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 schools. But you asked what other things we did. We had several distinguished
 lawyers in our group, and I was not a lawyer at the time, but I organized the law
 defense for the Clinton Sixteen [sixteen Clintonians charged with violating a
 federal injunction for keeping the peace] charged with blowing up the school [in
 Clinton]. It was a difficult case, because it was a bunch of hardly intellectuals
 who didn't have a very good reason [for] doing anything. We had a team of
 lawyers, several from Nashville and Memphis and Birmingham, [that helped us].
 Ross Barnett, I don't know whether he was governor of Mississippi at that time or
 not, but he was a lawyer and he came up here. The attorney general of
 Louisiana, I can't remember his name right now, came up. We made enough of
 a defense that those people were not shanghaied and they never served any
 time in jail or paid any fines. They were lectured, I guess, or something else. The
 legalities of the event, I don't have it at my fingertips right at the moment, but I do
 remember that much.

H: So would you characterize the TFCG's efforts as more grassroots initiatives or
 more politically oriented?

K: Both. I think we were certainly interested in grassroots articulation, but that's just
 the beginning of politics, and without it you don't have politics. We were
 interested in preserving the constitutional rights of the people, and to do that, we
 expounded those rights and tried to show where any form of compulsory
 association was non-desirable in a democracy.

H: What was your relationship with John Kasper?

K: John Kasper was a strange situation. I really considered seriously the possibility
 that he was [a] double-agent. His ideas were, in a word, based on a dictatorial
 fascist sort of approach. He may have been well intentioned personally, [but] I
 don't know, [because] I really never had any personal contact with him. I did
 oppose his rabble-rousing in Clinton, the very best I could. I hustled back down
 here to Nashville to see my friend, the mayor Ben West, and I said, Ben, you
 better contrive some way or another of keeping Kasper out of town, [because]
 he's going to make you trouble. [Ben West] didn't do anything and Kasper came
 in and rabble-roused. There were aspects about John Kasper that were to be
 admired. He was independent in his willingness to stand up for what he thought,
 but he did not have a very generous attitude in what he thought. On the other
 hand, he performed a certain service by arousing the citizens of Clinton to make
 a noise, and the rank-and-file is oftentimes very useful in that field. All in all, he
 was brought down by justified criticism; [he catered to] an element in the South
 that was capable only of violence and nothing else.

H: What about the Parent School Preference Committee? Was that allied or linked
 with the TFCG?