Donald Davidson Acclaimed Poet and Head of the Tennesseans for Constitutional Government
Frank Houchin No One, Yet
Jack Kershaw Davidson’s Righthand Man
Rev. Fred Stroud Leader of the Bible Presbyterian Church
The most influential organized racist group in Nashville was the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government. As popular as the Klan was, upper-crust white Nashvillians certainly weren’t going to join. How gauche! No, they needed civilized, erudite hate groups filled with people of the richest social classes to belong to. Poet and beloved Vanderbilt professor, Donald Davidson, stepped in to fill the need.
It would be hard to overstate the cultural capital Davidson had in Nashville. He was literally one of Nashville’s most famous intellectuals. He enrolled in Vanderbilt University in 1909, earning both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, before he became an English professor. He was one of the founding members of the Fugitives, a group of Vanderbilt students and professors who wrote poetry and got together to discuss it in the 1920s. Other members of the Fugitives included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, Frank Owsley, Robert Penn Warren, Ridley Wills, Cleanth Brooks, and Laura Riding.11
After the Fugitives drifted apart, Davidson became a founding member of the Agrarians, a similar group of Vanderbilt-affiliated people who met informally to, as Paul Murphy puts it, “discuss ideas.”12 The Agrarians consisted of Vanderbilt professors John Crowe Ransom, Lyle Lanier, Herman Nixon, Frank Owsley, and John Donald Wade, along with Allen Tate, Henry Kline, Andrew Lytle, and Robert Penn Warren, among others. This must have been when Davidson came to know Vanderbilt student Jack Kershaw, most famous nationally for defending James Earl Ray, most famous locally for building a large, hideous sculpture of Nathan Bedford Forrest that until recently sat along the interstate south of town.
Kershaw’s obituary claims that Kershaw “became associated with a group of intellectuals who called themselves the Fugitive Poets of Vanderbilt in the 1920s. This group of students would go on to make a great impact regarding how the history of the South would be told.”13 Except that Kershaw was born in 1913, which means about the earliest he could have been at Vanderbilt was 1930—after the Fugitives had moved on. This doesn’t especially matter. He was clearly in with the Agrarians and met Donald Davidson at this time, but it’s indicative of the kind of largesse with which Kershaw regarded the truth, his willingness to heap a good story on top of it just to spruce it up a little.14
The Agrarians were deeply racist.15
Toward the end of the “Donald Davidson” entry in the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Paul Murphy writes, “Davidson, who considered African Americans racially inferior, defended segregation as a social institution developed by white southerners to preserve their culture and identity. In the 1950s he headed the pro-segregation Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, the state’s generally ineffective version of a White Citizens Council.”16
As hilarious as “generally ineffective” is, I wonder if that’s really true. Sure, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government did, on its surface, seem to exist only to give Davidson and his buddies a feeling they were doing something to stop the social changes they opposed without them actually having to go outside and interact with ordinary people. They didn’t stop desegregation. So, it does seem like they failed, like they were “ineffective.”
But let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
White Citizens Councils sprang up in response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. These groups were supposed to be a more respectable alternative to the Klan. Unlike the Klan, they would work within the system to prevent integration and they would be made up of middle-class people and community leaders. Nashville didn’t have a White Citizens Council for a very simple reason: our Klan was plenty respectable, made up of middle-class people and community leaders who were working within the system. There was no shame in being a Klansperson in Nashville in the 1950s. The papers regularly ran front page stories about Klan activities with the Klan members barefaced and happily identified. Also, if, for some reason, you didn’t want to join the Klan, you could just join Rev. Fred Stroud’s Bible Presbyterian Church and do your organized segregationist activities with your fellow congregants.17
Davidson’s group, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, wasn’t trying to be Tennessee’s equivalent of the White Citizens Council. It was trying to be for segregationists what the Fugitives and the Agrarians were for poetry and Southern mythologizing—a small, elite group who met and discussed ideas and held influence. They wanted to set the tone and guide the discourse, to be influencers. They didn’t want and never had a large membership of ordinary people.
Even when the TFCG decided a group of ordinary people was needed, they founded the Parents Preference Committee, which was full of white parents who opposed integrating Nashville schools. I don’t find any indication that they increased their own membership.
The 1955 roster of the TFCG is fascinating. It lists Donald Davidson as chairman. His first qualification is “Professor of English, Vanderbilt University.” Next is Jack Kershaw, vice-chairman, “Nashville real estate developer, widely known as a Southern painter and sculptor.” L.V. DuBose, also vice chairman, “is in the Production Control department of the Crosley Division of the A.V.C.O. Corporation of Nashville.”18 Robert F. Lee, secretary, is described as “Assistant Business Manager of Vanderbilt University and also Instructor in English at the same institution.” Dudley Gale, treasurer, “Chairman of the Greater Nashville Committee of the Chamber of Commerce and has been a trustee of the Nashville Children’s Museum since its organization.” The list continues with Lambeth Mayes, corresponding secretary; Ward S. Allen, bursar; and Paul Manchester, director of public relations, head of the romance languages department at Vanderbilt.
And then there’s Paul F. Bumpus, who served as counsel for the TFCG. His biography reads, “Has practiced law in Nashville since 1950. A native of Maury County, he served as District Attorney-General for Maury, Wayne, Lawrence, and Giles counties. While serving as Attorney-General, he handled the so-called ‘racial cases’ in Columbia, Tennessee.”19
Let’s be clear what this means: Bumpus was the guy who lost to Looby in the Columbia riots cases. And here he was serving as council for the group Davidson created in response to Brown v. Board of Education and the lawsuit Looby had filed on behalf of the Kelly family to desegregate Nashville schools.
Donald Davidson, who wanted to give Southern whites a myth of Southern whiteness they could draw on in order to be great, seems clearly to have been using the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government as part of his aesthetic project. It’s hard for me to read Bumpus’s prominence in the TFCG as anything but an acknowledgment that a large hurdle to white supremacy was Z. Alexander Looby. To effectively fight integration, you needed someone who had experience fighting Looby.
When word came down that Clinton, Tennessee was going to desegregate in 1956, the TFCG asked the state supreme court for an injunction. Davidson sent Kershaw to Clinton to address the community. After the Clinton riots, Davidson sent Kershaw to bail out most of the segregationist rioters. We’re going to see Kershaw show up again to advocate for the Hattie Cotton bombing suspects.
Kershaw and Davidson were close. They had worked together on behalf of Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Party in the ’40s. Davidson scholar Mark Royden Winchell writes, “Davidson formed a close friendship with Kershaw during the latter half of the 1950s. This was a time when he was estranged from most of his former colleagues in the Fugitive and Agrarian movements.”20
Kershaw seems to have taken the lessons he learned working with Davidson to heart. Davidson was using the money and the social standing of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government to help the more violent racists of the lower classes get out of the jams their activism got them in.21 Kershaw went on to found the League of the South in 1994, a racist group that, like the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, offers a less trashy alternative to the Klan. Like the TFCG, the League of the South often provides organizational help and material support to more violent racists.22 Also, like Davidson’s group, the League of the South has been able to hide in plain sight, with a remarkable number of whites acting like they’re just some anachronistic social club whose members aren’t hurting anyone with their old-fashioned views.
Kershaw also set up the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation, in honor of his wife. This was a slush fund for the League of the South.
In 2017, the League of the South aided white supremacists at Charlottesville. Also in 2017, Rev. David O. Jones collected money from the men in his suburban Nashville Bible study, including retired federal judge Robert Echols, and funneled it through the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation to his organization, Heritage Covenant Schools, which provides resources for conservative Christian homeschoolers. The men in his Bible study claimed not to know anything about Rev. Jones’s racist beliefs or that he was the past state chair for the League of the South.
So, was Davidson’s group “ineffective,” really? Davidson and Kershaw perfected a blueprint for supporting and funding racist activists while keeping their own group mostly free from the taint of the violence they facilitated. Kershaw took that blueprint and created a really effective group that still does that work successfully today, a group with ties to prominent judges, politicians, and attorneys—even though they may deny those ties when it becomes inconvenient.
I, too, would like to dismiss Davidson’s racist work as “ineffective,” but the truth is that it’s been very influential and continues to be an important component of racist terrorism today.
The other thing about “ineffective” is that it lets Vanderbilt off the hook. If Donald Davidson was a racist, but not very good at it, then it was relatively harmless that they kept him as faculty and let him have access to hundreds of young people. But if he was good at it, if his activism was successful, then keeping Donald Davidson around at the very same time they were expelling Vanderbilt Divinity School student James Lawson for his work organizing the sit-in movement, it starts to suggest something morally careless about Vanderbilt’s approach that, for all its good work in acknowledging some racial sins of its past, it has not begun to reckon with. It’s one thing—and an ugly thing—to not allow Black students to attend, then to create an oppressive, miserable atmosphere for them once they were there (and then to punish them, even expel them, for working to change it); it’s another, even uglier thing to do all this while one of your professors is running an effective and highly influential racist organization out of your English department.
The bombings we’re discussing weren’t the first racist bombings of the modern era in Nashville. On April 6, 1949, someone stuck a 15-foot cross on the train trestle that crosses Antioch Pike and set said cross on fire. Law enforcement believed it was a warning to Dr. Needham Roberts, a Black dentist who had bought a bunch of land along the road, within sight of that trestle, and who intended to develop it into housing for Black people. Needham sold the land to white developers, but that didn’t stop racists from blowing up two houses in the development in December of the same year. The development was changed to white. This bombing also remains unsolved.
This incident highlights something that is crucial for us to understand as we move forward: Nashville was very institutionally segregated. Black and white kids went to different schools. Black and white people shopped in entirely different ways (for instance, Black people couldn’t try on clothes in department stores). They ate in segregated restaurants. They buried their dead in different cemeteries. But they lived in the same neighborhoods, even on the same blocks.
The era of neighborhood segregation was brought about by the carving up of the city with interstates in the 1970s. Mixed-race neighborhoods dissolved. The shock is to us, whose Nashville has “always” had Black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. We’re the ones who project our own experience of the city back into the past and ask, “Where were the Black neighborhoods in 1880? In 1920?” We get answers we don’t question because they line up with how we experience the city now. But in order for anything I’m about to tell you to make sense, I need you to understand that Nashville didn’t have all-Black neighborhoods and very few all-white neighborhoods until the interstates went in fifty years ago, a decade after the Looby bombing.
The reasons Black people wanted to integrate Nashville’s schools was not because white schools were so great (white schools were better resourced, but Black schools expected their teachers to have master’s degrees, at least) but because it was stupid for any kid to have to walk by his neighborhood school in order to go to a Black school.
This is the kind of revelation that is so obvious once you hear it that it seems like the kind of thing you must have already known; but in my case, at least, I’m still having a hard time accepting it because it’s so contrary to what I’ve been taught. The neighborhood schools Black families wanted to attend were, indeed, that: their neighborhood schools. Their mixed-race neighborhood schools.
Between 1949 and 1960, there were more than fifty cross burnings in Davidson County. I had initially thought that these were racist intimidation tactics to keep Black people from moving into white neighborhoods. But what I understand now is that this was an early effort to create white neighborhoods—to run off people who already lived there. The police chalked most of these cross burnings up to pranks by teens, but as we’ll get into in the next chapter, that doesn’t preclude them from also being racist plots. Some teens were arrested for cross burning. Once. The only other arrest I could find related to cross burnings was that of Joe Baker, a Black man who found a cross burning in his yard up in Madison (a northern Nashville suburb) on April 23, 1950. According to the Tennessean, Baker grabbed the burning cross in one hand, his shotgun in the other, and proceeded to stop every car driven by white people that came by, demanding, “Did you do it?” He was eventually charged with public drunkenness, but he said he hadn’t been drinking. Apparently, he was just pissed. The paper never reported the disposition of his case. Somehow, we don’t have a statue of this hero.
I had initially thought that, in the cases I’m looking at, the fact that the bombers were using dynamite would be helpful. Dynamite was traceable, right? But it turns out that dynamite violence in Nashville in the 1950s was very, very common. Dynamite was readily available. You could buy a stick at your local hardware store for a quarter, and newspapers from the time make it seem like construction sites just left dynamite lying around for the taking by anyone willing to sneak onto the site and steal it.
There were a number of newspaper stories about teenagers who would steal dynamite or blasting caps and then leave those items near elementary schools where young children would find them, play with them, and lose an eye or some fingers. You’d think that this would be a cause for great alarm, but the media treated it as a “boys will be boys” thing. You have teenagers literally leaving explosives for smaller kids to find and hurt themselves with. If that’s not explicitly on the list of “your kid may be on the path to being a serial killer” traits, it’s certainly covered by “harms small animals.” But the term “serial killer” hadn’t been coined in the 1950s. America was worried about rebellious teenagers, but more the kids who wore T-shirts and tight skirts and listened to R&B (and, at the end of the decade, rock & roll) than the kids putting dynamite out for grade-schoolers to find.
Adults were also blowing things up. People liked to fish with dynamite. People used dynamite to blow wells and clear cesspools. Union troubles in Nashville were often punctuated with dynamite, and barbershops were blown up on a regular basis during the 1950s, usually because of labor disputes and union activities.
Focusing on people able to get their hands on dynamite narrows our suspect pool to “everyone.” Looking at people willing to blow up things important to other people gives us “too many teenagers” and “barbers” among others. Still a really broad list.
But if these three integration-era bombings were connected, was there any suspect who fit that pattern? Was there a person in Nashville who was already known for blowing up government buildings and who was willing to bomb Nashville politicians?
Yes. Starting in 1952.
Was that person ever a suspect in these bombings?
As far as I can tell, no.
Why not?
Welcome to the first of many mysteries.
Forty-seven-year-old Jesse Wilson was the president of the trucking company Tennessee Motor Lines, which had a terminal downtown on 3rd Avenue South and a terminal in Chattanooga. Wilson ran his trucks heavy, which became a problem for him first when Kentucky put truck scales on Highway 31-E in Hodgenville (a little more than halfway between Nashville and Louisville) and then when Tennessee put scales on Highway 31-W at Goodlettsville. Both scales were blown up. Wilson appears to have been the only suspect.
Two years later, in January 1954, Wilson had two of his employees beat up two former employees down in Chattanooga. It was all over the papers here.
On March 18, 1954, a man hired by Wilson bombed the yard of attorney and former mayor of Nashville, Thomas L. Cummings, who was representing the two men Wilson had ordered beaten. This man was also supposed to bomb the home of Tennessean publisher Silliman Evans, because Wilson was angry about the amount and kind of coverage the paper had given those earlier bombings and the beatings. This bombing didn’t happen; before it could, Wilson was involved in another bombing, and the would-be bomber testified that Wilson had taken him to Evans’s home to scope out the best place to put the explosives.
On March 20, Wilson and some men who were loyal to him filled the floor of Wilson’s 3rd Avenue Tennessee Motor Lines terminal with sawdust, soaked the sawdust in oil, moved trucks into the terminal, and blew the whole thing up. This bombing was intended to be an insurance scam, and Wilson blamed union strife for it, even claiming the union had bombed the building.
Carl Stokes, one of Wilson’s bombers, testified at trial that some of the trucks didn’t run, so the men had to push them. Here’s how Stokes described the bombing, according to the Tennessean:
“He [Wilson] went to his office. He had a desk with a top that rolled up. He raised it and got six sticks of dynamite. He got out some black kid gloves and taped the dynamite, three sticks together with black tape. He took a pencil and punched a hole in the dynamite and put a fuse in and took a pair of pliers and mashed it so it would not come off.”
He [Stokes] said Wilson then placed the dynamite in two trucks, on one cross-member and under a hood. Wilson then crammed an electric heater with paper, Stokes said, and tested the time it required for the paper to ignite after the heater was turned on. “It took three or four minutes,” Stokes recalled.
The heater, he said, was placed near one of the dynamite-laden trucks, and a long extension cord run outside. Herrod has testified he returned later and plugged in the cord, setting off the fire.23
Stokes also testified that Wilson had ordered him to do a series of bombings in Chattanooga, but Stokes refused. Lest you think that being arrested for a series of bombings would be enough to keep Wilson on the straight and narrow, Wilson paid a man, Jack Jones, to kill Stokes and two other witnesses. Fortunately, the would-be hitman alerted authorities.
But get this! After all that, Wilson only served twenty-eight months. He was released from prison in January 1958. He didn’t reform. In 1961, he was charged with a series of burglaries in the Carthage area, about an hour east of Nashville. He was out of money because he’d lost his trucking company.
Here we have a guy willing to bomb people, who knows how to case a building looking for the best place to bomb it, who blows up government facilities, and who was behind the bombing of a Nashville politician. A guy who was, by 1958, desperate for money. And here we have three unsolved bombings—including a government building and the home of a Nashville politician. Wilson couldn’t have bombed Hattie Cotton in 1957 because he was in jail, but why wasn’t he the first person the police talked to in the other two cases? How did they not look at our bombings and Wilson’s bombings and see similar targets? I also don’t think Wilson did any of our bombings, but I have sixty years’ worth of hindsight. How did the police and the FBI decide in 1958 or 1960 that Wilson wasn’t worth talking to?
The answer to that may be Frank Houchin. While Wilson was on trial for blowing up his own terminal, part of his defense was that Jack Jones and an old friend of Jack’s, Frank Houchin, were framing him and trying to blackmail him about it.24
While Frank Houchin’s middle name wasn’t literally Trouble, it should have been. He had a string of arrests going back at least a decade for robbing liquor stores and hardware stores. Clear back in 1936, when he was twenty-one, Frank was busted as part of an “alleged gang of thieves” that annoyed the city for at least six months.25 In 1949, he was caught up in a scandal with a crooked ex-cop. Frank was in and out of jail repeatedly and he was looking at serious legal problems with the Wilson mess.
And in late 1957, Frank joined the Klan.