schools. Mayor West expressed confidence that all would go as intended. Superintendents Bass and Oliver urged "kindness and fairness for all," calling on teachers and school employees to "carry out the mandate of the federal court with the highest respect for law and order . . . and the welfare of every little child, white and black."
Writing in the Sunday New York Times, reporter Robert Alden sketched a city holding its breath. "No one knows what is going to happen tomorrow, or how much support the segregationists will be able to draw from the general white population." But Nashville, he wrote, "is by nature a law-abiding city."
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
