Dawn broke overcast and muggy over Nashville (pop. 187,000), the graceful and leisurely capital of the state of Tennessee. It was back-to-school week, and for the first time in the city's history Negro children would go to school with white children. The way had been prepared carefully; the integration would be selective and limited. Only twelve carefully chosen little Negro children, first-graders all, would go to five schools that were previously all white. But the air was charged with tension. "We are in the backwash of a thing that's going on too close to us," said School Superintendent W. A. Bass. "The Little Rock situation is giving the impression of possible victory to those people who would defeat the Supreme Court decision."
Nashville's city officials, though brought up for the most part to believe in racial segregation, were determined to preserve the law as a necessity of their community's everyday life. "Desegregation," said School Board Chairman Pro Tem Elmer L. Pettit, "is something that has become law, and we must learn to live with it." Back of the local officials stood Tennessee's Governor Frank Goad Clement, who called out the National Guard last year to enforce integration and the law in Clinton, Tenn., and this year sharply turned down a segregationist delegation that urged him to follow the lead of Arkansas' Orval Faubus.
"Pull Their Black Curls!" Before 7 a.m. on back-to-school day crowds of white people began to gather outside the schools where Negro children had been registered—and it was clear that Nashville was in for serious trouble. There were scrawny, pinch-faced men in T shirts and jeans, vacant-faced women in curlers and loose-hanging blouses, teen-age boys in tight pants and greased ducktail hairdos. They flaunted Confederate flags and placards, e.g., WHAT GOD HAS PUT ASUNDER LET NOT MAN PUT TOGETHER.
"Here come the niggers," was the first battle cry as two six-year-old Negro girls in neat green dresses, their hair done up in braids, came into view. "Pull their black curls out!" screeched one white woman. As the Negro six-year-olds tripped quietly into the schools, the crowds grew wilder. A white waitress raised a tattooed arm, threw a rock and hit a Negro woman on the chest. A Negro woman guided her grandchild quietly through a gauntlet of hissing whites until she broke under the strain, undid one button of her blouse and drew a knife. "If any of you jump me, I'm going to use this," she cried. All pretense at education collapsed as the Battle of Nashville got under way.
"Bloodthirsty Race." That evening white crowds concentrated outside the War Memorial Building beneath a granite-carved quotation from Woodrow Wilson:
America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.