In all of Tennessee, the best known, most respected jurist is a short (5 ft. 5½ in.), balding judge named Robert Love Taylor. A lifelong Democrat in Republican East Tennessee. Little Bob Taylor comes from a long line of big men: his great-grandfather Nathaniel G. Taylor fought the British at New Orleans with Andrew Jackson; his Republican father Alfred was governor of Tennessee (1921-23); his namesake uncle, a Democrat, was a U.S. Senator (1907-12) as well as governor (1887-91; 1897-99)—in fact, the Taylor brothers ran against each other in 1886 for governor. No politician, Little Bob Taylor is well content to be a federal judge in the Northern Division of the Eastern District of Tennessee (Knoxville). If he is segregationist at heart (which some friends think he is), he keeps his sentiments to himself, deals fairly with Negroes and whites in his court, for, as anybody in Tennessee knows, Little Bob values above all things a respect for law and order.
Thus it was no surprise when Judge Taylor last year issued an order against interference with the high-school integration program in Clinton. At first he had denied Negro petitions for admission to the all-white school, by declaring the legality of "separate but equal" facilities for Negroes. His reversal—with the stiff injunction against meddling—came on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation decision, which ruled out the old separate but equal precedent. And when violence and rioting followed in Clinton (TIME, Sept. 10 et seq.), it was Little Bob Taylor who sternly slapped the racial agitators with criminal charges of contempt of court.
The Interloper. The trial, before an all-white jury (ten men, two women) in Judge Taylor's federal court in Knoxville, was remarkable as much for its cast of characters as its issue. Long-legged Frederick John Kasper, 27, was the headline defendant, a preening cock in his moment of glory. Kasper ran a bookshop in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1953. A screwball without a cause, he seemed then to be a friend to Negroes, permitted solicitation of N.A.A.C.P. contributions in his shop, frequented interracial dances, kept company with a Negro girl. Yet after he bolted to Washington, D.C., his store rent unpaid, hundreds of inflammatory anti-Semitic pamphlets were found in the shop. And when the Supreme Court's decision on school integration was handed down, Frederick John Kasper found his cause, headed into the Southland to stir the mob. Ironically, Kasper did not get a rousing reception from most of his fellow segregationists, once they learned of his pedigree. Spat one avid white supremacist: "He's an interloper, an emotional idiot with a martyr complex and a power complex who is neurotically avid for publicity. His actions make him a double agent. He might as well be working for the other side."