Procedimiento

The easiest way for the segregationists to resegregate Clinton High School was for them to convince middle-class white leaders that it was more problematic to desegregate the school than to defy the federal government, that it was more costly to cross their working- class constituents than to disobey the federal courts. When Kasper arrived in Clinton, the segregationist protestors invited him to explain his philosophies which aligned so well with

John Kasper, “Segregation or Death.”

their own fears. They were anxious to connect to the larger segregationist movement and hoped that Kasper’s presence meant that their resistance would gain national support.

They also valued his contacts with national segregationist figureheads. For instance, at Kasper’s invitation, Clinton was visited by Birmingham segregationist Asa Carter. Carter was a leader in Alabama’s White Citizens’ Council and founded a paramilitary terrorist group called the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. He was also a speechwriter for George Wallace and reportedly penned Wallace’s famous commitment to “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” As many as twenty individuals spoke to the crowds that 287 gathered in the courthouse square for the nightly rallies that first week of school. Though most of the speakers were local white supremacists, Kasper and his friends gave the keynote addresses, and their notoriety attracted attention to the rioters’ message. Since these meetings were the way that the movement recruited new supporters, publicized the plan for the coming day and interacted with the national media, the high profile visitors were key to the

protestors’ success. 288

Kasper’s loose affiliations with the national White Citizens’ Councils, based in Indianola, Mississippi, were also valuable to Anderson County’s white supremacists. Founded in 1954 response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown, the White Citizens’ Council denounced by some as being a “‘new Ku Klux Klan without hoods.’” The national 289 Council leadership, however, saw themselves as being more politically adept than the night

After Wallace began to soften his stance on race in the late 1960s, Carter retired from politics and

287

began writing under the pseudonym Forrest Carter. His most famous book, The Education of Little Tree, has been a New York Times bestseller and required reading for many American schoolchildren.

Adamson, “Dynamite,” 101-06.

288

Quote from Atlanta Journal (February 10, 1956), quoted in McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 203.

riders were in the 1950s. Though their membership came from all classes of whites, they focused on recruiting members from the middle classes, men who could had the political and economic influence to support white supremacy. Instead of threatening to lynch African Americans who tried to enroll their students in white schools, for instance, White Citizens’ Council members were to get the blacks fired from their jobs, call in their mortgages and loans or in other ways undercut the financial standing of the black community. They were a “network of chamber-of-commerce types … openly endorsed by bankers and judges and congressmen that would affirm publicly that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, that the United States Court yields only to Moscow … [and] that God recoils in disgust whenever white and black children share a common classroom,” according to historian Neil McMillen. National representatives of the Citizens’ Councils would eventually separate themselves from Kasper and his violent tactics, but his use of their name, affirmation of their complaints against the federal government and affiliation with their political agenda lent legitimacy to segregationist efforts in Clinton. Finally, he brought the people of Clinton propaganda materials they could not afford to produce themselves.290

Though local segregationists accepted Kasper’s help, he and his new allies remained wary of each other. Anderson County’s supremacist leaders wanted to join the national cause but not at the expense of their own goals. They expected Kasper to throw his energies, talents and funds behind their aims. But Kasper hoped to lead their movement rather than join it.

Webb, “Introduction,” in Massive Resistance, edited by Webb, 5; “Kasper Not Wanted in Arkansas,”

290

Arkansas Democrat December 2, 1957; Seivers, “Voices of Determination,” 67; John Kasper, “Jail NAACP,

alien, unclean, unchristian, BLAST irreverent, ungodly LEADERS, HANG 9 SUPREME COURT SWINE (this year domine ’56) BANISH LIARS Destroy REDS (ALL Muscovite Savages, rooseveltian dupes) EXPOSE BERIA’S ‘psycho-politics’ DEATH TO USURERS” (Washington, DC: Seaboard White Citizens’ Council, 1956); McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, xi-xxvi, 22-25.

Kasper was a compelling and persuasive public speaker, and he used his speeches to campaign for his leadership. He contrasted himself—the educated and articulate

Northeasterner—with the “mountaineers” who headed the local supremacist crusade. On the one hand, he told his listeners at one segregationist rally, he valued their leaders’ isolation and lack of education because these seeming disadvantages had protected their pure sense of their whiteness. They had not been infected by the other ethnicities that had immigrated but had retained their Scots-Irish traditions. On the other, those same factors rendered them naive and unable to negotiate national politics. To win this fight, Kasper argued, Anderson

County’s whites needed his worldly voice to show them how to harness their race pride. He even ignored their preferences and called them words which they considered slurs. For instance, during one of his speeches, Kasper stood on the steps of the courthouse. The crowd cheered him loudly until he began to praise them for being “the hardworking hillbillies of East Tennessee,” which he assured them made them into “the most independent people in the world.” At that pronouncement, a deafening silence fell over the crowd. In their silence, they rejected the supportive role he offered them. Could they integrate the eager newcomer into their movement? 291

Despite the power struggle occurring among the organizers, the nightly rallies served their purpose, drawing ever larger numbers to the square each evening and encouraging more whites to come to the school protests. Within a few days, the segregationist movement had grown beyond local leaders’ control. The officials turned to the federal courts for help, filing an injunction request. The judge granted it on Thursday, August 30. In it, he declared that

Adamson, “Dynamite,” 101-06; Seivers, “Voices of Determination,” 67; Clinton Courier-News,

291

John Kasper and five Clintonians (most of whom were part of the August petition drive) along with “‘all other persons’” were “‘enjoined and prohibited from further hindering, obstructing or in any wise interfering with the carrying out of the aforesaid (integration) order of this court, or from picketing Clinton High School.’” 292

This tactical move by the city leaders and the federal judge backfired. The federal marshals served the order on Kasper and the five Clintonians that night in front of almost a thousand protestors. Kasper snatched the order from the marshals, scanned it briefly and then shredded it. He told the crowd that he and the five others specifically named in the order would have to step back. But, he continued, the rest of them should “‘go ahead and continue.’” Rather than being cowed by the judge’s actions, the protestors should see the restraining order as a sign of victory. They had finally convinced the authorities that they could not be led docilely forward into integration. “‘Let us keep on until we win it,’” he shouted. After his speech, the marshals arrested the six persons named in the order and took them to the federal prison in Knoxville. The next day, the five Clintonians were released, but Judge Taylor sentenced Kasper to a year in the federal penitentiary. An unknown patron had

Herd, “Then and Now,” 41-42; United States Court of Appeals, “Alonzo Bullock et. al. v. United 292

States of America v. Frederick John Kasper, 1957, Case No. 13512 and 13513,” July 16, 1957, United States

District Court, Eastern District of Tennessee at Knoxville, National Archives and Records Administration— Southeast Region, Atlanta, GA, 668; Seivers, “Voices of Determination,” 71; U.S. Court of Appeals, “Joheather

McSwain et. al. v. County Board of Education of Anderson County, 1950, Case No. 1555,” August 30, 1956,

United States District Court, Eastern District of Tennessee at Knoxville, Civil Liberties Cases, National Archives and Records Administration—Southeast Region, Atlanta, GA, 67-69; Clinton Courier-News, August 30, 1956, 1:1, 1: 4; The Oak Ridger, August 31, 1956, 1, 5.

paid for a Washington, DC, attorney to represent Kasper. The lawyer filed an appeal, and Kasper was released on bail a few days later. 293

Over Labor Day weekend, while Kasper was in jail in Knoxville, the nightly protests became riots. On Friday night, a small group of segregationists clustered together on the outskirts and voted to found a local branch of the White Citizens’ Council. They elected Willard Till, a machinist inspector at Oak Ridge and a prominent member of Clinton’s First Baptist Church, as their leader. When they announced their new club at the rally that night, approximately a hundred fifty individuals paid the three dollar membership fee. 294

The rally that night opened with two local speakers. Then Asa Carter took the

speakerphone. “‘I’m Asa Carter,’” he announced. “‘I’m from Alabama.’” His crowd cheered loudly. He reassured the assembled masses that whites’ innate superiority made white supremacism a humanist and patriotic endeavor. Whites were the reason the world had democracy. “‘For every three white men there are seven colored men on this earth,’” he explained, “‘but you’ll find that the Anglo-Saxon races are the only ones that have ever maintained a free government for free men.’” The audience roared their support of his ideas. Carter and the local speakers went on to denounce the federal government and assured the crowd that the will of the people trumped any judicial order, people continued to stream into the square. 295

Herd, “Then and Now,” 41-42; Seivers, “Voices of Determination,” 71; Clinton Courier-News,

293

August 30, 1956, 1:1, 1: 4; The Oak Ridger, August 31, 1956, 1, 5; D.J. Brittain Jr., “A Case study of the Problems of Racial Integration in Clinton, Tennessee High School: A Study Concerned with the Problems Faced by School Officials in the Racial Integration of a Public Secondary School in Compliance with a Federal Court Order,” Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1960, 149-50; Adamson, “Dynamite,” 103-05.

Margaret Anderson, The Children of the South, with a foreword by Ralph McGill (New York: Farrar,

294

Straus and Giroux, 1966), 15-16; Herd, “Then and Now,” 44-45. Ibid.

Late in the evening, some members of the crowds turned violent. One group of men attacked some of the news photographers, shouting, “‘The only picture we want is a picture of a nigger with a noose around his neck.’” Others rocked cars passing through town on the state highway which passed through Clinton’s square. One car carrying black passengers was overturned. Another carload of African Americans escaped the mob, but not before the whites cut the tires off the car. The vehicle broke down just outside the city’s limits, and the police had to rescue its occupants. Around two hundred people marched toward the mayor’s house, threatening to dynamite it. The police turned them around just before they got there. Others discussed blowing up the courthouse. 296

Concerned that they could no longer control the mob, the next afternoon town leaders collected additional weapons from the Knoxville police department and the FBI, and they deputized forty-six law-and-order white men as an auxiliary police force. As the auxiliary police neared the city square that afternoon, they found the crowd already milling. 297

A reporter from The Oak Ridger who was following the auxiliary police was surprised by the people around him. Though he expected a mob, this crowd was courteous. Whenever he accidentally bumped into one of the crowd members, they politely exchanged apologies. He walked among “people: tall, small, fat, thin.” He was surrounded by “women, some carrying babies, wide-eyed or sleepy.” He saw young children who “stumbled and straggled along behind their mothers” and teenagers who “laughed and punched each other, mugging for the cameras.” He thought the square would feel unfamiliar, but at “any other

Seivers, “Voices of Determination,” 73-74, 156-58, 196-98; Anderson, Children, 16; Holden,

296

Clinton, Tennessee, 6-9; Herd, “Then and Now,” 42-45; Adamson, “Dynamite,” 106-07; Clinton Courier-News,

September 6, 1956, 1:3; East Tennessee Reporter, February 15, 1957, 3.

The Oak Ridger, September 3, 1956, 8.

time, it would have been a Saturday night crowd in the county seat, in town for a movie or a coke or a chat with friends under the bright lights of the drug store and then home again.” The difference was that on that night, “no one was going home. Instead more and more came.” 298

The auxiliary police tried to keep the crowd circulating, hoping that they could keep trouble at bay by preventing onlookers from congregating around persuasive speakers, but as more whites gathered, forcing movement became increasingly difficult. Some of the crowd members began challenging the home guard. Auxiliary deputy Sidney Davis had a “heated discussion” with Mary Nell Currier, one of the Clintonians mentioned in the injunction, and five men were arrested and jailed for their antagonism. As tension rose, some crowd

members slashed tires and broke the windows of passing cars. 299

Soon a number of onlookers gathered on one side of the courthouse, cheering and shouting. The auxiliary police could not budge them. The deputies began to advance on one of the largest clumps of people. “‘Come on,’” the crowd taunted in response. For a few minutes, the crowd and the officers stared at each other, then “suddenly there was a hiss and a large puff of smoke went up from the center of the crowd.” The deputies threw canisters of tear gas one-by-one at the mob. Each time, the crowd drew back until the air cleared and then surged forward again. As the guard threw their final canister, thirty-nine Tennessee Highway

Ibid.

298

Holden, Clinton, Tennessee, 6-9; U. S. Court of Appeals, “Alonzo Bullock v. United States v. 299

Kasper,” July 16, 1957, 672-73; Clinton Courier-News, September 6, 1956, 1:3; Seivers, “Voices of

Patrol cars carrying one hundred state officers came barreling over the bridge, sirens screaming. The patrolmen regained control and disbanded the auxiliary police. 300

Then another car pulled up, and two representatives of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government got out, carrying a loudspeaker and microphone. They set up a makeshift speaker’s podium on the car and started the evening’s programming. The Reverend Alonzo Bullock—a local grocer, unemployed preacher and “father of nine living children,” at least one of whom was a student at Clinton High School—opened with a prayer, then a series of speakers stepped up to address the crowd. One man, a Nashville attorney and state leader of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, told the crowd that

desegregating the schools placed the local communities in an impossible position. The only solution was for the people to take the money the state collected to support the public schools and use it to open private, segregated schools for their students. “‘It’s just as if the federal law said you can’t drive down the right side of the street and the state law said you can’t drive down the left side of the street,’” he explained. “‘What would you do in that case? Why, you would take over the streets and make them private streets.’” Other speakers

advocated sacking the Anderson County Board of Education and impeaching the governor. 301 The next day, Tennessee Governor Frank Clement replaced the Highway Patrol with the Tennessee National Guard under the direction of Adjutant General Joe Henry. Henry instituted martial law in the town. He decreed that there would be no congregating in

Clinton’s town square or around the school; no parking near the Courthouse after dark and no

The Oak Ridger, September 3, 1956, 8.

300

Ibid., 1, 8; East Tennessee Reporter, July 26, 1957, 1; Clinton Courier-News, September 6, 1956,

301

public address systems or “outdoor speaking.” The Mayor and Board of Alderman passed ordinances in support of these prohibitions and added a curfew for teenagers. Nevertheless, as darkness fell that Sunday night, a crowd gathered on the square. A black Navy sailor who was dating Gail Ann Upton Epps, one of the twelve black students, stepped off the bus from Knoxville into the middle of the crowd of whites. He had assumed that the Guards’ arrival meant that he could visit his girlfriend before he shipped out to Texas. When the whites saw him, they lunged for him. He ran into the nearest building, a service station, where a single military policeman stood guard over him until a convoy of five jeeps filled with armed National Guardsmen rescued him. The Guardsmen drove the sailor back to Knoxville. 302

Irate that the segregationists had defied his orders and attacked a member of the military, General Henry sent three hundred Guardsmen armed with rifles and bayonets to clear the square. At first the whites refused to move. “Teenagers, knowing they wouldn’t be harmed, jeered and kidded with the soldiers,” the local paper reported. A few threw

firecrackers at passing cars. The standoff continued until about one in the morning. 303 On Monday, “Clinton was quiet but ominous,” The Oak Ridger reported. Just after dark, General Henry’s sedan roared out of town toward Oliver Springs, its sirens screaming. Rumors spread that, considering the success in Clinton, black students would enroll in Oliver Springs High School. By nightfall, over six hundred whites gathered there in protest. At first, the white crowd remained peaceful so Henry did not intervene. The situation began to

Ibid.; Eugene Weaver, interview by June Adamson, analog recording, January 6, 1980, University

302

of Tennessee Special Collections, Knoxville; Clinton Courier-News, September 6, 1956, 1:1, 1:3; Adamson, “Dynamite,” 113; Holden, Clinton, Tennessee, 6-9; Anderson County, TN, “Clinton City Recorder Minutes, Volume 12,” Anderson County Records, microfilm collection, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville; Seivers, “Voices of Determination,” 201-03.

Clinton Courier-News, September 6, 1956, 1:3; Holden, Clinton, Tennessee, 6-9; The Oak Ridger,

303

deteriorate when four dynamite blasts exploded on the hill above the school. Then someone set fire to a six-foot wooden cross in the front yard of one of the school board members’ brothers, and there were rumors that a phalanx of armed blacks were coming to force them to accept desegregation. When two black men drove through town, the segregationists

surrounded their car and rocked it, though they did not turn it over. The men sped away, but they stopped just beyond the crowd and fired at the whites. One white man was hit in the arm. 304