CHAPTER 1 IN WHICH WE DISCUSS NASHVILLE’S LONG HISTORY OF RACIST VIOLENCE IN RESPONSE TO BLACK EDUCATION AND WE MEET Z. ALEXANDER LOOBY

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White opposition to Black education in Nashville, including terrorist violence, has a long history. Alphonso Sumner, a free Black barber, secretly opened a school for Black children in 1833. By 1836, he had 200 students, some of them enslaved. After he was accused of aiding runaway slaves—though this may have been a pretense—a white mob nearly whipped him to death. He fled to Cincinnati. His school closed.

In 1838, Nashville free Black people opened a school for free Black children. This was allowed as long as they hired a white teacher. They brought in John Yandle. He lasted two years before the white threats of violence caused him to quit. Black educators kept going until 1856 when the city council closed the schools and enacted an ordinance that fined white people $50 for teaching Black children.4

That was the end of formal schooling for Black children in Nashville until after the Civil War.

The postwar era brought with it an influx of white missionaries determined to provide educations for Black Nashvillians. As well intentioned as these do-gooders were, their actions often had the effect of reinforcing the idea that white people set the agenda for what Black children in Nashville should learn. That caveat aside, black schools—religious and public—opened across town. Black universities and Black trade schools flourished.

Fisk University is the best known of these historically Black colleges, but another was Roger Williams University. The earliest iteration of the school was founded in 1864 by Baptist minister Daniel Phillips. It grew steadily and moved locations a few times. In 1874, Phillips bought a plantation on Hillsboro Pike near Vanderbilt University to transform into a permanent home for the college.

Historian Bill Carey shares:

Even though not everyone in the surrounding area was thrilled about the presence of an African-American college, the relationship with Vanderbilt was cordial, at least according to one Roger Williams professor. “Vanderbilt football coaches coached the Negro team,” he recalled in the 1930s. “Roger Williams students went to games at Vanderbilt and sat with the others on the bleachers—a practice which would not be allowed today. Individual students, white and black, formed friendships that outlasted school days.”⁵

In 1903, someone shot at the college chapel. In 1904, someone shot the college president’s wife through a window of her own home (she was not killed). A month later, at the start of 1905, someone burned down the campus’s Centennial Hall. In May of the same year, another building on campus burned down. The terrorism had its effect, and Roger Williams got the message that it was no longer welcome on that plot of land. The school began efforts to sell off the property and twenty-five acres of the campus was sold to the trustees of Peabody College in 1910. The other acres were subdivided for homes, and the deeds to those homes all forbade them from ever being sold to Black people.

In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy began raising money to put a building on Peabody’s new campus. This would be Confederate Memorial Hall.

Z. Alexander Looby and the Columbia Riots

In 1914, fifteen-year-old Z. Alexander Looby arrived in the United States from the British West Indies. Black education was central to Looby’s life’s work. He attended Howard University and Columbia University. He eventually received his law degree from NYU before settling in Nashville in 1926, where he worked as a professor at Fisk and where he helped found a law school that Black people could attend. He lived in Memphis for a few years, worked as an attorney, got married, and moved back to Nashville, where he worked as a lawyer for decades before the events in this book took place.

Okay, listen, I know it’s kind of corny to use a Black guy’s education as evidence of his support for Black education, but what I’m trying to get at is that he believed in the importance of established Black institutions—Howard and Fisk, for example—and establishing more Black institutions. His life trajectory is also important for understanding the philosophical conflict he felt with the sit-in protestors. He’d gotten an advanced degree from Columbia University. He’d come to Tennessee and won court victory after court victory that slowly advanced the cause of Black people. For him, it was obvious that you could make the system work for you and, when it didn’t, you could make your own institutions that would meet your needs. The generation gap between him and the students he represented was enormous. He was 58 in 1957. Diane Nash was 19. But a thing I deeply respect about Looby is that he represented the sit-in protesters even though he didn’t agree with their tactics. He went to court and stood up for them, because they needed him. He didn’t withhold help just because they weren’t doing things the way he thought they should.

Even though Looby is not very well known in Nashville anymore, and certainly doesn’t have the statewide stature he deserves, there is no more important a figure in Tennessee history in the first half of the twentieth century (with the exception of Ida B. Wells, who straddled the turn of the century). Every single legal advancement Black Tennesseans were able to make in that time period happened either directly because of Looby or because of things Looby was involved in.

The fact that he loomed so large on the Tennessee landscape and was so important for most of his life and yet has faded so thoroughly from a large swath of the public’s imagination is a troubling testament to how entrenched is the racist habit of disregarding Black accomplishments.

It also skews our ability to understand these bombings. If we don’t realize how famous Looby was, how widely known he was as a decades-long adversary of segregation, not just among Black people but among white people as well, we’re missing an important component of what linked these bombings to other racial terrorism in Tennessee.

The incident that first put Looby squarely in the public’s focus was the Columbia Riot of 1946. Black members of the armed services had come home after liberating Europe from racist oppressors during World War II and began pushing for the United States to be liberated from racist oppressors as well.

In February 1946, Navy veteran James Stephenson defended his mother from an aggressive white clerk in a Columbia, Tennessee store. (Columbia is about an hour’s drive from Nashville, the last big town you hit going south on Highway 31 before you reach Pulaski, Tennessee—birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.) Stephenson and his mother were arrested. After they posted bond, white people began gathering at the courthouse to form a lynch mob.

But now the Black section of town was filled with men with guns and military training. They set up armed patrols, positioned snipers, and kept the lynch mob out of their neighborhood. It was a mitigated success. Two Black “rioters” ended up dead. Columbia law enforcement looted Black businesses. More than one hundred Black people were arrested.

But the NAACP’s legal team, Thurgood Marshall (who later became a US Supreme Court justice), Nashville’s Z. Alexander Looby, and white Chattanoogan Maurice Weaver kept all but one “rioter” out of prison.

Contrast this with the Memphis riot of 1866, where a white police officer tried to arrest a Black Civil War veteran and was stopped by a Black crowd. White mobs swarmed Black Memphis and targeted Black veterans and their families. The mobs burned down houses, churches, and schools. Five women were raped, and forty-six Black people were killed. No one was ever arrested.

It doesn’t necessarily seem like it in retrospect, but the outcome of the Columbia riots was an enormous paradigm shift. In Tennessee, even if an activity—like burning someone’s home down—was a crime, the law was rarely applied if white people committed it against Black people. Black people simply could not count on having legal protection; in cases where it seemed like they might, white people formed angry mobs and terrorized and killed them.

But in Columbia, Black people did have access to the legal system; they were afforded trials; and there was national disgust and outrage over the fact that they were attacked and then tried for defending themselves. Plus, the lynch mob failed.

At the end of the trial, when the NAACP’s legal team was leaving town for the last time, the story goes that a convoy of police officers followed them, pulling them over repeatedly for whatever nonsense reason they could come up with.⁶ The last time the police pulled the legal team’s cars over, they arrested Thurgood Marshall for drunk driving. He was placed in the back seat of a police car and driven away into the night.

Only six years before, in west Tennessee, Haywood County police had come to Brownsville NAACP officer Elbert Williams’s house and taken him away. He was lynched. Looby and Weaver knew that police taking Marshall away for trumped-up reasons was not going to end well. They turned around and followed the police, who took Marshall out into the countryside and drove him around long enough, I would guess, to realize that if they were going to kill Marshall, they’d have to kill Looby and Weaver too. And, if they did that, they couldn’t be sure there wouldn’t be terrible repercussions for them—especially since Weaver was white.

Marshall was released. Charges were never filed.

Let that soak in. Not six years before, police officers in Tennessee could take part in killing NAACP leaders with no fear of negative repercussions. In 1946, they couldn’t be sure they’d get away with it.

Most of the retellings of the Columbia riots have focused on Marshall’s role, because it’s cool to know we had such an important figure and such a brilliant legal mind here working for justice. But if we want to understand what happened in Nashville a decade later, we need to keep our eye on Looby.

Looby made sure those Black Columbians had access to the legal system, made the legal system work for them, and saved Marshall from being murdered by police. Looby wasn’t leaving Tennessee when this was all over. Looby was Tennessee’s most prominent and often only civil rights lawyer. A massive change had come to Tennessee—Black people did have access to the legal system; the legal system didn’t reflexively rule the way whites wanted it to; and lynch mobs could be thwarted. At the center of that change was Z. Alexander Looby.

Looby was already a prominent lawyer—obviously, or he wouldn’t have been brought in on the Columbia case—but this victory established his legend. The story was that he only took Black clients, and that he never lost a case. As far as I can tell, the first part of that is true. I don’t think this is surprising, since his practice was focused on civil rights. He did lose cases, though, as he was quick to point out when asked about the myth growing around him. That said, in an interview he did with John Britton in 1967 for the Civil Rights Documentation Project, Looby comes across as proud and flattered that people believed he was undefeatable.

In 1951, Looby was elected to the Nashville city council, which meant that he became even more of a public figure. Now he was someone white Nashville heard about all the time, instead of someone briefly mentioned in news stories that ran deep in the paper, if the white media deigned to run those stories at all. Take the story that appeared on page 19 of the Tennessean, on March 29, 1951, a few months before his election. A five-and-a-half-foot-tall cross had been set ablaze at the intersection of Acklen Avenue and Grove Avenue⁷ on the south side of town near Belmont University. The paper reported, “A note, apparently written by an ignorant person, was found at the foot of the cross, [police lieutenant] McDaniel said. Written on rough paper it was a warning to Z. Alexander Looby, Negro attorney. Many words in the note were incorrectly spelled.”⁸

A small story, buried at the top of page 19, with no mention of the threat against Looby until the end. The lede was that someone had burned a cross, not that someone had threatened Looby. Obviously, he was on the radar of segregationists, but until he was elected to the city council, Looby didn’t occupy a lot of white civic space. After he was elected, stories about him, no matter how minor, were front page news.

In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional in 1954, Looby filed suit against the Nashville public school system on behalf of Alfred Z. Kelly and his son, Robert. That case would lead directly to the desegregation of Nashville’s public schools’ first grade in 1957.

But because Nashville desegregated one year at a time beginning with first grade, under a court order and with court supervision, lawsuits went on for years. Looby didn’t win the Kelly case and wash his hands of school segregation; he remained involved in integrating Nashville’s schools until well after 1960—the year his house was bombed. In every story about Nashville school integration throughout the era, you are likely to see two names: Z. Alexander Looby and Judge William E. Miller (who we’ll get to).

The way the story has come down to us is that Looby’s house was bombed because he was providing legal representation to the students protesting Nashville’s segregated downtown through sit-ins (which he was). But it’s actually not clear that this is why he was attacked. The groups that had been threatening him from 1954 until the bombing had been threatening him in the context of school desegregation.

There’s also one more controversy that Looby was involved in that hangs over every other facet of this era, even if it doesn’t seem directly related to integration. Nashville was trying to move from a city government—one that presided over a city that sat like the yolk of an egg in the middle of a more rural Davidson County—to a metro government that would, after 1963, preside over almost all of Davidson County (Goodlettsville, Berry Hill, and Belle Meade being among the few exceptions).

Looby supported these efforts.⁹ He was a vote on the city council in favor of metro-fication. White racists were opposed.

In response to growing Black social power in Nashville, whites had moved to the non-Nashville parts of Davidson County. This meant that Nashville provided a place for white people to work and shop, but their property taxes no longer came to the city. But if Nashville was going to provide the urban amenities people wanted, it needed that tax base. The plan was to annex as much of the county as the city could in order to get it.

At the time of the bombings, there were two school systems—Nashville and Davidson County. If Nashville schools desegregated and all of Davidson County became Nashville, the folks who had moved out into the county to avoid having to participate in civic life with Black people would be out of luck. Their public school children would have to attend desegregated schools.

But let’s take a moment to appreciate the giant loophole the law enforcement situation created for the bombers. Like the twin school systems, there were two police departments—Nashville PD and the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department. The Davidson County sheriff was the most powerful person in rural Davidson County. The sheriff had traditionally been a typical political machine boss, doling out favors to friends, swaying elections, and conducting himself with a level of amiable corruption.¹⁰

Nashville didn’t want a second law enforcement entity with the same duties and powers as the Nashville Police Department, so everyone knew that metro-fication would massively disempower the sheriff. This, in fact, is why the Davidson County sheriff now runs the jail and picks up bulk trash and doesn’t do much more. The position has been defanged precisely because of how powerful it was at the time we’re looking at. Obviously, the sheriff didn’t want to lose this power.

How eager do you think the sheriff would have been to help solve bombings that happened in Nashville—bombings whose perpetrators might have lived in or escaped to rural Davidson County? Why would the sheriff have made it easier for Nashville to prove it had a competent police department that could also investigate crimes outside city limits? It was in his best interest to stay uninvolved. Let the Nashville police sink or swim on their own. Without his help, it seemed likely they would, indeed, sink.