When people think about violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, Nashville is not likely to be the first place that comes to mind. Everyone has seen the footage of fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Birmingham, and everyone has heard of the murders of civil rights workers and leaders in Mississippi.
But fifty years ago this week, just as Nashville’s public schools were taking their first baby-steps toward racial integration, an act of violent resistance shocked the city.
Shortly after midnight on September 9, 1957, a powerful explosion shattered an entire wing of the Hattie Cotton School on Greenwood Avenue, west of Gallatin Road. The attack followed a first day of school that many white parents had boycotted, a day marked by angry demonstrations outside the school building. The focus of the rage: Hattie Cotton’s admission of one five-year-old African-American girl into first grade.
Across the city’s school system, a total of 13 black first-graders were entering formerly all-white schools that September. The system was making its first, grudging efforts to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling three years earlier that was meant to abolish segregation in schools. Many local parents objected strenuously, and one firebrand ideologue from up North — New Jersey-born John Kasper, age 27 — saw the opportunity to make a name for himself as the voice of segregationist fury in these parts.
“Blood will run in the streets of Nashville before Negro children go to school with whites,” Kasper had sneered to a crowd from the steps of the State Capitol a few days before the school year began. Using the N-word and brandishing a length of rope, he said of the black population: “When they fool with the white race, they’re fooling with the strongest race in the world, the most bloodthirsty race in the world.”
Amid the bluster, Mayor Ben West backed school officials in their decision to move forward with the “Nashville Plan” for integration one grade at a time over the course of more than a decade, and he enrolled his six-year son Jay in first grade at a city school.
If those who dynamited Hattie Cotton School thought they would cause city leaders to retreat from the Nashville Plan, they miscalculated. “This is no longer a matter of segregation or desegregation,” one school official told Time magazine. “This is a matter of sheer lawlessness. We’re up against thugs.”
Kasper soon found himself in jail, charged with incitement to riot and unable to raise a $2,500 bond. City Court Judge Andrew Doyle had told him:
“You came into this town to cause racial disorder. You and others like you are responsible for any blood that may be shed. I only wish we had enough policemen to take you by the seat of your britches and the nape of your neck and throw you outside the city limits.”
Neither Kasper nor anyone else, however, ever faced criminal charges for bombing the school.
Hattie Cotton School was repaired and reopened by January 1958. It has remained in operation as a grade school to this day.
