Civil disobedience before civil disobedience was cool

by Jack Neely

If you're not old enough to remember the '50s well, you've been hearing all your life about how peaceful that decade was. During the Eisenhower administration, everyone smiled, everyone was polite, people respected authority. Policemen and firemen were mostly concerned with getting cats out of elm trees. It was Pleasantville.

Except, sometimes, after football games. The 1958 season was one of the Tennessee Vols' worst seasons in history, but no one knew quite how bad it could get. Forty years ago this weekend, Bowden Wyatt's team was 2-4 for the season. They looked forward to certain victory in the Chattanooga game as a confidence-builder.

See, before there was a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, there was a University of Chattanooga. The UC Moccasins played UT every year, and every year they lost. In 32 years, UC Coach "Scrappy" Moore had never beaten UT. The great Vols thought of the Moccasins as 11 punching bags.

The '58 UT v. UC game started at 1:30 p.m., as most games did when they were scheduled for the convenience of the spectators. There was no live TV coverage of the game, though Channel 26, which didn't broadcast at all in the daytime, was planning to show film of the UT-UC game that evening—the UT-UC game from last year, that is. The horseshoe-shaped stadium's 46,000 seats weren't quite half full.

The first score came in the second quarter: a rare touchdown by the Moccasins. But then came halftime without a Vols score. The Mocs scored another rare touchdown in the fourth, and still nothing from the Vols. Gene Etter finally connected with a receiver in the final 15 seconds of the game, but the last-minute touchdown didn't count for much. The Mocs beat the Vols, 14-6. It has since been called the most embarrassing loss in UT history.

Chattanooga fans by the thousands flowed out of the Visitors section on the east side to hoist the elderly Coach "Scrappy" Moore into the air—he claimed it was "my greatest moment." And while they were out on the field, the Mocs fans claimed their rightful souvenirs. It wasn't the first time visiting fans had torn down the goal posts, but it had been some years back, a Vanderbilt game, someone recalled.

Pick your own version of what happened next. By some accounts, Knoxville policemen moved in to break up a fight between two Chattanooga prep schoolers. But police grabbed a third young man who interfered. They said police hammered his head with a nightstick. A paddy wagon arrived; the apparently injured Moc fan and others were loaded aboard.

The crowd, estimated at 1,000—mostly young white men in flattops, judging by the pictures—surrounded the paddy wagon, chanting "Turn 'Em Loose!"

Chattanooga Mayor P.R. Ogliati was on hand, and thought he could reason with his fellow Moccasin fans with a speech from atop the truck. He should have known better. Then a UT student appeared, a trainer connected to the football team. He told the crowd there was an injured boy in the wagon who needed to get to the hospital. The plea backfired.

"Who hurt him?" the crowd chanted, more furious than ever. By some accounts, the police blocked a physician who offered to examine the injured boy. Boos devolved into curses. Enraged, the crowd began throwing glass pop bottles at the police.

Someone snatched the paddy-wagon driver's keys. The officer quickly hot-wired the truck and attempted to ease forward through the crowd with his load of prisoners. But then his clutch popped out and injured his leg. He'd hardly climbed out of the truck before he was knocked out by a pop bottle striking his head. They slashed the truck's tires, stomped on the hood. Fans stole one officer's pistol.

As the mob lurched outside the stadium to the east, the police went into full riot mode. Led by Chief Joe Kimsey, they fired teargas canisters into the crowd. Several came flying right back at the police, one thrown by a Korean War veteran. He'd seen combat before. One police lieutenant, though, declared it was "the worst thing I've ever seen—including prison riots."

The fire department showed up with water hoses that they trained on the crowd, on students shouting unrecorded expletives from dormitory windows, and—whether intentionally or not—on the police themselves.

The riot lasted 90 minutes. When it was over, the battered patrol wagon "looked as if it had been dynamited." Eight officers had been injured, most with cuts and bruises from thrown bottles, but two with gas burns and one with a knife wound. Only one reported "civilian" required treatment, for a headwound from a nightstick blow.

Meanwhile, UT Coach Wyatt emerged from the locker room, smelled teargas, and promptly went right back inside. He and his boys finished their supper.

Hamilton County Sheriff James Turner was there for the game. He was angry at the Knoxville cops, whom he blamed for "aiding and abetting" the riot by overreacting to it. Eleven rioters were jailed downtown, most of them Chattanoogans. Turner alleged that the prisoners were being abused, and demanded they be returned to Chattanooga.

Knoxville Safety Director David Garrison responded to the allegations by accusing Turner of inciting the riot. "Our biggest mistake," Garrison said, "was in not jailing Sheriff Turner." Some witnesses charged that Turner was drunk and had attacked one Knoxville policeman. In Chattanooga, though, students hanged KPD Chief Kimsey in effigy.

It made the national news, even CBS TV. A decade later, of course, the smell of teargas in the afternoon would be more common on college campuses across America. It wouldn't be the last pre-Viet Nam student riot at UT. It makes you wonder whether the '60s would have happened even if there hadn't been a war to protest.