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Day in Court. Next day the Battle of Nashville moved to a climax in the courts. The first blow was struck by City Judge Andrew Doyle, who read a crushing lecture to Rabble-rouser Kasper, hauled up during the week on charges that ranged from parking in a no-parking zone through vagrancy to incitement to riot. "I consider you guilty of the lowest possible degree of vagrancy," said Judge Doyle. "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." At week's end Kasper, in the county jail on charges of incitement to riot, and unable to raise $2,500 bond, was confronted by new testimony, relayed by the FBI, linking him to the dynamite bombing of the Hattie Cotton school.
To guard against future violence, Federal Judge William Miller, who issued the original integration order, now issued a sweeping restraining order against any more interference with integration of the Nashville first grade. The effect: anybody who shows up outside the schools and demonstrates against integration can be haled into court for contempt.
Thus the weight of law and order, misused in Little Rock, aroused in Nashville, achieved a notable triumph. By week's end even the weakening rabble-rousers were beginning to reconsider. No Nashville white had shouted more loudly against integration than a burly, tattooed man named George H. Akins, who had been arrested by the police after some disorderly conduct. As he stood trial in City Judge Doyle's court, his eight-year-old daughter standing beside him began to cry, anguished by the spectacle of her father at bay. The man saw the child's distress, reached out one hand and smoothed down her blonde bangs, pulled out a handkerchief and began to mop her eyes. Suddenly a look of pain broke across his face. "I didn't go out there to cause any trouble," he blurted. He too burst into tears.