Victory For Little Bob

In all of Tennessee, the best known, most respected jurist is a short (5 ft. 5 1/2 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."

In a real sense. Kasper stood alone, abhorred by his fellow defendants, who had rounded up no fewer than eleven lawyers to represent them. As the trial droned on for twelve days, the defense attorneys did little more than rise to object or make wordy points of law, or try to inflame segregationist feelings in the jury. One defense attorney, Ross Barnett, informed the jury that Mississippi's Senator James Eastland had instructed him to "tell that jury what's happened in Washington." Eastland's news: 874 public-school children in Washington. D.C. "have loathsome and contagious diseases, and 97% among them are colored."

Save the Court. Though the defense acted as if the case were won before it started, U.S. Attorney John C. Crawford Jr. hammered hard at the evidence. Tobacco-chewing Harvardman Crawford paraded 44 witnesses before the court, developed the story of the beatings, insults and threats that added up, he said, to conspiracy to halt integration at the high school--thus violating Little Bob Taylor's injunction. Pounding a fist on a table, Crawford demanded a conviction "to save this honorable court. When an order is issued by this court, it cannot be flouted."

In his lucid, 50-minute charge to the jury, Judge Taylor tuned his piping voice to the heart of the issue: "Whether school integration is right or wrong is a question to be debated in the public forum of speech and press. The right or wrong of integration is not pertinent to the question before the jury, namely, whether the defendants violated the injunction aforesaid under such circumstances as to make them guilty of criminal contempt."

Two hours and ten minutes later, the jury returned to the court. The verdict: Kasper and six others, guilty. And, as if to prove that it weighed evidence and not passions, the jury acquitted the remaining four defendants. "We tried our best to come up with a just verdict," said the foreman of the jury later. "We discussed the case thoroughly before taking a ballot. We weighed the evidence carefully against the points of law as outlined by the judge. We tried to avoid being influenced by any side issues."

The Proof. The news struck through the Deep South and into Capitol Hill, where beleaguered Senators were worrying the matter of jury trials under the civil rights bill. Many Southerners pointed to the guilty verdict as ample proof that white Southern juries can be depended upon to deal out justice in cases involving the race issue. From opponents came the reply that the Clinton case was no real test, because East Tennessee is traditionally Republican border country, was mostly Yankee in the Civil War, and has relatively few Negroes. In fact, the verdict proved only one thing: when a case is fought on an appeal to racist passion on one side and an appeal to law and order on the other, the citizens of East Tennessee will take law and order--especially if administered by Judge Robert Love Taylor.

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