CHAPTER 11 INFORMED SPECULATION

Guide to the Racists in this Chapter

Robert Bromley Rider’s tenant

Frank Houchin Informant for the state fire marshal and the FBI

Charles Reed Kasper’s friend and FBI informant

Wallace Rider Garage owner who bragged about Hattie Cotton bombing

Lloyd Shadrick Nashville Klansman and Charles Reed’s neighbor

Slim Thompson Rider’s Alabama friend

I feel pretty confident that we know what happened with the Hattie Cotton bombing and the JCC bombing. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at J.B. Stoner and what brought him to Nashville. I think he came to town at the behest of Kasper, perhaps with some buddies from the Chattanooga Klan, in August 1957. Possibly, he even brought the explosives.

Kasper then took the explosives and, with the help of Charles Reed, hid them in the abandoned house on Delta Avenue. This would have been just a few blocks away from Wallace Rider’s garage at 17th and McDaniel. If Frank Houchin’s account is right, then Wallace Rider, Slim Thompson, and some unnamed guy then went and bombed Hattie Cotton. I’m biased, but I believe that unnamed man was likely J.B. Stoner.

We now know that the only real suspects police had for the JCC bombing that make any sense were Rider again, and his tenant, Robert Bromley. We also know that Stoner flew into town that day, so it seems likely that he was involved in this bombing as well.

We know that a man from Alabama contacted the FBI about John Kasper trying to hire him to kill Looby, and we know that the FBI disregarded it. However, we also know that Slim Thompson lived in Alabama and was regularly in Nashville and the Klan talked about him almost like he was some kind of Klan hitman. Was he this man from Alabama who contacted the FBI?

If there’s one thing I would like to impress upon you, it’s just how silent all the FBI files I reviewed are when it comes to April 1960. With the exception of them noting that they got a call from Kasper but farted around instead of talking to him, it’s hard to piece together anything they might have been doing in April, when someone tried to assassinate a sitting US politician.

More so, everyone already knew that the Nashville police department seemed to have lost interest in solving the case days after the bombing—but now we also know that it was initially so important to Mayor West that he helped conduct the investigation himself.

We have a puzzle with quite a few missing pieces. But we’ve discussed other times when evidence suggests the FBI shut down investigations to protect informants. It seems plausible that the Looby bombing investigation was also shut down to protect an informant.

But let’s speculate why the Hattie Cotton bombing, at the least, wasn’t ever prosecuted. There is a witness, Frank Houchin, who heard directly from Wallace Rider that Rider bombed the school. That bit of information wasn’t even worth an arrest of Rider, to see what might shake loose under interrogation? Strange.

But imagine that you’re Rider’s attorney and Houchin is the State’s star witness. Houchin is a known criminal who was somehow wrapped up in the Jesse Wilson truck scales bombing mess. If Wilson really was guilty of trying to kill a bunch of people here and in Chattanooga, why was his sentence so short? Or did the short sentence reflect some doubt by the judge of Wilson’s guilt? Remember, part of Wilson’s defense was that Houchin and his friend were framing and blackmailing him. If I’m Rider’s attorney, the very first thing I’d get Houchin to admit on the stand was that, of him and Rider, he was the one associated with a known bomber and that, though Rider had been in and out of trouble over the years, never for things as serious as Houchin had been. Plus, way back in his younger days, Houchin had been in on a scheme with a corrupt cop. Houchin had the contacts and the experience to frame someone.

Did Nashville fail to convict anyone for the Hattie Cotton bombing because their main witness was too compromised? And same for the JCC bombing? Plus, we now know that Houchin was an informant for both the fire marshal and the FBI. This adds some interesting shading to the Looby bombing. If the circumstances surrounding the abrupt end to the Looby investigations at a local, state, and federal level suggest that an informant committed the bombing and needed to be protected, there is only one informant I’ve come across who knew bombers in Nashville and who both state and federal officials might have wanted to keep safe, even if they suspected he was involved—Frank Houchin.

Still, let’s be clear, these are a lot of dots very close together that look like they’d make a Frank-Houchin-and-friends-looking pattern if connected—but they are not connected. The biggest missed connection is that we simply don’t know why every investigation into the Looby bombing seems to have fizzled out by the end of April 1960. My theory is that it was because the bomber was someone authorities did not want revealed. My opinion is that the most likely reason is that this person was an informant. But we don’t know that for sure.

I heard a story about Gary Rowe, the Birmingham Klan infiltrator for the FBI. I don’t know how true it is, but it goes like this. Supposedly, Gary Rowe was set to testify in one of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing cases and when the defense lawyer heard this, he started laughing. The prosecutors demanded an explanation, but the defense lawyer kept laughing and said, “No, no, go ahead and call him.” Then, allegedly, the prosecution called the FBI and asked why a defense lawyer in this case would be laughing about Rowe testifying and whatever happened during that phone call resulted in Rowe never being called.

I bring this up, not because it’s factual, but for its folkloric value. What the story tells us is that people believed that the FBI had people so deeply embedded in these situations that it may have hampered investigations and derailed prosecutions, because no one knew just how involved the FBI’s informants were in the crimes and no one wanted to risk the informants testifying under oath to that involvement.

We could have in Frank Houchins a Gary Rowe problem. Did he know all this stuff because he was a witness or did he know it because he was a participant? And what would it have done to the city, and possibly the nation, for us to learn in 1960 that an FBI informant was involved in some way in an assassination attempt on a sitting U.S. politician? You think JFK conspiracy theories are wild now? Imagine if conspiracy theorists had the precedent of Houchins and Looby to fuel them?

I also feel very good about my theory that J.B. Stoner was intimately involved with at least the first two bombings, which makes it very likely that he was involved with the third. But all we have connecting Stoner to the bombings are men with a proven track record of shading the truth—Bull Connor, John Kasper, and Stoner himself. I’m all in on the “Stoner was behind it” theory, but you could have reasonable doubts.

Here’s the thing, though. The FBI had a file on Looby that it started long before the bombing. The FBI also had informants in Nashville and (in April 1960, when the bombing occurred) good reason to believe that John Kasper was ready to start telling what he knew. They also knew that Kasper had tried to hire a hit man to kill Looby the year before. So, they knew there was a target on Looby’s back. And then they lied about having the Looby bombing file.

All this leads me to the conclusion that either the FBI knew racists had a plot against Looby and they let it happen, or, for all their agents and informants, they didn’t have good enough connections in Nashville and failed at their job, which means they let it happen, but with a slightly different inflection.

The only reason the FBI would be, to quote Looby, so “busy looking the other way” is if it was going to cause them problems to look squarely at the crime.

We may never know exactly what happened with these bombings and I hope that outrages you. Our history has been deliberately hidden from us by people who don’t even bother to justify it.

But I also hope you will go by 2012 Meharry Boulevard if you get the chance and see the house that Looby built after his home was destroyed. The whole house is brick, with small windows. The front wall juts outward like the bow of a ship so that, if another bomb is thrown at the house, it will be harder to knock it down. Inside is a bomb shelter.

Z. Alexander Looby did so much to provide Black Tennesseans some shelter under the law and yet, when he most needed it, he found none. This house—this bunker—is a testament to the way law enforcement failed him and how he picked up and went on anyway.