Dynamite nashville, p.1
Dynamite Nashville, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Betsy Phillips
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
For more information:
Third Man Books, LLC
623 7th Ave S
Nashville, Tennessee 37203
A CIP record is on file with the Library of Congress.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Caitlin Parker
Art direction by Jordan Williams and Amin Qutteineh
Layout by Amin Qutteineh
ISBN: 979-8-98990-895-0
DYNAMITE
NASHVILLE
UNMASKING THE FBI, THE KKK, AND THE BOMBERS BEYOND THEIR CONTROL
Betsy Phillips
What’s been done in the dark will be brought to the light.
You can run on for a long time,
Run on for a long time.
You can run on for a long time,
But sooner or later …
Traditional folk song
For Z. Alexander Looby, who deserved justice.
Contents
USEFUL MAPS
TIMELINE
PREFACE
The Limits of This Book and My Hopes for It
CHAPTER 1
In Which We Discuss Nashville’s Long History of Racist Violence in Response to Black Education and We Meet Z. Alexander Looby
CHAPTER 2
1949–1954, A Brief History of Local Non-Klan Racists and of Nashvillians Blowing Up Things
CHAPTER 3
1956, the Beginnings of Racist Attacks on Tennessee Schools
CHAPTER 4
August 1957, When the Klan Tells the FBI They Won’t Have Anything to Do with John Kasper, so the FBI Ignores John Kasper for a Whole Month
CHAPTER 5
The Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing
CHAPTER 6
The Aftermath, the Beatings, and the Man in the Garage
INTERMISSION
The FBI and the Ku Klux Klan. Best Friends Forever?
CHAPTER 7
The Jewish Community Center Bombing
CHAPTER 8
J.B. Stoner Decides Bombing Empty Buildings Isn’t Enough
CHAPTER 9
The Bombing of Z. Alexander Looby’s Home
CHAPTER 10
Nashville’s Known Racist Bombers—Robert Gentry and Gladys Girgenti
CHAPTER 11
Informed Speculation
CONCLUSION
A City Can’t Heal if It Can’t Say What Happened
EPILOGUE
The File Finally Arrives
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ENDNOTES
IMAGE INDEX
BIBLIOGRAPHY
USEFUL MAPS
Courtesy Tennessee State Library & Archives.
Courtesy Tennessee State Library & Archives.
TIMELINE
(Text in bold refers to Nashville-specific events)
May 17, 1954
US Supreme Court rules in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional.
September 1954
Two Nashville Catholic schools desegregate: Cathedral High School and Father Ryan High School.
August 28, 1955
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi.
September 1, 1955
Robert Kelly attempts to enroll in Nashville’s East High School. He is turned away because he is Black. His father hires Z. Alexander Looby and Avon Williams to sue the school board.
September 3, 1955
Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral is held in Chicago and covered extensively by the national Black press.
September 6, 1955
Oak Ridge High School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, desegregates.
December 1, 1955
Rosa Parks is arrested for not giving up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.
December 5, 1955
Martin Luther King Jr. leads the Montgomery bus boycott.
January 30, 1956
Dr. King’s home in Montgomery is bombed.
September 1, 1956
Clinton, Tennessee’s eponymous high school is desegregated by twelve students. John Kasper instigates a riot in retaliation, and the National Guard is called in.
January 10–11, 1957
Black pastors and civil rights leaders meet in Atlanta and begin planning nonviolent protests against racial discrimination. They form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
September 4, 1957
Nine Black students desegregate Little Rock Central High School, sparking a dramatic confrontation between Arkansas governor Orval Faubus and President Eisenhower.
September 10, 1957
Hattie Cotton School in Nashville is bombed.
March 16, 1958
The Nashville Jewish Community Center is bombed.
March 26–28, 1958
The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), led by Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, holds its first workshop.
Fall Semester, 1958
James Lawson enrolls at Vanderbilt Divinity School and begins leading workshops in nonviolent protest at Clark Memorial Methodist Church.
October 5, 1958
Clinton High School is bombed.
February 1, 1960
The sit-in movement begins in Greensboro, North Carolina.
February 13, 1960
The Nashville Sit-Ins begin.
February 19, 1960
Chattanooga high-school students from Howard High begin their lunch counter protests.
March 3, 1960
James Lawson is expelled from Vanderbilt Divinity School because of his civil rights work.
April 16–17, 1960
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded.
April 19, 1960
Z. Alexander Looby’s Nashville home is bombed. Protesters lead a silent march downtown to confront Mayor Ben West. Diane Nash gets the mayor to admit that segregation is wrong.
May 10, 1960
Nashville lunch counters begin to desegregate.
November 14, 1960
Ruby Bridges desegregates New Orleans public schools.
May 4, 1961
The Freedom Rides begin.
April 3, 1963
Activists launch a series of massive demonstrations in Birmingham.
April 12, 1963
Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in Birmingham.
May 2, 1963
The Children’s Crusade begins in Birmingham.
May 3, 1963
Birmingham commissioner of public safety Bull Connor turns fire hoses and dogs on the child activists.
June 11, 1963
Governor George Wallace blocks Black students from attending the University of Alabama.
August 28, 1963
The March on Washington for economic and civil rights for African Americans, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I have a dream” speech.
September 15, 1963
Racial terrorists blow up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). More than twenty others injured.
PREFACE
THE LIMITS OF THIS BOOK AND MY HOPES FOR IT
Nashville Public Library, Special Collections, Nashville Banner Photos
A few months before the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hattie Cotton Elementary School in 2017, I thought I would write something for the Nashville Scene about the bombing and who had committed it and why it remains unsolved. Five years later, I’m still working to answer those questions and more.
Who committed Nashville’s three unsolved integration-era bombings—Hattie Cotton Elementary School in 1957, the Jewish Community Center in 1958, and Councilman Z. Alexander Looby’s house in 1960?
The two most prevalent theories were either that racist agitator John Kasper did it or that the local Ku Klux Klan did it. But these “solutions” only raised more questions. John Kasper was in jail at the time of two of the bombings. Are we supposed to believe he had a batch of such devoted followers that he could order an assassination attempt from jail—and that people would keep quiet about it for sixty years? If it was the Klan, why did the bombings stop? They had successfully terrified the city and nearly derailed school integration, and no one had been caught. Why would they abandon such an effective tool? And again, we’re supposed to believe that a rabble of local racists tried to assassinate a politician and then kept quiet about it for half a century? It didn’t ring true. How could three bombings—one of which, I reiterate, was an assassination attempt on a sitting US politician—remain so thoroughly unsolved?
I set about to see if I could solve them.
What I soon discovered is that Nashville’s local violence of the 1950s was a precursor to the violence that would grip the South in the 1960s and 1970s, an early version of what we would come to know and fear.
This contradicts the myth of Nashville’s peaceful integration. To hear the story, you’d think civil rights organizer and sit-in leader Diane Nash gathered some friends for a stroll one day, happened across Mayor Ben West downtown, and, during a pleasant chat, convinced him of the injustice of segregation, which he ended then and there without incident.
The truth was uglier. It’s true that no one was killed here. T here aren’t iconic photos of people suffering (actually there are, but the papers didn’t run them).1 But African Americans who were in Nashville during this era have always spoken plainly about its brutality. The rest of the city hasn’t made a habit of listening.
AP Photo
Which means we don’t know our own stories. Worse, it means we’ve been conditioned to not look too hard at what we don’t know.
Just as these were the early, formative years for the people who would go on to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and head up the Freedom Rides, these were the early, formative years of their organized enemies. Just as Nashville was full of young people who would go on to be American civil rights heroes—Rev. James Lawson, Diane Nash, future congressman John Lewis, and so on—we had America’s nightmare here in J.B. Stoner, Edward Fields, John Kasper, Robert Gentry, and so on. Their evil was still developing when they were in Nashville, so it’s gone unrecognized.
But once you are able to see what you’re looking at, Nashville’s three unsolved integration-era bombings—Hattie Cotton Elementary School on September 10, 1957, the Jewish Community Center on March 16, 1958, and the home of Z. Alexander Looby on April 19, 1960—take on a new importance. It’s not just that these are some of the earliest appearances of the racists who would go on to do so much damage to our country. Nashville is where they first worked out the best ways to do these terrible things without paying any price for it.
Much of this book focuses on the minutia of why these racial terrorists weren’t caught—though most of us already know that the police weren’t uniformly in disagreement with their goals, and that the FBI’s agenda during this time was often at odds with solving these kinds of crimes. That lesson cost our nation dearly in the coming decades.
But another reason these bombings have never been solved is that the people who might have relevant information are still staying silent.
If you’ve ever seen photographs of little first graders integrating Nashville’s schools or of stoic college students sitting at lunch counters, then you’ve seen mobs of furious white people holding signs, throwing rocks, and hurling epithets. The captions of these photos always identify the Black people risking their safety for justice; they very rarely identify anyone in the angry mobs.
These events happened only sixty years ago. Most of the first graders who integrated Nashville’s schools in 1957 are still alive. When white Nashville natives go into the Civil Rights Room at the downtown branch of the Nashville Public Library and see those pictures enlarged on the walls, some of them must know some of the people in the mobs. They must know the names of the managers at the lunch counters. Someone knows who bombed Hattie Cotton Elementary School, the Jewish Community Center, and Z. Alexander Looby’s home. Yet the community at large has been denied that knowledge.
My focus is small: I want to know who did those bombings. If I can’t know that, I want to know why not. I want to know who made the decision that protecting white racist terrorists was more important than telling Nashville the truth.
This book is therefore not directly about school integration or the civil rights movement in Nashville. That work has already been done—you can read The Nashville Way by Benjamin Houston, Making the Unequal Metropolis by Ansley Erickson, Congressman John Lewis’s March, or David Halberstam’s The Children, among others, for yourself. It is also not a biography of Z. Alexander Looby or Avon Williams or other Black Nashvillians who deserve considered examinations of their lives and accomplishments. I’ll be dealing with the ugly underside, the white supremacist side, which, until now, no one has tried to piece together.
To be clear, I have not solved these bombings. Admittedly, this makes for a strange premise for a book: here are three unsolved crimes that, even after we spend eighty thousand words together, will remain unsolved.
Why, then, this book?
I’ll level with you: my answer to that question has changed over the course of writing it. I finished the first draft in 2017, fueled by outrage that someone had tried to kill Z. Alexander Looby—a sitting city councilman, an elected representative of Nashville—and that the would-be murderer was never caught. We can all shrug and say, “Well, it was 1960, what do you expect? They didn’t care about crimes against Black men.” But, folks, it was only 1960 for one year. What has prevented Nashville from investigating the crime in any of the six decades since?
The answer to that last question is why I’ve not chucked this project into a deep hole. When I started writing, I thought the answer was laziness or disinterest. And while I’m sure there’s some of that, what I discovered over the course of writing is that it’s very hard to get answers to these old unsolved cases.
The files of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and its precursor organization, the Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification, are sealed by state law. No one who isn’t in law enforcement can see those files, except under very narrow and specific instances when state legislators might be able to. Even the governor’s ability to see those files is severely limited. This means that, for all practical purposes, the TBI operates without citizen oversight. There is no way for the media to look into a TBI investigation. Families of victims in cold cases can’t review the files on their loved ones to see if the TBI discovered something that is meaningful to the family—a name, a location, something that might give them a clue.
FBI files are theoretically subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. I had very little luck actually getting files. Most of what I asked for they claimed they’d destroyed. The files they hadn’t destroyed (or hadn’t lied about destroying, but we’ll get to that) are at the National Archives. I have standing FOIA requests in at the National Archives, but I have lost hope that those will be filled before I am old or dead, whichever comes first. And, frankly, I did almost die while writing this book.2 People I would have liked to interview—like Kwame Lillard—died before I got the chance. The longer I wait, the more people who deserve the truth pass away without at least some part of it.
I have a lot going for me. I have the support of the Nashville Scene. I’ve had help from former congressman Jim Cooper getting the FBI to admit that they had not destroyed the Looby bombing file. I’ve spoken with a retired US attorney, a working federal defense lawyer, a terrorist, the DA’s office, and witnesses. And I have had all the time I need to write this book (thanks, Third Man Books).
I could not get the information I need to definitively tell you what happened.
This is what motivates me now. Nashville has the right to know the truth about itself. As we struggle to overcome our history and traditions of racism, we need to know the truth about our history. And it’s being kept from us.
That makes me angry. I hope it will also make you angry.
My hope is that this won’t be the last word on these bombings, but the first effort to get the truth.
I believe these crimes are solvable and that someone out there has the missing pieces that will give us definitive answers. I’m hoping that me saying, “This is what we know,” might spur an old memory or make sense of an overheard conversation. It might put other facts known to scholars of this era into context.
