CHAPTER 7 THE JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER BOMBING

Nashville Public Library, Special Collections, Nashville Banner Photos

Guide to the Racists in this Chapter

Kenneth Adams Anniston Klan leader and member of the Dixie Knights

Robert Bromley Wallace Rider’s tenant

Jack Brown Leader of the Dixie Knights

Emmett Carr Nashville Klan leader

Crimmons brothers Suspects in the Hattie Cotton bombing

Donald Davidson Poet and unrepentant racist

E.S. Dollar Nashville Klan leader

Ed Fields J.B. Stoner’s partner and founder of the National States Rights Party

Frank Houchin Fire marshal informant and FBI informant, involved with the earlier truck bombings

John Kasper Racist activist

William Hugh Morris Alabama Klan leader and, as we’re about to learn, law enforcement informant

Ezra Pound John Kasper’s mentor

Wallace Rider Nashville man who bragged about the Hattie Cotton bombing

Gary Rowe FBI Klan infiltrator

Robert Shelton Alabama Klan leader

J.B. Stoner Racial terrorist

Rev. Fred Stroud Leader of the Bible Presbyterian Church

Allen Tate Another white supremacist poet and friend of Donald Davidson

James McKinley “Slim” Thompson Wallace Rider’s Alabama friend

Okay, back to Nashville.

In the wake of the Hattie Cotton bombing, there were a lot of dramatics and political maneuvering, but long story short, Nashville kept John Kasper in jail as long as it could, then ran him out of town. At the end of September 1957, Kasper went to D.C. to commiserate with Ezra Pound, and in October, he went to federal prison for his role in the Clinton riots.

In November, Kasper’s buddies, Ed Fields and J.B. Stoner, held a meeting in Knoxville to begin organizing the group that would eventually become the National States Rights Party (NSRP).127 The NSRP was both a political party—meaning they ran candidates for office—and a terrorist organization.

The Rise of the Dixie Knights

At roughly the same time as the start of the NSRP, Emmett Carr and E.S. Dollar were leaving the US Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and helping to form the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Much of the known history of the Dixie Knights is hilarious. They got embroiled in a trademark lawsuit over Klan rituals. They tried endorsing candidates only to find the candidates appalled by their support. Then, in typical Klan fashion, people started leaving because the “one true” Klan they founded wasn’t being true to Klan principles, whatever those Klan principles were supposed to be.

I had substantial difficulties in nailing down any reliable information about the Dixie Knights, but what I found beyond the hilarious public failures was disturbing. As we’ve discussed, the group came into being when Klavern no. 317 in Chattanooga got kicked out of the Klan, and Emmett Carr took the Middle Tennessee Klans under his control (including Nashville) out of the UKA to join forces with 317. Birmingham Klan leader Robert Shelton may have been involved early on, but he and Chattanooga leader Jack Brown didn’t get along, so it’s hard to know. I have to suspect that Asa Carter was either involved or a strong influence on the Dixie Knights. We can say with certainty that J.B. Stoner knew many of the men who formed the Dixie Knights. Stoner also worked with the notorious Birmingham Klavern with their infamous bombing unit. Were Klansmen from Birmingham somehow tied into this group? If Shelton was indeed involved, it seems like yes, maybe. If not, then maybe no? (Investigative reporter Harold Weisberg spent years trying to sort this out while investigating the King and Kennedy assassinations, and even he wasn’t clear on who was affiliated with what, when.)¹²⁸

The publicly available story of the Dixie Knights is that they started in 1958 and had petered out by the time of Brown’s death in 1965. The US Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) didn’t even bother to subpoena any of them during their Klan hearings, saying that they “had dwindled to a position of relative unimportance.”¹²⁹ But, and this is a big but, the HUAC did note that the Dixie Knights had a Klavern in Anniston, Alabama, which means that the violence committed against the Freedom Riders in Anniston by local Klan members, including Kenneth Adams, was committed by the Dixie Knights.¹³⁰ Also involved in the Anniston attack on the Freedom Riders were Klansmen from all over Alabama, including controversial FBI informant Gary Rowe. That would seem to indicate that the Dixie Knights were very important, or at least that understanding how the Dixie Knights operated was important, to understanding Southern segregationist violence. I couldn’t find anyone who has studied them. No one nationally who understood their regional efforts. No one in Chattanooga who understood what they had been up to in that city. No one seems aware of the full scope of their activities.

I asked the National Archives for their file on the Dixie Knights, assuming I was looking for a small file on a fringe group. It’s 30,000 pages long. I wrote back assuming that they had misunderstood which group I was talking about. They had not. The file on the Dixie Knights just from the end of 1957 is 500 pages. The file continues into the 1970s. So much for petering out.

And here’s another thing that suggests there’s much more for scholars to investigate. It’s clear from available FBI files and Birmingham police files that other Klans were terrified of Jack Brown. Klan members warned each other not to cross him, that he was unstable and violent, that he had killed people. I couldn’t find any murders Jack Brown was suspected of, but I also didn’t get into his FBI file. The scope of his terrorism, what he was doing that had other Klans so afraid of him, is not yet known.

We have some hints, though. Alleged members of the Dixie Knights, much like members of the NSRP, had a habit of being present when bad, racist shit went down in the South. Jack Brown allegedly had a plot to kill President John F. Kennedy. Two Dixie Knights were suspected in the bombing death of Ringgold, Georgia housewife, Mattie Green.¹³¹ Shelton’s group may have been involved in at least two murders. And Weisberg found evidence this crowd was trying to pay someone to kill Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.¹³²

The Start of the Confederate Underground

At this same time, the Confederate Underground must have come into existence. As we’re about to discuss, they started bombing Jewish community centers and places of worship in late 1957. The Confederate Underground was a network of bombers headed up by J.B. Stoner, who had come out of the Chattanooga Klan scene. This is a known fact. And it was a fact known by some people almost as soon as the Confederate Underground started bombing Jewish targets.

There is no mystery about who, ultimately, is responsible for the bombing of our Jewish Community Center. And there hasn’t been for sixty years. It was one of a series of anti-Semitic bombings perpetrated by J.B. Stoner’s terrorist network, the Confederate Underground, in 1957 and 1958.

Except that no one in Nashville seems to have known this. It doesn’t appear that anyone from the FBI or the Anti-Defamation League, which by the end of 1958 had a very thorough report about the network that pulled off these bombings, informed anyone in the Jewish community here. If they did, no one remembers it.

We don’t know what the police were doing, but the little evidence we have of their thinking seems to indicate that they either didn’t know about the Confederate Underground, or they didn’t take it seriously.

So, though this bombing is still officially unsolved, it has, historically, been the least unsolved of the three bombings. But this information hasn’t ever made it into public knowledge in Nashville. And that’s a mystery I have no good explanation for.

If the answer to who bombed the JCC was “the same folks who were bombing all those other Jewish buildings throughout the South,” and that answer was known in 1958, why don’t we know it now? And if the Nashville police had known, or taken seriously, the fact that J.B. Stoner was behind the bombing of the JCC, shouldn’t that have led them to look at whether Stoner could have been involved in the Hattie Cotton bombing? Shouldn’t they have discovered he was in town in August of ’57?

While it’s true that an integrating elementary school and a Jewish Community Center seem like very different targets, the Confederate Underground went to great lengths to make sure the two would be connected in the public consciousness. They failed.

We know NSRP members took part in some of the anti-Semitic bombings by the Confederate Underground, so we know that those two groups had overlap. But how much overlap was there between the Confederate Underground and the Dixie Knights?

I suspect a lot.

The simplest answer may be that the Confederate Underground was just a name used by J.B. Stoner and whichever Dixie Knights and/or NSRP members he could rope into bombing people. If the Confederate Underground and the Dixie Knights had considerable overlap, then when the Confederate Underground bombed our JCC, a prime suspect should have been the person who went to the media two months before to announce that he was helping to form the Dixie Knights—Emmett Carr.

But it doesn’t appear that Carr ever was a suspect.

A thing I’ve wondered about, too, is what role J.B. Stoner may have played in encouraging his Klan buddies to accept Kasper’s ideas. We know Carr didn’t like Kasper, but Carr and Stoner ran in the same circles, and Stoner liked Kasper a lot. It looks to me like Stoner was the “translator” of Kasper’s ideas. Kasper said some dumbass thing or made some dumbass plan that wouldn’t work because the Klan didn’t trust Kasper; Stoner would make it okay for the Klan to do what Kasper said. He would make a plan that would work.

This brings us to the Jewish Community Center bombing.

How Anti-Semitism Got Tied to Anti-Black Racism

While there had been a rise in anti-Jewish terrorism in the late ’50s, officials were slow to link it to integration until the Confederate Underground started taking credit for bombings. In part, this was because Southern segregationists weren’t uniformly anti-Jewish. A North Carolina Klan, for instance, was opposed to John Kasper coming to the state because of his attitude toward Jewish people. This seems strange now in an era when racism and antisemitism go hand-in-hand, but back then, the men who were of an age to be leaders in the Klan were, by and large, World War II veterans who saw themselves as patriots fighting to preserve a distinctly American way of life. They were wary of anything that smelled too much like Nazism, the thing they had fought and watched their friends die to defeat.

So, an important rhetorical strategy of men like Stoner and Kasper was to link Jews to communism in the minds of racist whites. If Jews were communist, then opposing them wasn’t taking the side of the Nazis against America, it was taking the side of America against the Reds. Their theory was that Black people were not smart or ambitious enough to want equality for themselves, that they were, normally, happy in their lot. It was the communist Jews who were putting ideas in Black people’s heads, telling them they were unhappy, and planning and directing Black protests behind the scenes. Black aspirations for equality were just a symptom of a Jewish communist plot to ruin America.

J.B. Stoner had a parable he would tell his Klan buddies to help them understand why he was such a virulent anti-Semite and to try to convince them to join his cause. Here’s how Birmingham Klan leader William Hugh Morris recounted said story:

[Stoner] also told me yesterday that he had much rather that his Confederate underground had much rather bomb Jewish targets than negro targets. He compared it this way and these are his exact words. He said ‘Suppose you were walking down the street and passed a house where there were a bunch of vicious dogs and the fellow in the house kept sicking [sic] those dogs on you, and you kept knocking those dogs over, and the man who kept sicking [sic] the dogs on you didn’t stop them, then if you got the man who sicked the dogs on you, you could stop them.’ He had reference to the Jews sicking the negroes on us. He said that acts of violence against the Jews would stop integration faster than on the negroes. He said that the acts of violence perpetrated against the Jews by bombing their synagogues and threatening their Rabbis and threatening their Federal judges has been solely responsible for slowing down integration.¹³³

Once the Jews became the secret bogeymen behind the Black civil rights movement, they became fair game in the minds of the people opposing integration.

The Explosion

The local papers reported that the Nashville Jewish Community Center had been hosting integrated community meetings, though there hadn’t been one for weeks. According to Gilbert Fox, who was the vice-president of the JCC at the time of the bombing, there had been an integrated activity, though. The JCC youth basketball team had recently hosted a Black youth community basketball team.

Fox and other Jewish leaders suspected that electricians who had been in the building that week had seen the children playing together, and that either the electricians were the bombers, or they had alerted the bombers to the situation.

Some witnesses remembered seeing a man sitting in a truck parked nearby as they left the JCC on the evening of March 16, 1958.

At 8:07 P.M. that night, the building, which then sat at 3500 West End Avenue, was bombed. Its front entrance was damaged, and windows on neighboring houses were blown out. No one was injured.

Damage to the JCC was mostly cosmetic. Unlike the Hattie Cotton bomb, which was detonated by electric charge, this bomb had a lit fuse. The FBI recorded that the explosive was placed near the door in such a way that indicated the bomber could have used the building’s shrubbery for cover while coming and going. The FBI said that the Nashville Police Department and the Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification (TBCI) found two pieces of Orange Wax Clover Safety Fuse about five feet long and “taped together with light-colored masking tape, which was approximately three quarters of an inch in width.”¹³⁴

Rabbi William Silverman of The Temple out in Belle Meade received a call before he had even heard news of the explosion. His wife answered the phone and according to the Tennessean and the FBI, the caller said, “I am a member of the Confederate Union. We have just dynamited the Jewish Community Center. Next will be The Temple, and next will be any other nigger-loving place or nigger-loving person in Nashville. And we’re going to shoot down Judge Miller in cold blood.” Judge Miller, you recall, was the judge overseeing Nashville’s school integration.

A few minutes later, a man called the Tennessean and said, “This is the Confederate Underground. We just blew up the center of the integrationists in Nashville. Now we are going after Judge Miller.” An hour later, an anonymous caller reached the United Press and said, “This is the Confederate Underground. We have just blown up the integration center. Our next target is Judge Miller. We are going to shoot him down in the street. The dirty son of a bitch.”

The FBI went out of its way to note that the caller “had the voice of an educated man, low-pitched, and no particular accent.” We can gather from the FBI’s report that there was something the TBCI recognized in this bombing, whether it was the description of the anonymous caller’s voice or the way the bomb was put together—what exactly, we don’t know. But the TBCI told the FBI that “REDACTED was the only suspect in this bombing and that a piece of masking tape, similar to that found on the fuse, was located in a garage operated by REDACTED. This was also sent to the FBI Laboratory, but no identification could be made between this and the tape found at the scene of the explosion.”¹³⁵

Based on the fire marshal’s report, we know REDACTED was Wallace Rider, the garage owner who insinuated to Frank Houchin that he had been involved with the Hattie Cotton bombing.

The Message

On March 28, Rabbi Silverman addressed his congregation with a message entitled “We Will Not Yield.” As you can imagine, the Jewish community in Nashville was shaken. My understanding, after talking with people who were alive then, is that Nashville Jews had very mixed feelings about how to, or even whether to, take a public stance on integration, for fear of being targeted. There was, apparently, shock and confusion about the bombing because Jewish people in Nashville hadn’t been particularly vocal in support of integration. If they were targeted in order to dissuade them from publicly supporting integration, it wasn’t clear to a lot of folks how they could do less.

Of course, most Jewish people in Nashville were completely unaware that J.B. Stoner and other white supremacists were targeting Jews because of their conspiratorial belief that Jews controlled Black people and getting rid of the Jews would cause Black people to settle back down into their rightful, subservient place in society. They were used to much more straightforward antisemitism.

But Rabbi Silverman—who, remember, had been singled out by the JCC bomber—stood before his congregation and urged them to use this act of terrorism to galvanize them toward social justice. The sermons we are most familiar with from the civil rights era, like King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, were for a large audience that King knew included the general public. Silverman’s sermon wasn’t published until 2008 and it is heavily focused on what he thought his congregation and the larger Jewish community in Nashville needed to hear.

Even with that focus and context, it’s a deeply stirring message. At the end, Silverman says,

WE WILL NOT YIELD TO EVIL. We will not capitulate to fear. We will not surrender to violence. We will not submit to intimidation but, as Reform Jews, we will continue to speak for truth; we shall continue to dedicate ourselves to social justice and to the brotherhood of ALL men, knowing and believing that all men are created in the divine image, and this includes Negroes as well as Caucasians. And even as we stand at the threshold of Passover, our Festival of Freedom, the Season of liberation, with resolution and reverence, our hearts touched, warmed and ignited by the Eternal Flame of an eternal faith, we shall continue to consecrate ourselves to human rights, and civil liberties—we shall, with God’s help, continue to dedicate ourselves to the cause of freedom and justice for all the children of man.¹³⁶

The Suspects

Donald Davidson shared his theory of the bombing with fellow poet and white supremacist Allen Tate in a letter.

As to the “anti-Semitic outburst” in Nashville, that’s the usual propaganda stuff put out by the press services. It is serious only because the incident will be exploited to cast discredit on the South and especially on all “segregationists”, including such people as me.… As to who planted the dynamite, nobody knows, and the police have no clues.¹³⁷

In April, the police were questioning Elmer Robinson, a local Klansman, who was arrested in Carthage, a town about an hour east of Nashville. The Tennessean reported that he had “four timer clocks with electrical contacts and about 50 feet of electrical wire.” Robinson claimed he was going to store the clocks “in his garage, although police said he later admitted he did not have a garage.”¹³⁸

Robinson fell through.

Nashville police shared a list of suspects with the Birmingham, Alabama, police as part of the region-wide initiative to stop these bombings: Robert Lewis Bromley, Wallace Lester Rider, James McKinley Thompson (who we know was called Slim), John Houston Prater, and Joseph Edward Prater. Rider and Thompson were fingered by Frank Houchin as two of the three Hattie Cotton bombers, so it’s not surprising to see them pop up on this list. Bromley had been Rider’s tenant, so it makes sense he might be tied in. But the Prater brothers? I don’t know why they were on the list. They have similar backgrounds to the others—they’d been busted for robbing gas stations and liquor stores a few times. But I never came across their names at any other point. They’re not on Kasper’s witness list. They’re not mentioned in any Klan meetings. I didn’t find anything that connected them with the rest of the men on the list.

I can’t exonerate them, but I also can’t explain why they were suspects.

Which leaves us with Robert Bromley.

Bromley and his wife were on Kasper’s witness list when Kasper went to trial for his Nashville activities late in 1958, so he was at least tangentially tied to the crowd we’d expect to see the bomber come out of.¹³⁹ But Bromley is buried in Calvary Cemetery. He’s Catholic.

Now, clearly, there were Catholic segregationists in Nashville.¹⁴⁰ The police beat some of them in the Hattie Cotton investigation. And Catholics can also be anti-Semitic. So, it’s not like the fact that Bromley was Catholic would, ordinarily, prevent him from hating Jewish people. And we know Kasper and Stoner welcomed Catholics into their ranks and that Carr had been doing some Klan outreach work to that community.

But I’m still stuck on this. Nashville literally had a white supremacist church in Rev. Fred Stroud’s renegade ex-Presbyterian congregation. The vast majority of racists who’d come to town to scream about segregation were Protestant. Some of these Protestants were clearly on a path to Christian Identity beliefs, and Christian Identity, by the 1960s, believed that Jews and Blacks were descended from Eve and the serpent—literally children of the Devil who needed to be annihilated in a holy war.¹⁴¹ That was a theological teaching. You might find some Catholics who believe that Black people are the children of Ham (one of Noah’s less-cool sons). You might find Catholics who believe that Jews had their shot at being God’s favorites, but they screwed it up, and now He loves Christians best. But “Jews and Blacks are descended from Satan” is a theological leap most Catholics at this time wouldn’t have made, especially because the unspoken goal of the annihilation of the serpent’s descendants was so that proper white Christians could rule. And every Catholic in the South in the 1950s knew in their bones that white Protestants aiming for white Christian rule had no intention of including white Catholics in their paradise. The big Klan revival of the 1920s viewed Catholicism as incompatible with democracy and had happened in the adult memory of these folks’ parents.

I’m going to admit that this may just be a place my imagination can’t reach. I’ve been listening to Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Ultra, which covers the America First movement and discusses the popularity of Father Coughlin and his anti-Semitic message. And I get, listening to that pod-cast, how he was carving out a space for Catholics in a very anti-Catholic society by appealing to a shared antisemitism. I get it. And, like I said, I have plenty of evidence that some Nashville Catholics were so opposed to integration that they joined the Klan.

But, man, how did it not occur to the Crimmons brothers or Bromley that they were doing the dirty work for men who, when it came right down to it, belonged to an organization that would happily turn on them?

The Other Anti-Semitic Bombings of the Confederate Underground

Later that year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) put out a pamphlet on the rise of anti-Semitic hate in the South: “Between June 1, 1954 and October 12, 1958, there have been 83 bombings in the South, of which the seven [anti-Jewish] bombings and attempted bombings were only one part.”¹⁴²

Here are those anti-Jewish bombings: November 11, 1957, an attempted bombing at the Temple Beth El in Charlotte, North Carolina; February 9, 1958, an attempted bombing at the Temple Emanuel in Gastonia, North Carolina; the Beth-El temple in Miami was bombed the same day as Nashville’s JCC; April 27, a Black high school and a Jewish synagogue in Jacksonville, Florida, were bombed; the next day, April 28, the Temple Beth-El in Birmingham had a bombing attempt; and then October 12, the Temple in Atlanta. The Confederate Underground claimed responsibility by phone in many of these bombings. In the case of the Jacksonville bombing, the caller said, “This is the Confederate Underground. We’ve just blown up the Jacksonville Jewish Center of Integration.” The same wording as the caller in our bombing.

The ADL report goes on:

With regard to the bombings of Jewish institutions as such, several patterns seem to emerge. In all cases, an apparent attempt was made to avoid causing injury to human life, to time the explosions in such a way that they would only cause physical damage to property—with the evident intention of intimidating the Jewish communities.

Almost identical shopping bags were used to conceal the dynamite in Gastonia and Birmingham. It also appears that in all cases with the possible exception of Birmingham, the dynamite employed was of a common variety readily purchasable or easily stolen.

In Nashville, Miami, Jacksonville and Atlanta, telephone calls were placed to prominent individuals by anonymous persons identifying themselves as members of the “Confederate Underground.” In each case the caller indicated a familiarity with what had transpired before it became a matter of public knowledge. Finally, it is generally believed by police and other experts that one group of individuals is responsible for all of the bombings against Jewish institutions.¹⁴³

According to FBI files, an informant was also claiming that Stoner was trying to plan something against a Jewish target in Chattanooga. According to Birmingham police files, the St. Louis, Missouri, police were looking at Stoner for a threat against a “Jewish Center Home.” Someone (the St. Louis police believed it was Stoner) called and said, “‘The same thing can happen here as in Nashville, Tennessee,’ and it was also remarked that it was the Confederate Union or Underground that was calling.”¹⁴⁴

You’d think that a criminal conspiracy that cut across state lines would be right up the FBI’s alley, but no, the Tennessean reported that the FBI was still convinced that “it lacks authority to enter the cases.”¹⁴⁵

But Why Target These Places?

Kasper had visited many, if not all of these cities, before the bombings, and I suspect that’s not a coincidence. I think Stoner really wanted Kasper to be in the National States Rights Party; this was the terrorist equivalent of flowers and an invitation. But there’s another possibility we need to consider. It’s possible Stoner was trying to impress Kasper because Stoner wanted Kasper, period.

We need to tread carefully here. Obviously, people were gay in the 1950s, and obviously, gay people can also be terrible racists. But it’s also obvious that the FBI used “homosexual” and “deviant” as synonyms and saw part of their mission as ridding the country of deviants. And it’s clear that the FBI often accused people of being homosexual or engaging in homosexual activity in order to prove that they deserved FBI scrutiny. The FBI also knew that calling someone a homosexual at this time was a great way to ruin his life.

So, for instance, when the FBI suggested that John Kasper had slept with a Black man in New York City, it’s hard to know what to make of that. I didn’t find any other evidence he slept with men as well as women, but I can’t rule it out. But the FBI in this case wasn’t interested in whether it was a fact. They wanted to suggest that Kasper had not only crossed a racial taboo, but a sexual one as well. They wanted to ruin Kasper’s ability to lead racists. They nearly did.

The FBI’s proof, such as it was, that J.B. Stoner was gay is a little more solid. By the end of 1959, the FBI had a really good informant very close to Stoner and Fields. This informant told them:

Stoner was still going fiercely on the F.B.I. studded with “Kikes and queers” and “pervert agents committing all kinds of sexual abominations.” This had now been going on three hours and I had never been submitted to a more refined brand of torture than listening to Stoner’s outpourings. But in all this there remains some questionable point. “Methinks he does protest too much,” as Shakespeare would put it. Besides the fact that they were living together, Fields and Stoner were sharing the same bed, and there may be more than meets the eye in this situation.¹⁴⁶

The irony is that everyone was right. Hoover and Tolson were more than friends. Stoner and Fields slept in the same bed whenever Fields’s wife was out of town (the FBI heard this from multiple informants over the years).¹⁴⁷ Everyone’s protesting too much and pointing out the real deviants far from themselves.

Stoner never married. As we’ve seen, there was no shortage of radical racist women. If Stoner had wanted a female companion, I think he could have found one.

So, let’s entertain the idea that the FBI is right about Stoner and not just looking to slander him. Fields was a tall, handsome, smart man with what appears—though it’s hard to tell with black-and-white photos—sandy brown hair. If this was Stoner’s type, then Kasper fits it—tall, passably good looking, smart, and with brown hair.

How does a violent racist flirt with another violent racist? Maybe by bombing the cities the first violent racist visited and called for violence in?