John Egerton, Walking into History: The Beginning of Desegregation in Nashville; Southern Spaces

Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville

John Egerton, Nashville, Tennessee

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The Witching Hour:

For a few hours after the half-day session had ended and Nashville's first venture into school desegregation was an accomplished fact, the prevailing mood among parents and children, school personnel, city officials and the police was a profound sense of relief. With white rage simmering just beneath the surface on that sultry late-summer morning, voices of raw anger and hatred had spilled out into the streets. Sticks, stones and bottles had been hurled at a handful of African Americans seeking the full benefits and services of public education. They had been spat upon, cursed, threatened — but with quiet courage and admirable restraint, the parents and children had kept on walking. Miraculously, no blood had been spilled, and that alone seemed reason enough to pause and be grateful.

Fred Stroud rails against integration, Nashville, TN, September 1957.

Mayor West, who was away from the city, called back to praise Chief Hosse and the police force for allowing orderly protest while protecting the children and preventing violence. The Parents School Preference Committee, having earlier harangued the mayor to defy the Supreme Court, chose this day to call on Governor Clement, demanding that he use national guard troops to block desegregation, as Governor Faubus was doing in Arkansas — but Clement firmly rebuffed them, as West had done earlier.

Superintendent Bass expressed mild disappointment that attendance was down by about one third in four of the six schools that were desegregated, but he applauded the efforts of school principals and teachers, the black families, and the police. Referring to the escalating conflict in Arkansas, he said, "We are caught in the backwash of . . . Little Rock, [which] has given the impression of possible victory to those who would like to defeat the Supreme Court decision."

In their different ways, the leaders of Nashville were claiming progress — but not total victory — in the campaign to desegregate the schools. They were on the side of the law, but they knew that a great many whites, perhaps a majority, wanted to cling to segregation, and the most avid racists among them would continue to fight change with every weapon at their disposal. The first day of desegregation was over, but it was just one day in what was likely to be a long and bitter domestic war.

Registration day at Glenn Elementary School, Nashville, TN, August 1957.

John Kasper was still in town to lead the segregationists' offensive. The racists had lost every round in court, but Kasper was still their weapon of last resort. Kasper was the Bomb. They knew that he could not be trusted, but he had the skill to fire up a crowd as few men could. Through him, they might still build an underground army that could draw manpower and money from across the economic spectrum in Nashville and beyond; without him, their chances were slim — or nonexistent.

In the fading light that evening, about three hundred whites gathered on the steps of the War Memorial Building to witness another Kasper performance. He had vowed earlier that no black child would get past the iron curtain of segregation — but sixteen had done so, and about a dozen of them were now permanently enrolled in their new schools. He had assured his followers that a white boycott of the system would shut it down, but that had not happened. He could argue that the hole the government had poked in the solid wall of segregation was no bigger than the eye of a needle — only a handful of black first-graders out of fourteen hundred had squeezed through — but the slogans of defiance now echoed in his ears: "Not one, not now, not ever!"

Crowd in the street near Hattie Cotton after the bombing, Nashville, TN, September 1957.

Private worries also dogged the man. Rumors were circulating that his personal associations back East, far from signifying "white purity," had been interracial and at times intimate. His earlier conviction in the federal court in Knoxville was still under appeal. His tolerance factor among Nashville law enforcement and court officials was nearing zero. And, perhaps worst of all for him, his money sources (none of them known publicly) were swiftly drying up as the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, the Citizens' Councils, the Parents Committee for School Preference, and even the Ku Klux Klan began to distance themselves from him.

With what seemed like a mixture of confidence and desperation, Kasper stood before his audience that Monday evening and slowly heated his rhetoric to the boiling point. Using language laced with dehumanizing epithets and images of violence, he pressed once again the emotional buttons of defiance and menace that had always seemed to work for him in the past: communism, atheism, mongrelization, rape, mayhem. The crowd was on his leash, waiting to be led. He told them they had a constitutional right to carry weapons, and the time had come for them to arm themselves and get into the fight.

They moved across Charlotte Avenue to the steps of the State Capitol, with Kasper in the lead. "We say no peace!" he shouted. "We say, attack, attack, attack!" Then, brandishing a rope, the Jersey racist with his newly-acquired Southern accent closed with a final flourish: "This is Dixie! Who do they think they're playing with? We're the greatest race on the face of the earth! Let's for once show what a white man can do!" Standing gaunt and grim-faced, Kasper absorbed the frenzied crowd's deafening roar of approval. He looked for all the world like the leader of a lynch mob.

The throng began to thin out quickly when Kasper sent ten men out among them to take up a collection in their doffed hats. Minutes later, an effigy in blackface was seen swinging from a stoplight on Church Street, two blocks south of the capitol. "This could be you!" the sign on it read.

A demonstrator shouts from a traffic light post, Nashville, TN, September 1957.

It was dark by then, and two miles to the north, another mob of four or five hundred was roaming the streets around Fehr School. Boldness crept in with the shadows, and soon the violence escalated. Two outbuildings in the back yard of Grace McKinley's family on Sixth Avenue burst into flames. Crosses were torched outside the darkened houses of black families in the neighborhood. Young men hurled rocks at passing cars and vandalized more property. All of this happened in a few harrowing minutes of anarchy. When the police moved in, the perpetrators scattered and fled ahead of them like a flock of birds. An eerie silence hung in the night air. Later, remnants of the two mobs regrouped in small pockets around the city, their energy for marauding still not spent. From their midst came a whispered rumor that Fehr would be blown up at midnight.


Police arrest a demonstrator (left). Young demonstrators throw bottles (center). A young demonstrator wields a rock (right). Nashville, TN, September 1957.

The witching hour came and went, but there was no explosion. Then, half an hour later, a powerful dynamite blast shook the earth — not around Fehr but three miles to the east, at Hattie Cotton School, where Principal Margaret Cate, six-year-old Patricia Watson, and 139 white children had ended the first day of school twelve hours before.

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