The Cavalier Daily 7 March 1957: 1

Integration Leader Attacked By Whites

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., March 6.—(U.P.)—A mob of rock-throwing white men, yelling "kill the nigger lover," attacked a white integration leader today as he left the race-troubled Birmingham terminal station.

As violence flared again in the South's segregation wars, fiery John Kasper announced in Miami at the cross-burning trial of one of his aides that he will form a white supremacy youth group in Florida because parents "are not educating their children properly."

Kasper, wanted in Tennessee on a charge of interfering with court-ordered integration and free under $10,000 bond pending an appeal to a conviction of similar charges, said he will reveal is plans for a "Florida White Youth" group at a rally in Miami Friday night.

A relative calm here was shattered when an angry mob attacked integrationist Lamar Weaver as he left the terminal station where two negroes tested waiting room segregation laws.

Weaver was hit over the head with a suitcase and his Cadillac convertible was showered with stones and cement blocks as he tried to escape from a crowd of white men who met him at the door of terminal station.

Weaver had gone to the station for a talk with the Rev. F. L. Shuttleworth, a negro minister. Shuttleworth had taken a seat in the white waiting room at the station and was allowed to remain. However, police asked Weaver to leave because he was not a ticket-holder.

Some 150 white men were waiting outside the station and taunted Weaver with cries of "nigger lover." About 25 or 30 of the men followed the integration leader to his car, where the attack began.

One car pulled in front of his Cadillac, blocking Weaver's way out of the parking lot. The cursing white men grabbed chunks of concrete block from a nearby wall under construction and broke several windows in the car.

One man pulled open the car door and started hitting Weaver over the head before a reporter managed to shut the car door and keep the attacker away. Weaver backed into another car, put his car in low and ran headlong into traffic, barely missing several cars.

He drove to city hall to protest the attack, but was instead charged with reckless driving. Weaver told police both car door windows were broken as well as the windshield and the convertible top of his car was slashed.

Weaver told reporters after the attack he plans to "leave this city and state right away."

"I think it is best I leave to avoid any more trouble," he said. "I don't know where I am going but it will be out of Birmingham and Alabama."

Weaver, a clerk at U.S. Steel's big Tennessee Coal and Iron Division in this southern steel city, has requested permission for he and Shuttleworth to appear before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights.

He was granted permission to submit a written report since the subcommittee closed its hearings yesterday. Weaver, a frequent speaker before Negro integration groups, claimed "repeated threats against my life" had forced him into hiding.

Kasper announced his long-range plan to teach the children of the South "the ideal of racial separation," after he came to Miami for the trial of four men, including one of his aides, Fred Hockett, 51, for attempting to burn a cross in front of the home of a negro entertainer living in a white residential section.

The four men were convicted of trespassing and disorderly conduct charges. Hockett, James McSwiney and Frank L. Foster, Jr., were given maximum sentences of 120 days in jail and $1,000 fines. They appealed their convictions and were freed on $1,200 bonds. The fourth Defendant, Hampton Earl Shaver, was given a suspended 60 day sentence and fined $200.

©1957 The Cavalier Daily