CHAPTER 4 AUGUST 1957, WHEN THE KLAN TELLS THE FBI THEY WON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH JOHN KASPER, SO THE FBI IGNORES JOHN KASPER FOR A WHOLE MONTH
Courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives
Guide to the Racists in this Chapter
Emmett Carr Nashville Klan leader
Asa Carter Birmingham renegade Klansman
Dr. Edward Fields J.B. Stoner’s friend and member of any racist group that will have him
Bill Hendrix Florida Klan leader
John Kasper New Jersey racist and instigator of mob violence in Clinton, Tennessee
Thomas Norvell FBI informant
Charles Reed Kasper supporter, FBI informant, and friend of Thomas Norvell
J.B. Stoner Chattanooga Klansman who moved to Atlanta
Rev. Fred Stroud Leader of the Bible Presbyterian Church
Robert and Carrie Wray Nashville Kasper supporters
A Series of Segregationist Rallies
By August 1957, John Kasper had decamped from East Tennessee and made Nashville something of a permanent headquarters. Locals who had been following the nightmare at Clinton were understandably nervous—Nashville was now, thanks to Z. Alexander Looby, under court order to desegregate in September.
On Thursday, August 1, the Tennessean ran a short but jam-packed story about the beginning of Kasper’s war on Nashville. He was going to hold a summit for white supremacist groups at Centennial Park at 2 p.m. on Sunday. He had a who’s who of segregationists scheduled to appear, including Asa Carter, who had been at Clinton with him; Florida Klan leader Bill Hendrix; and Kentucky White Citizens Council official Dr. Edward Fields, who was J.B. Stoner’s dear friend.
The story was quick to note, however, that Emmett Carr and his Klan would not be there.
“Understand, I’m not fighting with the man,” [Carr] told a reporter, “but he’s got such a bad background and such a bad reputation that we’d just rather not associate with him.”37
The Park Board had hoped to find a way to stop Kasper’s gathering. By Saturday, they had decided that if Kasper didn’t have a permit for a rally, he couldn’t hold one in Centennial Park. Kasper, who was already in hot water for his willingness to defy a federal judge, was not about to let a city park board stop him.
At 1:30 in the afternoon, he and his crowd showed up at the West End entrance to Centennial Park. Park Superintendent F.W. Pickens and the police met them.
“You must have a permit,” said Pickens.
“All right, what do I have to do to get a permit?” Kasper said.
“The park board is the only one who can grant a permit,” Pickens answered.
Turning to the crowd, Kasper said: “We didn’t apply for a permit because we thought the right to free speech was guaranteed by the first amendment to the constitution. Any law or ordinance or regulation that abridges it is unconstitutional.”
Pickens interrupted: “Kasper, you’re making a speech and I told you you can’t make a speech here without a permit.”38
The caravan of hate packed up and moved to a field out west of town in Croleywood. Kasper called for a race riot and railed against the Jews. Other speakers denounced various politicians. But as the hot afternoon wore on, the crowd dwindled. In his speech, Kasper accused Emmett Carr of skimming money off of Klan members. Carr told the Tennessean, “There’s one or all of three things about Kasper. One, he’s probably an integrationist working backwards; two, he’s an agent for the government; and three, he just hasn’t got all his marbles.”39
Listen, this stuff is hilarious. Especially Pickens being all “you’re making a speech when I just told you you can’t make a speech without a permit.” But it’s also very funny that Kasper’s been in town all of two seconds and his great mission to prevent Nashville’s schools from desegregating is already being undermined by a public fight he’s having with another racist. So much for presenting a united front of segregationists. That dream didn’t even last through the first meeting.
I’m telling you this, because I, too, am laughing. I think laughter is an appropriate response to these dumbasses.
But I think Nashville made a crucial mistake because the situation was so funny: because these were so clearly a bunch of doofuses who could barely get their acts together without descending into squabbling, Kasper’s arrival wasn’t the giant red flag it should have been. Even with the troubles at Clinton, the Clinton racists hadn’t started shooting at people yet. The Clinton High School wouldn’t be bombed until the next year. The threat Kasper presented, as far as Nashville knew, was that he might instigate a riot. And yet here he was, being peacefully turned away from a rally in a park. Maybe Nashville would just be better able to contain him than Clinton was.
That belief—that this was kind of a containable joke—was a crucial mistake.
But it was a mistake we as a city weren’t alone in making. The FBI already had a substantial file on Kasper, following his cross burnings in D.C. and in Florida. They had also paid close attention to him while he was in Clinton. Yet, on July 25, Special Agent in Charge Francis Norwood sent a memo to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, saying that after calling around to Klansmen in Nashville and hearing that they weren’t going to be associating with Kasper, and then reading in the papers that the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government was avoiding him, “no investigation or inquiry concerning Kasper will be made in Nashville UACB [Unless Advised to the Contrary by the Bureau].”40
The next item in Kasper’s file is dated “8-30-57.” The FBI had let Kasper operate in Nashville for a month without keeping track of him.
The other mistake law enforcement officials made was not recognizing what the presence of Dr. Edward Fields at the rally meant—that J.B. Stoner was tied up in this. Maybe that’s understandable in the summer of 1957. Stoner had revitalized the Chattanooga Klan by then, yes, and he and Fields already had a club devoted to their mutual hatred of Jewish people. But his willingness to bomb and his ties to other bombers hadn’t fully developed at this point.
Still, when Stoner’s name started popping up repeatedly in relation to the string of anti-Semitic bombings throughout the South—including Nashville’s JCC—you’d have thought that someone, anyone, might have been curious about how early Stoner had been sniffing around Nashville. And here we have Fields in Nashville at the beginning of August 1957. You don’t get Fields without Stoner. Not in 1957, that’s for sure. Fields was Robin to Stoner’s Batman. If you see one involved, you can safely assume the other one is as well.
What John Kasper Was Doing while the FBI Wasn’t Watching
Anyway, back to our story. If Dr. Fields was in town, then Stoner was somewhere close by, skulking around, watching, and gathering information. This is both a safe assumption we can make based on what’s known of Stoner and Fields’s activities and on the fact that the FBI found a note Kasper had made saying that Stoner was in Nashville in August of 1957.41 Stoner later said he was here.
On August 8, Kasper and other racists attended a school board meeting, demanding board members find a way to defy the federal court order to desegregate. William Keel in the Tennessean recorded the names of other segregationists who spoke—R.E. McKenzie, E.S. Dollar, Rev. Fred Stroud, L.V. DuBose (vice chairman of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government), W.C. Orman, Betty Stephens, and Carey Hambrick.42 What this tells us is that, in spite of Emmett Carr’s insistence that the local Klan wanted nothing to do with Kasper, Carr’s own sect, even the guy right below him in the pecking order—E.S. Dollar—was fine working with and appearing with Kasper. Same could be said to be true for the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government.
According to the school board minutes,
The citizens, speaking as individuals, in addition to protesting the plan, feared violence and for the safety of their children. Reverend Fred Stroud stated that “Almighty God, down through the years has been the greatest segregationist of them all; that we must put some courage in the backs, hearts and minds of the people of Tennessee and not integrate.”43
On August 10, Kasper told the Tennessean that he was looking to form a segregationist political party. But a rally he had that weekend was filled with a less than enthusiastic crowd and neither Asa Carter nor Bill Hendrix bothered to show up. Conventional wisdom had it that they were still sore that Kasper had held integrated dance parties in his younger days. Kasper said he was going to lay low for a couple of weeks. In actuality, when he wasn’t in Nashville, he was over in East Tennessee dealing with his legal troubles from Clinton.
One of the homes he laid low in while in Nashville was that of Robert and Carrie Wray. Thirty-seven-year-old Robert worked at AVCO, which had been the famous Vultee Aircraft factory during World War II,44 before a series of mergers and buyouts. Thirty-year-old Carrie was a stay-at-home mother of three. They lived on Jay Street, in Woodbine, south of downtown. During Kasper’s downtime, Carrie Wray wrote Governor Frank Clement a letter, which he received August 23, and passed along to the Department of Education on August 26. There’s no indication it was shared with police. The letter reads:
Dear Sir,
As a housewife and mother born and raised in the state of Tennessee I feel compelled to write you and ask you to please intervene in this segregation issue before the streets of Nashville and Davidson county are filled with blood. I am very much concerned with the talk going around about dynamite and shotguns and you could hear it too ‘tho most of it is whispered.
The talk is on the city busses [SIC], in department and grocery stores in any and all public places and the South is beginning to hate the negro. I am afraid for our little children and I for one am not going to send mine to an integrated school and endanger their very life. We are actually sitting on a powder keg which will be lit in September. Couldn’t you go to the Supreme court and tell them it just won’t work in Tennessee?
Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi are standing together, why is Tennessee doing nothing. At least make a report to the newspapers or on television etc. and let the people know where you stand on this vital matter. I beg you before it is too late.
Sincerely,
Mrs. R.W. Wray45
While it’s true that Governor Clement received a lot of angry letters from people opposing integration, he only received one from a woman living with a segregationist known for inciting violence. Not that Clement knew that, of course. But what a missed opportunity. If only someone would have asked Mrs. Wray who it was she heard talking about “dynamite and shotguns.”
There’s one other bit of the letter that gives me pause. She says, “I am afraid for our little children and I for one am not going to send mine to an integrated school and endanger their very life.” Why does Carrie think that sending her kids to an integrated school would endanger them? After all, there are a lot of things white supremacists could do to thwart integration that wouldn’t put white children at risk. That wouldn’t put schools at risk. Carrie seemed to have known that kids in integrated schools were in danger. It’s possible to read this letter as a genuine expression of fear, but I suspect that Carrie is actually making a veiled threat, like a mafioso remarking about how lovely your home is and how it would be a shame if something happened to it.
On August 25, Kasper held another rally at the Robertson Road and Croley Drive location in Crowleywood, west of town. Asa Carter was there, complaining about Black people, as one does at a segregationist rally. He also had complaints about music.46
Carter said in Birmingham high schools, children don’t even recognize the names of great Confederate heroes, except for Lee. He said they think “they’re the names of rock ‘n’ roll singers or something.”47
Oh, kids today with their rock ‘n’ roll music.
The newspaper story on the event contains one bit that backs up Carrie Wray’s warning that things were going to turn violent.
Most of the cars were decorated with Confederate flags and signs reading “Keep Our Schools White.” One carried an American flag. Another sported a model of a gallows from which a doll was hanging by the neck. The doll was painted black.48
Kasper appears to have held rallies every night that week, but because Nashville was still treating him like a joke, neither the Tennessean nor the Banner covered them.
This is a shame because Klan leaders from all over the South were in town. On August 21, for instance, Kasper held a meeting where Asa Carter, Bill Hendrix, and Rev. Stroud gave speeches. Since there was no media coverage, we don’t know what was said. A Nashville detective, John Nolan, was said by the FBI to have reported that on August 23, “KASPER stated he had discussed dynamiting a public school with ‘certain people.’”49
School Registration
On August 27, Nashville schools held registration. Black parents registered first graders at five formerly all-white Nashville schools. On the 28th, the Tennessean ran a school-by-school breakdown of registration at the desegregated schools. (Note that Hattie Cotton is not on this list. Patricia Watson’s parents did not register her until the first day of classes. No one knew ahead of time that she’d be at Hattie Cotton.)
Bailey—one Negro, 55 white.
Buena Vista—three Negro, 40 white.
Fehr—three Negro, 56 white.
Glenn—two Negro, 71 white.
Jones—four Negro, 50 white.50
The city was erupting over a dozen children in basically two neighborhoods. No one in South Nashville or West Nashville was yet going to be sending their kids to school with kids of a different race. This was two parts of town desegregating and, by and large, segregationists focused their in-person protest efforts on the schools near Fred Stroud’s church.
They also took to the phones. The assistant school superintendent, W.H. Oliver, received threatening phone calls, though he didn’t reveal to the Tennessean’s reporter, Wallace Westfeldt, what those threats were. However, because the racists had called every W.H. Oliver in the phone book, another W.H. Oliver, a truck driver, told Westfeldt that “he had been receiving calls apparently intended for the assistant superintendent. One caller, when told the truck driver was asleep, replied, ‘He may be asleep now but he’ll be asleep for good later.’”51
The calls that went to the Black kids’ houses were more straightforward in their threats. Mrs. Horace Guthrie, Patricia Guthrie’s mother, told Westfeldt that she’d gotten a call from a woman saying, “You had better not send your child to a white school because we’ll beat her to death and bomb your house.” Mrs. Maud Baxter, Marvin Moor’s mother, “said a caller threatened to throw acid on her child and burn a cross in front of her home.”52
Men get most of the attention, but women were very heavily involved in the segregationist movement. Most of the people who confronted School Superintendent W.A. Bass at registration, pissed about integration, were women. The people demanding the names of parents trying to register their kids were women. At Glenn school, Westfeldt reported:
A small knot of women stood in front of the walkway leading to the school’s front door. They passed out “Keep Our White Schools White” buttons, Klan pamphlets stamped with a Tennessee White Citizens Council mark, anti-Semitic pamphlets published by Conde McGinley, a longtime professional anti-Semite in Union, N.J.; handbills announcing a Kasper meeting and citizens council membership applications.53
At some point on the day of school registration, John Kasper gave a speech and said, “We’re going to talk to the ‘niggers’ and tell them if they want to avoid the shotgun, dynamite and rope they had better get out of the white schools.”54 (This language is very similar language to Carrie Wray’s letter, which makes me wonder if she wasn’t hearing some early version of this speech in her house.) That put him back on the FBI’s radar.
Let me be clear, this language brought him back to the attention of the FBI on the day he gave the speech—August 27—not the day after, when papers reported it. The FBI heard about the speech from Thomas Norvell, 33, a World War II vet who worked as a mechanic, who called the FBI and told them that he and his friend, Charles Reed, 50, “had been attending KASPER’s meetings chiefly because they were curious about his views on segregation.”55 Norvell had apparently grown very concerned about what he was hearing at these meetings and told the FBI that “he believed that KASPER’s group would resort to violence.” When he gave his full statement to the FBI on September 12, he told them, “Sometime late in August a meeting was held at which Asa Carter and others appeared. There was some talk about organizing a group which would practice violence.”56 In other words, once the out-of-town Klansmen showed up, some small part of the crowd around John Kasper began talking about forming a terrorist cell to attack a Nashville school.
The FBI does not appear to have shared this with the Nashville police.
Worse than that—and that’s pretty dang bad—the FBI does not appear to have asked Norvell who all was talking about organizing this group. Norvell and Reed had both been with John Kasper all August, helping him hand out literature, making signs, and attending his meetings. Reed took down the names of people who attended the meetings. Norvell and Reed absolutely could have identified who was in the discussion about forming this group.
Nothing in the file indicates the FBI asked them to.