CHAPTER 10 NASHVILLE’S KNOWN RACIST BOMBERS—ROBERT GENTRY AND GLADYS GIRGENTI

Nashville Public Library, Special Collections, Nashville Banner Photos

Guide to the Racists in this Chapter

Kenneth Adams Anniston Klan leader

Richard and Robert Bowling Stoner’s brother bombing buddies

Charles Boyer Nazi

Johnnie Burnette Member of Bessemer Klavern 20

Emmett Carr Deceased Nashville Klan Leader

David Duke Yes, that David Duke

William Foutch Nazi

David B. Garrett Klansman in the Invisible Empire

Stanley King Grand Titan for Tennessee Invisible Empire

Lynn McCloud Klansman that Girgenti sent to kill Stanley King

James E. Nellums Klansman in the Invisible Empire

Bobby Joe Norton Klansman in the Invisible Empire

Hubert Page Grand Titan of Eastview 13

William Rosecrans Compatriot of Robert Pittman Gentry

Gary Rowe FBI infiltrator of the Klan in Alabama

Robert Shelton Head of the United Klans of America

M.B. Sherrill Pro-Southerner, Klansman, and acquaintance of Emmett Carr

Frederick Smith Alabama Klan treasurer

J.B. Stoner Yes, him again

Ronald Tidwell Birmingham Bomber and member of Eastview 13

Bob Lee Vance KKK leader who was cooperating with the ATF

Bill Wilkinson Head of the Invisible Empire of the KKK and FBI informant

I’ve been operating under the assumption that this violence has to have a pattern, has to fit a pattern, and, if only we could figure out the pattern, we could use that pattern to recognize the culprits. These bombers did not wake up one day, commit one act of terrorism, then return to their ordinary lives. Whoever did this—I felt certain—it would make sense that they were responsible.

So, I started my search for Nashville’s unknown racist bombers with Nashville’s known racist bombers. Was there anyone in Nashville at the time who we know committed acts like this, if not in Nashville, then maybe somewhere else?

We had two: Gladys Girgenti and Robert Gentry.

Robert Gentry

Let’s start with Robert Pittman Gentry.196 Born in 1938, Gentry’s story is that he lived up here peacefully until he went into the Army sometime in the late ’50s. He was discharged in 1961, at which point he moved to Florida, became a Klan member (though he didn’t exactly say he hadn’t been a Klan member here in Tennessee; he pled the Fifth when asked), and then got accused of all kinds of unseemly things that he insisted he did not do. Like bombing the home of Donal Godfrey, the first grader integrating Lackawanna Elementary School in Jacksonville on February 16, 1964.

The lawyer who got him off on those charges?

Yep. J.B. Stoner.

Gentry had also admitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he was in Birmingham on September 15, 1963, during the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, but he never would say why.

His lawyer when he appeared before the HUAC?

Right again. J.B. Stoner.

Right after Godfrey’s house was bombed, Gentry came back to his family’s home just north of Murfreesboro. Nashville police took him into custody at the behest of the Jacksonville police. According to Nancy Bradford at the Tennessean, while Nashville police had him, they questioned him about whether he was involved in the Hattie Cotton bombing or the JCC bombing. Branford did not mention the Looby bombing as being a topic of discussion, most likely because Gentry was in the Army at the time.¹⁹⁷

In 1966, Gentry told interviewers from the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had joined “the Klan shortly before June 25, 1961. At the time he joined, the Florida Klan was affiliated with the newly formed United Klans, which split from the United Klans and became independent.”¹⁹⁸ It’s not clear if Gentry meant that he was in a Klan in Florida that was briefly associated with the United Klans or if he was in the “Florida Klan,” meaning the Association of Florida Klans. There are two reasons this might be important. One, if Gentry was in the “Florida Klan,” then he’s a dude from Middle Tennessee tied to one of M.B. Sherrill’s groups and it might behoove us to wonder if he might have known another dude from Middle Tennessee, Emmett Carr, who was in another one of Sherrill’s groups, and, if so, what the extent of their relationship was, especially before Gentry moved to Florida and became a known racist terrorist. The other is that Stoner was Gentry’s lawyer, which, if Gentry was indeed in the “Florida Klan,” shows more links between Stoner and Carr’s circle.

I had initially dismissed Gentry as a suspect in our bombings because he was so young—19 at the time of the Hattie Cotton bombing, 22 at the time of the Looby bombing. That was before I learned that Emmett Carr was trying to organize white teenagers to terrorize students at Father Ryan. Gentry was young during our bombings, but not younger than other people participating in and being recruited for racial violence in Nashville.

I wanted to know how early Gentry had been on the FBI’s radar and I wanted to know if they ever suspected him in any of our bombings. I did a FOIA request. They told me his file had been destroyed on May 6, 2005, four years before he died.¹⁹⁹

Let that sink in. A bomber who tried to kill two people in Florida,²⁰⁰ who was admittedly in Birmingham before one of its most infamous bombings, and who was in Nashville for two of our bombings, and the FBI suddenly decided—years after his activities, but before he died—that they didn’t need a file on him anymore. A known racist terrorist with strong ties to other racist terrorists.

That’s weird.

Here’s a thing that may or may not be relevant. Most living people’s identities are redacted from FBI files available to the public. Sometimes, like in the case of the Wrays, the FBI will leave enough identifying information that you can make a good guess who’s being referred to, but sometimes not. Also, with rare exception, you can’t get someone’s FBI file unless they’re dead. Once a person dies, though, their identities normally don’t have to remain redacted, and if your FOIA request reasoning is sound, you can get the FBI files of dead people. The simplest explanation for the destruction of Gentry’s file is that there was some piece of information or some identity that the FBI never wanted known. So, instead of letting that file become available after Gentry’s death, they just got rid of it (unless they’re lying, like they lied with the Looby bombing file).

That’s … not cool, to put it mildly, and it really hampers our ability to understand Gentry’s role in racial terrorism in the South in general and whether and how he was involved in Nashville. It’s also problematic for us as we try to understand what happened in Nashville because, as full of shit as Gentry apparently was, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigators learned a lot of interesting things about him and his buddies.

The HUAC investigator wrote that Gentry told him that J.B. Stoner was “capable of planning acts of violence; expert in demolitions; although alleged to have no affiliations with the Klan, in fact belongs to a Jacksonville (Fla.) Klavern and carries a Klan passport, which affords him access to and entry into any Klavern of the Klan; Subject’s trial lawyer.”²⁰¹

HUAC investigator Philip Manuel also managed to track down FBI informant Gary Rowe in a hotel in Los Angeles. Manuel recounted a lot of disturbing stuff Rowe told him, but here are the paragraphs full of names familiar to readers of this book:

Rowe identified two former Klansmen and former state officers of the Alabama Realm as two violent individuals whom Rowe is positive were participants in the Birmingham bombings. These individuals are Ronald Tidwell and Hubert Page. Rowe stated further that at the time of the bombings J.B. Stoner and his associates were very close to Robert Shelton and during his life, Matthew Murphy was very close to J.B. Stoner. Murphy and Stoner along with members of the UKA in Alabama, namely Tidwell, Page, Johnnie Burnette and possibly Frederick Smith, along with members of the NSRP especially Robert Bolling, were described by Rowe as the guilty parties in the Birmingham Church bombings. Rowe claims he has no direct knowledge in this regard but claims that those inside the Klan know those persons to be the guilty parties.

With further regard to Murphy, Rowe claimed that the late Klan attorney always maintained good contact with Stoner and the NSRP, and Rowe believes that Murphy was a constant cause of violence in the entire South. Rowe had no direct knowledge of where the Klan obtains their dynamite, but he knows that Kenneth Adams had an excellent contact at the Anniston Ordnance Depot where it was rumored that the Klan was obtaining explosives. Further at the time of the Birmingham bombings there was, according to Rowe, excellent relations between Ken Adams, Matt Murphy, Robert Shelton, J.B. Stoner and certain members of the Dixie Klan in Tennessee. When questioned by this Investigator, Rowe stated that he had also heard the name Robert Gentry in connection with the Birmingham bombings, and he seemed to recall that Gentry was on a state Klokan Committee. (This statement of Rowe’s seemingly lends credence to a prior statement of Gentry made to this Investigator and Investigator McConnon with respect to his involvement with acts of violence.)²⁰²

Okay, let’s pick through the information Rowe provided. Ronald Tidwell was, indeed, known to be a bomber in Birmingham. He was said to be behind the bombing of the home of Birmingham civil rights attorney Arthur Shores’s house in 1963. He was a member of the infamous Eastview 13 Klavern. Hubert Page was the Grand Titan of Eastview 13. Johnnie Burnette was a member of the Bessemer Klavern 20, and he allegedly once pulled a gun on FBI agents who were tailing him. Frederick Smith was an Alabama Klan treasurer. Robert Bolling is obviously Robert Bowling, but I suspect, based on what we know, that Rowe got the two brothers confused and he’s referring to Richard, who did seem to have bombed a church in Birmingham. We’ve already met Kenneth Adams. These are all, indeed, violent dudes.

The thing is that Rowe’s not exactly trustworthy. We don’t know if he’s conveniently leaving his own name off the list here (I suspect he is), but he does seem to know things that other people hadn’t put together yet—namely that the flow of dynamite into Alabama had something to do with the Dixie Klan in Tennessee and Kenneth Adams. He also knows a Bowling brother involved in church bombings in Birmingham. That wasn’t common knowledge. So, when he throws Gentry into the mix here, I think we have to consider that he’s telling the truth.

Based on how Investigator Manuel is careful to use “bombings” and not “bombing,” I think we need to be careful, too, and not jump to the conclusion that, of course, Gentry must have been involved in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. There were plenty of bombings he could have been involved in. But which ones?

Investigators had been able to coax a lot out of Gentry.

Subject also admitted to this Investigator, under the previous stated stipulations, that he was the trigger man in the Tamiami case. He stated that he had deliberately missed the intended victim, as he had never killed a man in his lifetime. Subject, under further questioning, stated he was able to accomplish this deliberate miss at high speed, because he is an expert marksman, since a child has had guns for hunting, and holds a National Rifle Association instructor’s certificate. His excuse to the Klan for missing, he said, was that the victims’ car was station wagon and he had fired at the second set of windows in passing the vehicle, thus the middle windows, behind the driver, rather than the front windows. He states that the Klan believed this story.

Another admission subject made to this Investigator (under same stipulations) was that he has committed some of the Klan bombings of which he is not suspected and possibly one of which he is. Also, he claims to have knowledge of those persons who have committed bombing of which he is suspected, but of which he is innocent. He declined to name these people and the locations and dates of the bombings.²⁰³

The “Tamiami case” was when Gentry and William Rosecrans (who was on the Godfrey bombing crew with Gentry) opened fire on Tamiami Freightways employee Eugene Striggler, a Black man. Other than the Godfrey bombing, I haven’t found any indication of any other bombings where he was named as a suspect. Granted, the FBI destroyed his file, but still, if he was a serious suspect in other bombings, you’d think his name would have come up in other files. Much as I’m not sure what conclusions we should draw about Gentry, the HUAC investigators also seemed confused by him. The investigator said Gentry was “bent toward dramatics,” but he still recommended someone look further into his stories.

We don’t know if anyone did.

Gladys Baker Carney Girgenti

We have a much better understanding of Gladys Girgenti’s place in the racist paradigm. It’s highly unlikely that Girgenti was involved in these early Nashville bombings. By the late ’50s she was living outside of Detroit and had small children at home, and no woman was ever seen in the vicinity of our bombings. But the reason I want to discuss Girgenti is that she is a known racist bomber with ties to J.B. Stoner who lives in Nashville and grew up here. If there is anyone in a position to know who bombed us, or to at least have heard plausible gossip, it’s her.

Gladys Girgenti was born Gladys Baker in 1930 up in Bordeaux. Yes, near where possible Klan member and definite FBI informant Thomas Norvell lived, and near where the Whites Creek suspected bombers lived. She married for the first time at fifteen to a thirty-seven-year-old man, Charles Carney, a neighbor.

After that marriage broke up, she married Nick Girgenti, a small-time criminal from Michigan. By the mid-50s, she had moved north. Most people seem to have forgotten that she started life here.

When she moved back to Nashville in 1971, her few appearances in the local media before she went full Klan Granny told the sad tale of a Detroit widow who had moved here after her house was firebombed in a race riot, the stress of which killed her husband.

These stories were about her kids being involved in some school program or another, so it’s probably not surprising that no one fact-checked Girgenti’s claims, but there were no race riots in Detroit or the surrounding area in 1971. No one’s house had been firebombed.

There was, however, a firebombing: the Klan had firebombed the Pontiac school buses. In reading through the coverage of the Pontiac school busing situation, we find story after story of white women standing in front of buses, hurling rocks and hateful words at the vehicles. Yet, when the bombers were arrested, they were all men.

There is an element of sexism that runs through the events of this book that I have been assuming you probably already picked up on. But if part of my purpose is to try to understand why we don’t know who did these things to us, then I think I need to state it explicitly. Women were a fundamental and crucial part of the segregationist movement in Nashville (and throughout the country). They headed up the protests at schools. They sheltered and cared for John Kasper when everyone else had had it with him. They called in death threats and bomb threats. And yet, even though they’re standing there in plain sight doing terrible things, history has often overlooked them.

You’d like to think that when the Tennessean ran into Gladys Girgenti decked out in her full Klan regalia, when she and other Klan leaders went to the state capitol and posed with the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in October 1980, they’d have been like “Who is this woman and what has she been up to?” Instead, they treated her as a joke.

After she moved back to Nashville, Girgenti spent the ’70s becoming more open about her Klan affiliation. She sent robed Klansmen to her son’s school to lecture him when he got in trouble, for instance. By the end of the ’70s, she wanted to be a Klan leader. After all, according to her, she was a third-generation Klan member who had been in the Klan for thirty years.²⁰⁴ But sadly for Girgenti, there wasn’t a Feminism for Evil movement to help her realize her full potential, and like so many women before her, both good and bad, she got shunted off to lead the children’s group.

But wait! When was the last time we had a confusing and public meltdown of the Klan in this story? Back when Emmett Carr took his Klan and joined up with the Dixie Knights, who may have been part of the Confederate Underground, I think? Or maybe when the Dixie Knights got embroiled in their stupid copyright case?

Well, here’s another one.

Girgenti had been in the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke’s group in the 1970s. But for some reason no one seems to know, she had joined up with Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire of the KKK by the end of the decade.²⁰⁵ The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Invisible Empire of the KKK were bitter enemies. The Grand Titan for Tennessee in the Invisible Empire was a guy named Stanley King, who made Girgenti the state director of the Klan Youth Corps. King told the media that he fired Girgenti on April 17, 1981. He said he fired her because she’d “taken some Klansmen and weapons and went to Murfreesboro to intervene in a fight between some blacks and whites, and I found out about it.”²⁰⁶ He also believed that right before he fired her, Girgenti sent her friend and fellow Klansman, Lynn McCloud, to try to kill him. Which seems like a pretty good reason all on its own to fire someone, but what do I know?

McCloud never denied assaulting King, but claimed he did it because King assaulted Mrs. McCloud. They took their bickering to the media. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1981, Girgenti was starting a new clandestine terrorist organization—the Confederate Vigilantes.

King ran to the media repeatedly to tattle on Girgenti. He told reporters that Girgenti and her husband were active members of the United Klans of America²⁰⁷ until its leader, Robert Shelton²⁰⁸ went to prison. King said Girgenti was a member of the National States Rights Party²⁰⁹ and that she “maintains a five-drawer filing cabinet in her home, filled with letters, documents, charters and other papers²¹⁰ collected during a 20-year²¹¹ career in these and other groups.”²¹² King also told the Tennessean that Girgenti had been involved in the Pontiac bombing.²¹³

So, here’s Girgenti, in the Confederate Vigilantes, which sounds very close to J.B. Stoner’s Confederate Underground. She’s allegedly a member of the NSRP, Stoner’s political group. And she’s old buddies with Robert Shelton, another one of Stoner’s pals.

What was it Stoner’s Confederate Underground promised us back in 1958? “We have just dynamited the Jewish Community Center. Next will be The Temple.”

In 1981, Gladys Girgenti tried to bomb The Temple in Belle Meade, a ritzy suburb just west of Nashville.

That spring, Girgenti put together a terror cell—herself, KKK leader Bob Lee Vance (who it turns out was cooperating with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms), Nazi party member William Foutch, Nazi party member and steel guitarist Charles Boyer, Bobby Joe Norton of the Invisible Empire, James E. Nellums of the Invisible Empire, and David B. Garrett of the Invisible Empire.²¹⁴ As you’d expect from someone tied to Stoner, she had a whole huge plan to basically go to war with Nashville’s Jewish community. She was going to bomb The Temple, the WSM tower, which she believed was owned by Jews, and various Jewish-owned pawn shops around town.

The reason Gladys failed is that when Vance went home to “make the bomb,” he actually got a dud from the ATF. Girgenti went to prison.

I think it’s unlikely that Gladys would have ratted on fellow bombers by the time she was on trial for the attempted Temple bombing. But back when she was pissed enough at Stanley King to supposedly try to kill him? Back when she was being publicly kicked out of the Klan? She might have spilled the beans on all she knew about local bombings and bombers. That was a real missed opportunity.

Another missed opportunity was not getting a search warrant and confiscating the Klan files she’d compiled. But this didn’t happen, I think, because no one had put together that Gladys wasn’t from Detroit. At least judging by the media coverage, no one realized she grew up in Nashville, that the Klan history she would have known well was our Klan history. Which is frustrating, since she, herself, told the Tennessean that her son was a fourth-generation Klan member, thus putting one or both of her parents in the Klan in Nashville, where they lived, and same with at least one of her grandparents. Who knows how far back her information on the Klan in Davidson County might have gone?

J.B. Stoner was finally convicted of bombing Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1980. In “things it would have been nice to know”—Did Girgenti decide to finish in ’81 what Stoner had started in ’58, targeting our Jewish community in retaliation for or in honor of Stoner, who looked like he was finally going to prison? How well did she know Stoner? Did Stoner give her the idea to bomb The Temple? Did she know who the earlier bombers were? If she didn’t, who did she think could have done it?

Gladys Girgenti likely had the answer to all these questions, served up to us on a silver platter of bad decisions on her part. For whatever reason, Nashville didn’t take the opportunity to ask.

So, I went to talk to her. To ask her myself. And I really liked her.

The Visit

I don’t know what to make of that, but it seems like an important component of trying to understand why these bombings weren’t solved. I’ve never been to a Klan rally. I don’t, as far as I know, know any people who deliberately set out to hurt or scare others. And I’d never talked to a convicted terrorist before.

She was funny and charming. She had big round eyes that made her either seem perpetually surprised or perpetually delighted. She lived in a multi-story assisted care facility over in Madison, about fifteen minutes from my house. The place was spotlessly clean, but old. The hallway to her apartment was poorly lit and there were pipes overhead. It smelled like people used to smoke there a lot but hadn’t in a long time.

Her apartment was small and cheery. She had a large window she sat beside, and sunlight flooded the place. She had an amazing, crocheted afghan draped over her loveseat. She had a cat, who seemed about a third longer than a cat normally should be.

Her son told me the cat would bite, but once he got some head pats and sniffed my bag, he settled in on the cat tree and paid us no mind. Once her son seemed to ascertain that I was harmless, he went upstairs to his apartment.

And there I was, alone with one of two known racist bombers to come out of Nashville.

She was very matter of fact about things. She launched right into telling me about Klan rallies and who she knew and how she had met them—J.B. Stoner, who she met through Ed Fields; Robert Shelton; David Duke. Folks I had only read about in books or, in Duke’s case, seen on TV. They were her friends and she spoke about them with the fondness you have for friends.

She didn’t use any racial slurs or launch into any lectures about the evils of the Jewish people. And, honestly, I didn’t ask her about her beliefs. I wanted to focus on getting my questions answered.

But it’s easy to see how, as a white bystander, you could seduce yourself into believing that a white supremacist like Girgenti isn’t “that bad.” Yes, she was talking about the Klan and talking about people who did really terrible stuff, but she was talking about it in the matter-of-fact way you might talk about your Sunday school class or the Rotary Club. The signals that tell you that this is dangerous aren’t present or they’re muted.

So, as I was sitting there, listening to this funny, charming woman tell these stories that were sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, I could feel something happening to me, mentally. I came into that apartment knowing some really terrible things about Girgenti and having heard credible rumors of worse. And I had been warned not to underestimate her, that she was very smart. In other words, I was as prepared as I could be.

And I still felt this overwhelming urge to just go along with what she was saying. Not just for the sake of the interview—that much I could understand and not fret over—but for the sake of our rapport, for the psychological reward of having this woman I found funny and charming finding me funny and charming.

That scared and scares me.

Listening to her stories, it’s very easy to see that the FBI took the wrong approach to her, over and over. It seems like they thought the button to push with her was her family. After talking to her, I agree that her family is very important to her. But threatening them never caused Girgenti to break and admit to crimes. It just strengthened her resolve to not cooperate.

Not that I got much farther. She wasn’t in town for my bombings. She didn’t want to tell me anything she, herself, didn’t know as a fact. So, no gossip on who it might have been. But I definitely got the impression that there was gossip she had heard. I just didn’t have the skills as an interviewer to overcome her reluctance to gossip with me.

But this was my first time interviewing a person with known ties to a terrorist network. Presumably the FBI does that all the time.

I had told a handful of people where I was going and that they should call the police if I didn’t get back in touch with them by dinner. I was done long before dinner. I did my best to make sure I wasn’t followed home. I felt stupid for worrying about it.

I couldn’t sleep though. I found excuses not to go to my room, and then when I realized I was just sitting on the couch staring at nothing, I forced myself to go to bed. And then I lay there, in the dark, in the quiet, afraid I would hear someone in the house with me. I had this thought that I should not have met her, that I should not have let her know what I look like or given her my phone number. That, obviously, anyone with dangerous friends could still be dangerous.

But the thing that kept me up was that I wasn’t having these thoughts until almost eight hours after I’d interviewed her.

The thing I’m struggling to put into words is how far down the path I was before my gut instinct to be afraid kicked in. I had already done the interview. I was already home. I had already assured everyone I had jokingly asked to avenge me if I was murdered that I was fine.

But while I was with her, I wanted her to like me. And I had years of research about her and her awful friends in my head.

There’s something psychological going on here that seems important, if we want to truly understand how we’re in this situation. Something about how your brain will push you to find connections and common ground with people, to find ways and reasons for you to like each other and see each other as being on the same side, even temporarily.

I keep thinking about that lyric from They Might be Giants, “Can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.” You become like the people you like. You can’t have a racist friend and not be, at some level, okay with her racism.

And yet, if that person is charming and funny, smart and insightful, isn’t it so very tempting to overlook her flaws?

No, no. Different than tempting. I would not have been tempted to overlook Gladys Girgenti’s flaws.

This is something deeper and more fundamental to how white supremacy works, I think. Something so deeply ingrained in me, so deeply trained, let me like her and suppressed the warning signals I should have been getting—and obviously was getting, if my terror that night was any indication.

I came as prepared as I could be. I was raised to try very hard to not be a racist asshole by people who have tried very hard their whole lives to not be racist assholes, and I still had that psychological reaction to her. And I didn’t even recognize that’s what was happening until way later.

That’s deeply troubling to me. But it also feels to me crucial for understanding why these bombings were never solved. I think there’s a very good chance that the white people in a position to investigate these bombings had the same bad training or psychological shortcoming or whatever this is as me. I think a crucial component of why these bombings were never solved is that the people who could have solved them were not seeing them for the huge red flags that they were. And I have to allow that one of the reasons I haven’t completely solved them is that I also am not picking up on obvious cues and am, instead, reacting in ways that work to thwart my own goals.

Like I said, she didn’t know anything for certain about my bombings and she didn’t want to gossip, but the interview did give me some important background. I asked her why so many Klan members were FBI informants, and she told me it was for the money. Being an FBI informant, it seemed to me, was, in Girgenti’s world, like working as a stripper to get through college. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to brag about in polite company, but the money was good, and people understood why you would do it.

Until this moment, my understanding of FBI informants came from the movies. I assumed it was really dangerous, and if you were discovered, chances were you would be killed. But what Girgenti was telling me seemed very different—that being an FBI informant was more often just a character flaw, and a flaw most of your peers would overlook.

This is my speculation, based on my conversation with Girgenti, but I think, with the widespread understanding of just how much the money from the FBI might mean and how easily the FBI could jack you up if you didn’t cooperate, the sin was not in being an informant. The sin was in being a useful informant.

If you could talk to the FBI and tell them things they either already knew or could easily find out, then, okay, it’s distasteful but everyone gets it. But if you talk to the FBI and tell them things they couldn’t otherwise know, or if you agreed to testify against your fellow racists, that was when you were putting your butt in peril.

And one of the reasons I think this is the dynamic at play is that I talked to Girgenti for a long time and got what I thought was a bunch of new information about her. But later, after I’d had time to go through my notes and revisit old newspaper articles, I realized she told me very little I hadn’t either already read or couldn’t have inferred from what I’d read. If that’s how informants were supposed to handle the FBI, then being that kind of FBI informant wouldn’t matter much at all.

She and I found common ground in our mutual frustration with the FBI, though her frustration was that they kept raiding her house and once sent her to prison. Mine was just that they weren’t very forthcoming.

Still, it was easy to see how Girgenti and Stoner could be friends, not just because of their shared hatred of Black people and Jewish people, but because of their audacity in the face of the FBI. I told Girgenti how Stoner had figured out he was being tailed by the FBI and reported their own license plate numbers back to them.

She, in turn, told me about a time when the FBI put a car on her house while David Duke was staying with her and how, before bed, she brought out coffee to the agents in the car and asked them if they wanted her to wake them up in the morning so they wouldn’t miss the opportunity to follow her or if they had their own alarm.

“I tell you what,” she said to me, “I have more respect for the Klan or the lowest drug dealer than I have for the FBI. Get that on the record.” I assured her I would. “They are the lowest people, and, like I say, if you want justice, look in the dictionary,” insinuating that the dictionary was the only place justice could be found.²¹⁵

She was still pissed at Stanley King for saying she was dangerous during her trial in 1983. She asked me if I was afraid of her. I didn’t want to say yes, but I didn’t want to lie to her, so I told her I was. I couldn’t tell if she was flattered or not.

As I was leaving, she assured me that I didn’t have to be afraid of her. “I’m not going to bomb you.”

I have to admit, hearing out loud that the possibility had been on the table didn’t leave me feeling particularly safe. But I did laugh, not just out of discomfort, but because the delivery was perfect. I kid about the Evil Feminism bit, but we’re probably really lucky as a city and a country that Gladys was never given the opportunity to live up to her full potential.

The Ethics of It

As I’m writing this book, media critics are discussing the ethics of interviewing white supremacists—not just whether you should do it, but how you do it so as not to normalize or elevate their beliefs. A point the critics keep raising—and rightly so—is that the neutral ways of interviewing subjects give a kind of credence to the beliefs of the white supremacists. If one side of the “debate” thinks that Black people are human beings and the other side of the “debate” insists that they are apes, even holding the debate makes it seem like these are two reasonable positions in dialogue with each other. A thing good people can disagree on.

If one side believes that Jewish people are a Semitic people whose beliefs and practices coalesced in the Middle East a few millennia ago, the reasonable other side of the debate should be about how many millennia ago or if we should say “a Semitic people” or “Semitic peoples” or if that term is even relevant—not about whether Jewish people are actually the descendants of Eve and the serpent in the Garden and thus controlling the city through the WSM tower.

I’m not trying to let myself off the hook or put myself on the hook for interviewing Girgenti and liking her. I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong by giving you a sense of how funny she was.

But I want to be clear that this is a trap. The white supremacist’s ability to be charming and willing to talk is supposed to make other white people find them helpful and cooperative. Nice, even. To make them seem like reasonable people with whom I just have a difference of opinion. It’s supposed to lure other white people into a sense of normalcy so they can use the other white people to disseminate their stupid, evil ideas.

I suspect one of the reasons Girgenti still loathes the FBI is that the FBI didn’t seem to be willing to treat her like they might just disagree on a few things, but didn’t they have a lot of common ground?

In a way, this level of white supremacy is like a cult. We seem to understand the dangers of putting religious cult leaders on TV and letting them ramble on mostly unchallenged about their beliefs. We don’t yet seem to have developed the same sense about white supremacists.

Anyway, long diatribe short: white supremacists can be likable, especially if you’re also white. But if we decide that our liking someone means they must have some core goodness we could appeal to if only we treated them with respect, we’re not that much different from the crowds of people in Nashville who went out to hear John Kasper and didn’t realize he was escalating, because they believed he was only talking about hurting Black people, not white people too.