CHAPTER 8 J.B. STONER DECIDES BOMBING EMPTY BUILDINGS ISN’T ENOUGH

The Archives of the State of Florida

Guide to the Racists in this Chapter

Dick Ashe Florida Klan Leader who was working with or for the FBI

Richard and Robert Bowling Brothers who worked with J.B. Stoner

Raymond Britt Montgomery Klansman and bomber who moved to Jacksonville

Asa Carter Alabama Klansman and enemy of Bull Connor

Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss Birmingham bomber

Eugene “Bull” Connor Birmingham commissioner of public safety

Admiral John Crommelin Racist activist and retired Navy man

Eldon Edwards Imperial Wizard of the US Klans

John Kasper Racist who vexed Nashville

Floyd Fleming John Kasper’s acquaintance and friend of Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell

Robert Pittman Gentry Florida Klansman who grew up in Murfreesboro

Barton H. Griffin, Jacky Don Harden, Willie Eugene Wilson, and Donald Eugene Spegal Florida Klansmen who, along with Robert Pittman Gentry, committed acts of terrorism in Jacksonville

Fred Hockett Violent racist and FBI informant

Sonny Livingston Montgomery Klansman and bomber

William Hugh Morris Birmingham Klan leader and informant

George Lincoln Rockwell Founder of the American Nazi Party

Gary Rowe Alabama Klansman who was working for the FBI

M.B. Sherrill Florida Klansman, member of the Pro-Southerners, and acquaintance of Emmett Carr

Vance Maxey Stevenson Nashville Klansman

J.B. Stoner Terrorist

Robert and Carrie Wray Friends of John Kasper he sometimes stayed with

Southern officials were upset about the Confederate Underground’s bombing campaign. They wanted the FBI’s help, and the FBI was still farting around claiming that they didn’t have jurisdiction. We were lucky to have the TBCI, which could coordinate investigations in Tennessee that contained multiple municipalities, but many states didn’t have an analogous department. Florida, for instance, didn’t. So even if police in Jacksonville and Miami knew their bombings had been done by the same group, it was very difficult for them to coordinate their investigations and share information. There just wasn’t the infrastructure for it.

Scale that up to a region-wide series of attacks and the problems compound. Someone who had a national perspective, who could track people’s movement and trace long-distance phone calls, needed to be coordinating the investigation, but the FBI wouldn’t. This kind of myopia at the FBI was still a problem ten years later. See Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock’s Killing King, where they found that one of the reasons the FBI never suspected Stoner’s involvement in the plot to kill Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is that Stoner was in Mississippi when the assassination occurred. As if Mississippi isn’t directly south of Memphis? As if phones didn’t exist?

Unless, of course, the myopia was deliberate, because the FBI didn’t want Southern law enforcement to get too close to their informants.

The Southern Conference on Bombing

Anyway, this forced states to say, in essence, “forget the FBI, we’ll do it ourselves.” In May 1958, Southern governors held the Southern Conference on Bombing, where they shared information with each other about known dangerous racists in their states. I know they shared lists of names of people, because the list of dangerous people in Alabama from that conference is in the Birmingham city archives. The most complete paperwork from the conference I was able to find, in the State Archives of Florida, doesn’t include any of those lists. Which is a shame.

But the file from the State Archives of Florida does reveal some interesting stuff. For one, the Jacksonville police had looked closely at a person from Montgomery, Alabama, in the Jacksonville bombings—“REDACTED was tried and acquitted in the case of a bombing in Montgomery, Alabama last year. His modus operandi in those cases was the same as the ones committed in Jacksonville.”148 Two men had confessed to, been tried for, and been acquitted of bombing four Black churches in January 1957—Bell Street Baptist, Hutchison Street Baptist, First Street Baptist, and Mount Olive—and the homes of Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Rev. Robert Graetz, who had been active supporters of the Montgomery bus boycott. Those two bombers were Klansmen Raymond Britt and Sonny Livingston. Britt had also been involved in the lynching of Willie Edwards that same month. Judging by the shortness of the black mark redaction over the name in the Florida archive, the Jacksonville suspect was Britt. The Jacksonville City Directory shows a Raymond Britt living in the city in 1958. If Jacksonville police were right to suspect Britt—and with his history of violence, it seems like they were—then we know Britt was in the Confederate Underground, because the Jacksonville bombings were one of the sets of bombings where the Confederate Underground called to take responsibility, which means Britt had ties to Stoner.

There’s another interesting, but confusing, bit in the report that reads, “a ladies train bag was found containing the dynamite in the Gastonia attempted bombing. As in the Jacksonville bombings, a witness stated that she saw a light colored car with a tag, bearing white background, with black letters, the first two numerals which she believed to be A-9, at the scene, just before the bomb went off, and it is possible a car with numerals similar to this might be a Morie [sic] County,¹⁴⁹ Tennessee tag, as was seen in the area of Nashville and near the vicinity of the explosion at the time of the bombing.”¹⁵⁰

This seems to indicate three sightings of a light car with Maury County plates. “As with the Jacksonville bombing” makes it seem like that car was spotted in Jacksonville. The car was also spotted in Nashville during the JCC bombing, most likely, since there’s no discussion of Hattie Cotton in the file. Wherever this witness was, she also saw such a car. I’m guessing, from context, that she was in Gastonia, North Carolina. Nashville and Miami were also looking for an unidentified man who took a flight from Miami after the bombing there and arrived in Nashville prior to the JCC bombing.

My guess is that J.B. Stoner was in that car and on that flight. We know that J.B. Stoner was discussed at this meeting, and we know that he emerged as the suspected mastermind. He’s not specifically named in the documents available, but we have an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence that suggests he was specifically named at the conference, starting with the fact that the FBI and various local law enforcements all took up the assumption that Stoner was the bomber thereafter, or at least the head of this bombing network.

In the first half of 1958, Stoner was still employed by State Farm and had a bit of money. According to the FBI file on the Atlanta bombing, “when STONER first came to Dublin, he did not have a car of his own and he drove a 1955 Ford, four-door, cream colored, bearing a Florida license which belonged to State Farm and had been used by a company nurse in Jacksonville, Fla.¹⁵¹ STONER used this car until August 1957, when he obtained a 1957 Chevrolet, yellow body and cream top, which the company purchased for him.”¹⁵² As for the plates, Stoner often talked about switching them out. It wouldn’t be a problem for one of his Middle Tennessee acquaintances to get him plates from Maury County to use when he was doing non–State Farm things.

Oh, but here’s where it gets ridiculous.

The Time Bull Connor Decided to Catch J.B. Stoner

Bull Connor, yes, Bull “turn the firehoses on peaceful protesters” Connor was one of Alabama’s delegates to the conference on bombings. He was also on Alabama’s list of known dangerous racists in their state. He was furious and embarrassed (even though it was true!) and the conference organizers scrambled to apologize and appease him.

Still, Connor was motivated to do something dramatic to show that he wasn’t a violent racial terrorist. When he got home to Birmingham, he was determined to catch a high-profile racial terrorist. Except he needed someone who wasn’t one of his friends.

Conveniently, Bull Connor wasn’t friends with the man Southern law enforcement had just spent days warning one another about—J.B. Stoner. I’ve never heard why Connor was hostile to Stoner, but it may be as simple as Stoner being buddy-buddy with Asa Carter, who had run against Bull Connor for office. So, Connor set out to catch Stoner being a racist terrorist. But for that to happen, he needed Stoner to have a racist terrorist plot in Birmingham. Connor had Klan leader William Hugh Morris vouch for two undercover police officers who were posing as businessmen, assuring Stoner they were prominent townsfolk. They then hired Stoner to bomb local civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s church. For another $1,500, Stoner offered to throw in the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.¹⁵³

Judging by the FBI file, it doesn’t appear that Connor’s men agreed to pay Stoner to kill King, but let’s note that we now know—and the FBI knew at the time—that by 1958, Stoner was entertaining plans to kill King, meaning King was on Stoner’s radar, and Stoner was already looking for excuses to go after him.

Through his intermediaries, Bull Connor paid J.B. Stoner a small amount of money to indicate that they were serious about the plot to blow up Shuttlesworth’s church. The plan was that Stoner would come to town to do the bombing in July, then Connor would arrest him, thus proving that Connor could do something no other Southern authority could—get Stoner for a bombing everyone knew he was involved in—and thus prove that Connor wasn’t one of the bad guys.

Unfortunately for Connor, Stoner was well-connected, and he wasn’t an idiot. He likely knew the plan. Stoner came into town on or right before June 29, 1958, and his crew placed a bomb at the church. Fortunately, a church employee found the bomb and moved it into the street, where it exploded without injuring anyone. While this was going on, someone on the bomb crew tried to call Bull Connor to taunt him about the bombing. When he could only get through to the switchboard operator at the police department, he told her the Confederate Underground had just bombed a “Communist center of integration”.^{154 155} Then Stoner left town.

Which meant that Bull Connor had paid a known racist bomber to bomb the church of a prominent Birmingham civil rights leader. Which, again, did not assuage anyone’s fear that Connor was a violent racial terrorist.

At this point, Connor—who is really failing to learn from recent history here—went to the FBI for help. The same FBI that has heretofore utterly refused to help Southern authorities, of which Connor is one, with interstate racial terrorism, hence the reason for the conference Connor attended and was embarrassed at, which then led him to this cockamamie scheme in the first place.

Guess what happened next.

That’s right. They refused to help Connor. Congratulations—we all have more ability to predict people’s present behavior based on their past behavior than Bull Connor had.

Of all the evil Stoner was involved in, this is the thing he eventually went to prison for. Thirty years later. Just for three years. But he did go to prison. Ultimately, this was because it was a sting operation. Prosecutors had Connor’s plan and could show a trail that led to Stoner doing this bombing. It’s tempting to believe that Connor straight-up hired Stoner to bomb the church, because we know the kind of monstrous things Connor’s on the verge of doing. But I do think it’s clear he did intend to catch Stoner in the act.

Klan Leader William Hugh Morris, Police Informant

There’s a little tidbit in the FBI’s NSRP file that adds an interesting Nashville wrinkle to this Birmingham story:

STONER contacted the source, stating he wanted to organize an air-tight group with the purpose of perpetrating violence against the Jews. STONER “intimated strongly” to this source that he was responsible for the bombings of a school and synagogue in Nashville, Tennessee, and a synagogue in Birmingham. STONER spoke knowingly of other acts of violence. STONER, having been contacted by the source under the pretext of representing a group which wanted to arrange for some act of violence against Negroes, indicated that he would set a price for such work. STONER thereafter met with this source and members of the Birmingham PD, who impersonated members of the source’s “group”. STONER represented that he could, through “his boys”, arrange for bombings or killings, and implied that he had arranged bombings in connection with anti-Semitic and anti-Negro activity in the past. Following the attempted bombing of a Negro church in Birmingham, Alabama, in June 1958, STONER again contacted the source and members of the Birmingham PD (still under pretext) representing that he had arranged for the bombing and attempted to collect a sum of money for the “service”. On December 8, 1958, Commissioner EUGENE CONNOR, Department of Public Safety, Birmingham, Alabama furnished SAC CLARENCE KELLY a copy of a statement dated 12/8/58 by REDACTED to Commissioner CONNOR and Birmingham Police Officers (Bureau refer to Birmingham airtel to Bureau 12/9/58 in the REDACTED ET ALL matter). In the statement dated 12/8/58 REDACTED included the following:

Source had “gathered bit by bit,” from STONER, that STONER had “planned and put into execution” bombings of the Hattie Cotton School, Nashville, Tennessee, a synagogue in Atlanta, the Clinton, Tennessee High School[,] at Jacksonville, and Miami bombings and The Temple Beth-El, Birmingham. STONER said, according to the source, that he bore the expenses and bought the dynamite for all the bombings. STONER deplored, the source said, that so many people who believe in segregation and the White race, will sit around and do nothing. The source expressed the opinion that STONER is insane.¹⁵⁶

Okay, so let’s make sure we all understand what this is saying. Stoner came to this source sometime before June 1958 and told the source he wanted to put together a terror cell to target Jews in Birmingham. Then, in June, Stoner tried to get paid for bombing the “Negro church.” All the while, he was telling this source about all the places he had bombed and how he supported the bombings. So, why didn’t the FBI nail Stoner to the wall?

In view of the possible doubt as to the reliability of REDACTED and the fact that past intensive investigation by the Bureau or local authorities regarding the various bombings mentioned by REDACTED has failed to corroborate REDACTED’s information re STONER’S involvement in such bombings, the information originating with REDACTED has not been included in the body of this report.¹⁵⁷

If there’s one thing we know, though, it’s that these investigations were not as intensive as they could have been with the FBI’s help. The fact that Nashville couldn’t piece together Stoner’s involvement in the JCC bombing, for instance, isn’t an indication that he wasn’t involved; it’s an indication that Nashville needed the FBI to help them put together clues from other anti-Semitic bombings throughout the South.

Though the copy of the FBI file I have has this source’s identity redacted here, based on later references in other FBI files and Birmingham police files, this source was Klan leader William Hugh Morris,¹⁵⁸ the very Klan leader who had facilitated the meetings between Stoner and the undercover police.

Morris gave the Birmingham police, and then the FBI, a lot of information about Stoner and about our bombings, so the question of whether he’s reliable is important. Can we trust the FBI’s take on him? Frankly, I’m not sure.

Morris told the Birmingham police,

[Stoner] has talked to me about that on numerous occasions in a general way and has intimated very strongly to me that he was responsible for the bombing of the school in Nashville, Tennessee, the placing of the bomb at the synagogue here in Birmingham, also the bombing of the synagogue in Miami, Florida, and of calling by telephone the Rabbi down in Miami and representing himself as a member of the Confederate Underground and it was either to the Rabbi in Miami or to the Federal judge in Nashville that he said he would shoot them down in cold blood. I don’t remember which of them that was.¹⁵⁹

Morris seemed to know that Stoner had been in both Miami and Nashville, even though those bombings took place on the same day (Miami in the very early morning, Nashville at night). That’s not a detail anyone else but the people at the Southern Conference on Bombing seemed to have known,¹⁶⁰ which suggests Morris heard it directly from Stoner. I could not find any source saying definitely that anyone in Miami got a phone call from the Confederate Underground, so I had been assuming that Morris just mixed Miami up with Jacksonville; but I have since learned that Miami likely did get a call. This would mean that Morris knew something that didn’t make the papers and wasn’t widely known.

I went down to Birmingham and read through the Birmingham Police Department Surveillance Files. Morris gave Bull Connor a lot of information that isn’t in the FBI file I saw. Morris told Connor that Stoner was driving a blue-and-white Chevy early in 1958, the same color car witnesses saw driving away from the Hattie Cotton bombing in late 1957. The early ’50s Hudsons and Chevys did not look that different, especially from the back. And, more incredibly, not only did Morris tell Connor that Stoner had told him that Stoner had supplied the dynamite for the Hattie Cotton bombing, but Morris also claimed that Stoner and John Kasper met with Morris and asked for help bombing a school in the fall of 1957.

Worse than that, after Stoner and his crew bombed Rev. Shuttlesworth’s church, when Stoner showed back up in Birmingham looking for the money to pay his crew, he had a younger man with him. Morris got out of paying Stoner by telling him the non-existent financial backers of the plot had come to believe that Stoner wasn’t actually behind the bombings he claimed to be behind—that Jews had bombed the Birmingham synagogue themselves and that perhaps someone in Rev. Shuttlesworth’s congregation had tried to blow up their church. The man traveling with Stoner supposedly told Morris he was the one who placed the phone call in which the Confederate Underground took credit for Shuttlesworth’s church bombing and heavily insinuated that he (and maybe someone else) had done the bombing for Stoner. Morris identified that young man as a “Richard Bowling” from Atlanta.

Morris was telling Connor this in June 1958.

After the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple bombing on October 12, 1958, in Atlanta, one of the men arrested was Richard Bowling of Atlanta, along with his brother, Robert. This bombing was also attended by a call from the Confederate Underground. J.B. Stoner, supposedly, supplied the dynamite and then, as was his way, left town so he had an alibi.

As a side note that may be relevant to Nashville, the Birmingham police took a statement from the operator who had talked to the man who identified himself as being from the Confederate Underground, the man Morris claimed was Richard Bowling. She said he was well-spoken and easy to understand.¹⁶¹ It immediately put me in mind of how witnesses described the voice of the Confederate Underground caller in the Nashville JCC bombing. Let me be clear, I don’t think this proves anything. But I do think it’s enough to put Richard Bowling on our list of possible bombers of the Nashville JCC.

So, here’s where we are with William Hugh Morris, Klan leader and police informant: Some of his information is not quite right. It’s true that Bull Connor had every reason to want to make Stoner out to be the worst of the worst and Morris into Connor’s brilliant inside man instead of a doofus in over his head. It’s mighty convenient that Morris just happened to link Stoner to most of the unsolved bombings of the era.

But Morris also seemed to have really, really good information—like the name of one of J.B. Stoner’s bombers—that no one else had.

Kasper had invited a ton of KKK leaders to Nashville in August 1957. Why couldn’t Morris have been there? Kasper himself wrote that Stoner had been. Is it so hard to imagine that Stoner and Kasper might have met up with Morris, who had once been the regional head of our Klan and still had ties to those men?

I don’t think we should do like the FBI and dismiss everything Morris has to say, but I do think we should be cautious about accepting anything he says without something other than his word to give some credence to it.

Still, what appears to have happened is that the FBI had okay—not great, but okay—information about the extent to which Stoner was involved in the Nashville bombings, which they kept from local law enforcement and even many FBI agents who could have used it, because someone else, namely Bull Connor, had stumbled across this lead.

I’m going to give the FBI a little benefit of the doubt here, at least to the extent that this was Bull Connor’s source, not theirs. Bull Connor, as we’ve seen, was not making wise decisions, and it seems reasonable that the FBI should be suspicious of his source. Also, they knew Connor was looking to nail Stoner for something, anything, so it does seem super convenient that Connor has a source that links Stoner to everything.

But this is also what the evidence points to—that Stoner was in fact involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in most racist violence in the South in this era.

Another Nashville School Year, Another August of John Kasper Being an Asshole

This brings us back to Nashville in late summer, 1958. At the beginning of August, Kasper was released from federal prison in Atlanta and made his way back to Nashville. According to our stair-step integration plan, first grade and now second grade would be desegregated. White people were still pissed about integration. The Nashville Klan had switched allegiances from the United Klans to the Dixie Knights, a more violent faction. Many of Kasper’s followers had joined the National States Rights Party while he was in prison. In other words, integration was spreading, racist whites were radicalizing, and the city’s main suspect for being the mastermind behind the bombings was back in town.

It should have been a recipe for disaster, and Kasper tried to make it so. He did all the things he did the year before—big public spectacles of asshole-ishness, warnings of impending doom, an alleged terrorist plot—but nothing came off. Which suggests that there was some necessary component for racial violence in Nashville that Kasper didn’t have at the time or didn’t know he needed. He knew how to advocate for violence, but it seems like he didn’t know how to ensure it would happen. He could shout “dynamite” repeatedly, but without that mystery factor, no one was going to be Kasper’s terrorist.

I have many theories as to what this factor was, but I think the most likely one is that the people involved in the JCC bombing, and thus maybe the Hattie Cotton bombing, were laying low while Southern states were making noises about actually trying to catch them. Another possibility is that they knew the October 5 Clinton High School bombing was in the works and that’s where their attention was. Another distinct possibility is that they were all busy planning the bombing of the Atlanta Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple, which took place on October 12. You don’t want to risk getting caught doing piddly crimes in Nashville when the grand finale of your region-wide anti-Semitic bombing campaign is so near. Racist bombers may just have been too busy getting ready for October’s events to come fart around in Nashville in September.

Still, Kasper’s activities in 1958 are alarming.

On August 22, 1958, the FBI in Alabama received a tip that “John Kasper was planning to assassinate a colored city councilman in Nashville, Tennessee, by the name of Frank Luby [sic]; that Kasper had selected him [the tipster] for the job and REDACTED [the tipster] was to go to Nashville when Kasper directed him to do so; and that Kasper was to furnish the rifle with which to commit the murder.”¹⁶²

The tipster gave the FBI other information—that Kasper and Admiral John Crommelin “had formed a third political party on which ticket Crommelin would run for President” and that some of Kasper’s followers were plotting to assassinate Bishop Sheen of New York. An agent from the Mobile office went to interview the tipster and found him “not trustworthy and possibly psychopathic.”

In fact, Crommelin would announce his run for president on the National States Rights Party¹⁶³ ticket a couple of weeks later at the NSRP convention.¹⁶⁴ Now, we know that Kasper and Crommelin hadn’t really formed the party. But the informant’s information about Crommelin’s political ambitions was accurate. Yet there was a note in the margins of the Mobile Office’s letter: “No dissemination.”

In other words, the FBI knew Kasper was back in Nashville and had good reason to believe he was possibly literally gunning for Looby, and they appear to have decided to keep that a secret.

On August 23, someone called now–school superintendent W.H. Oliver and warned him to stay away from a meeting being held the next day about desegregating Nashville’s second grade. Both Oliver and the FBI were convinced Kasper was the caller. On the 24th, Oliver attended that meeting at Clark Memorial Methodist Church. Kasper, Carrie Wray and her daughter, and some of Kasper’s men also attended the meeting. During the meeting a bomb threat was called in. Kasper and his group tried to leave while the church was evacuated and searched, but other attendees persuaded them to stay.

First, let’s take a moment to admire the brilliance of that crowd at Clark Memorial that day. Remember, at the time most everyone was convinced John Kasper had bombed Hattie Cotton. There he comes, this nationally known terrorist, to sit in on their meeting about school integration. That must have been incredibly unsettling. Then there’s a bomb threat, while you have a suspected bomber in your midst. Then that suspected bomber and his friends start to leave the event. I don’t know who had the idea to gather a crowd and make it clear that Kasper would be rejoining the group in the church once the police gave the all-clear, but it was so smart. If Kasper’s followers wanted to bomb the church, fine, but they were going to bomb Kasper with it.

Second, and I’m not some investigative genius here, but if you have a known terrorist in a building with one half of the couple he used to live with, and there’s a bomb threat against that building, isn’t the first person you go ask about the bomb threat the other half of that couple? I mean, Robert and Carrie Wray both appeared to be big Kasper supporters and yet only one of them has shown up to this little intimidation effort. Isn’t it likely that’s because the other one had a role in the event he couldn’t execute from inside the church?

The Wrays may have lucked out here because Kasper’s reputation for sticking his dick where it didn’t belong was already very well known. When the police saw Carrie Wray with Kasper, I think it likely didn’t dawn on them that they should wonder what her husband was doing while she was with Kasper. If anything, they probably thought Robert Wray should wonder what, or who, his wife was doing.

Over the weekend of August 30 and 31, Kasper was one of the keynote speakers at the National States Rights Party convention in Louisville. The FBI recorded that he talked about the bombings:

Just look what happened while I was in prison even; those folks that have heard the truth in Clinton, Tennessee, and other places have a reaction even then, a synagogue was bombed in Miami, and Nashville, attempts were made in Gastonia, North Carolina, and Nigger schools were bombed and dynamited. All this was done only after a little communication work had been accomplished.

[ …]

We as leaders couldn’t be blamed because we are non-violent, but we tell the truth, and when the people find out the truth, such reaction is normal.¹⁶⁵

It’s hard to know how true this is. On the one hand, it’s kind of surprising that Kasper wouldn’t want to take more direct credit for the bombings. On the other hand, he didn’t want to go back to prison and, though he couldn’t have possibly known how many FBI informants were in the room, he certainly would have guessed it was a number greater than zero. Probably best to distance himself.

The Clinton High School Bombing, October 5, 1958

With all his talk of dynamite, it’s not surprising that Kasper still gets the blame, or the credit, for the bombing of the Clinton High School on October 5th, 1958. He had been active in Clinton, he had incited a riot, and he’d just gotten out of prison on charges related thereto.

But this time, the FBI had a close eye on Kasper and usually knew right where he was. Kasper was in Nashville when the Clinton High School was bombed. Yes, he could have planned the bombing and directed it from afar, except, remember, the segregationists in Clinton had come to loathe him. Who would he have made this plan with?

We’re going to have to devolve into straight-up gossip here, but the unsubstantiated gossip I have heard is that the identity of the Clinton bomber or bombers is known in elderly racist circles in Clinton, that there were two brothers and the bomber was one or the other of them, and that they were tied to the NSRP.

The fact that this gossip exists and that I can hear it, sitting nearly 200 miles away from Clinton, never having visited Clinton, and doing very little heavy research into the Clinton situation, is one of the stranger things about this. Not that the Clinton gossip exists, but that the Nashville gossip doesn’t.

I assumed when I started this research that our situation would be similar to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing down in Birmingham, where a lot of people knew who did it but it just couldn’t be legally proven at the time. I figured we never received justice because the right group of people to prosecute the case and serve on the juries didn’t exist in the late ’50s and early ’60s in Nashville.

But I have tried to find the right gossip network that could at least informally say who bombed us. If that gossip network exists, and surely it must, it must be very small and very insular.

The Clinton bombing is important to our story not just because it’s an important part of the “John Kasper was obviously a racist nightmare, but was he a bomber?” debate, but because Z. Alexander Looby was the lawyer on the Clinton desegregation case.

As far as I can tell, no one has explicitly made this connection. Among some people, it goes without saying that, of course, Looby was involved in all this. Who else was there to be? If African Americans in Tennessee needed a lawyer to take on a civil rights case, they were likely going to turn to Looby. But I think law enforcement, if they were looking for connections between the bombings at all, looked at who was bombed and who the suspected bombers were. No one seems to have stepped back to see if these cases had anyone else in common.

This is also what pisses me off about the way Nashville has erased the JCC bombing from our collective memory. If you don’t know it happened and you don’t know why the bombers said they did it, then you don’t see the pattern developing with Looby at the center.

We don’t have to continue to make that mistake. Let’s look at the racist violence against Looby’s causes.

In 1956, we have the Clinton Riot. Looby was the lawyer for the folks who wanted to desegregate the Clinton school system. In 1957, Hattie Cotton blows up. Looby was the lawyer for the family who wanted to desegregate Nashville schools. In 1958, the JCC blows up and the Confederate Underground threatens the life of Judge Miller. Judge Miller was presiding over the Nashville school desegregation case brought by Looby. Then back to Clinton for that bombing. In 1960, Looby’s house was bombed.

Five acts of racist terrorism in five years and Looby is connected to all five.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that a secondary purpose of the first four incidents was to scare Looby into backing off. When he would not, the fifth incident was supposed to guarantee he couldn’t be involved in any more desegregation efforts.

The Looby bombing wasn’t just one in a string of bombings. It was the culmination of a five-year effort to scare folks, especially Looby, away from school integration.

Anyway, we’ll get to Looby’s bombing in the next chapter. For now, let’s get back to Clinton High School.

In October 1958, Clinton High was bombed. Kasper was blamed. But finally, the FBI had eyes on Kasper almost all the time, so we know a lot of what he was up to and bombing Clinton wasn’t among those things.

Who did bomb Clinton? By November 1958, the FBI had a suspect:

Recently, however, there has been some indication of a general interstate pattern to these bombings. For example, one of the 5 men indicted on October 17, 1958, (Richard Bowling) for the bombing of the Jewish temple in Atlanta, received from one of his fellow conspirators two checks [handwriting] amounting to [typed] worth nearly $200. One of these checks was dated October 4, 1958, the day before the Clinton, Tennessee, High School bombing; the other, October 9, 1958, three days before the Atlanta temple bombing.¹⁶⁶

Richard Bowling, who, as in the gossip I heard, had a brother and was in the NSRP. Who, along with Stoner, bombed Rev. Shuttlesworth’s church. That’s three bombings in 1958 this guy was linked to in three different states. He was Stoner’s crony. Everyone knew that. Kasper was the face of the movement, but it was Stoner who had his hands in so many of the bombings.¹⁶⁷ Well, Stoner and Asa Carter. I just finished Rachel Martin’s book, A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation, which is about the Clinton bombing. It’s brilliant and you should read it. Possibly, you would have benefitted from reading it before you read this book. She makes two points that could be relevant—there was a lot of dynamite floating around Clinton, the police had confiscated at least two large caches of it; and “Asa Carter’s branch of the Klan had established an office in downtown Clinton just one block from the school.”¹⁶⁸

So, another possibility is that Bowling was not paid to bomb these two buildings, but was, instead, repaid for buying dynamite from whoever was stealing it in Clinton. Same network, just a slightly different structure.

John Kasper’s Scary Nashville Friends

Okay, back to Kasper.

In November, a couple of friends from D.C. came down to Nashville to visit Kasper. He showed them around town and introduced them to his racist buddies here. Kasper didn’t know it, but his D.C. friends went home and told the FBI all about their trip.

Here’s what the couple told the FBI about meeting a particular group of Kasper’s friends:

KASPER called on Thursday night and said that he would pick up the REDACTED [the D.C. couple] at 8:30 in front of the hotel and that he would be in a red and white Nash station wagon. He arrived, with REDACTED and her daughter, who goes to Antioch school, in the eighth grade. Everyone was introduced, and drove to the REDACTED who now live at REDACTED. KASPER said that they had been moved from the Jay Street address for almost three weeks.

REDACTED were introduced, and told about the REDACTED working for Seaboard WCC. REDACTED started talking, and said that just a few people had passed out thousands of handbills around REDACTED. He likes to talk, and the subject of weapons came up. He showed everyone his weapons, and he had a small arsenal. He brought out first a .25 cal. automatic pistol, chrome, and either Spanish or Italian. He said that he got it for his wife to carry in her purse. He then brought out either a M1 or an M2 Army carbine, and said that he had close to 300 rounds of ammo for it. He said that a friend of his and REDACTED had suggested that the gun be taken to a Negro park around Nashville, and that a group of Negro outers be told to take off down the road, and then worked over with the gun. He then showed a 1903 Enfield rifle, and said that he had close to 500 rounds of ammo for this gun. He paid $25.00 for it, he said. He said that he also had a .45 cal. government automatic pistol, and ammo for it. The carbine and the pistol were picked up in the Pacific in 1942, and were supposed to have been lost in action. He said that none of the guns are registered, and that several people know that he has them. He said that he could make aluminum knuckles at the plant he works at, and wished that REDACTED could carry a pair. KASPER said that the police could really get him then. REDACTED said that he knew where he could get a half case of dynamite at any time, without the owners knowledge, “at that there was always plenty of dynamite around.” He seems to know a good deal about dynamite, and talked about several different types of fuse. REDACTED carries an 18 inch British bayonet in his car, sharpened on both edges, and said that one swing would take a man’s head off.¹⁶⁹

There’s one more ominous bit the D.C. couple recounted that seems to be about this same man, “Kasper stated that REDACTED was not hot-headed and if he did anything violent would not broadcast it before or after and would do anything he did alone, with no help from anyone.”

The Wrays lived on Jay Street. Robert Wray was listed in the city directory in 1957 as living on Jay Street and working at AVCO. In 1960, he still worked at AVCO, but now lived on Lutie Street. Working at Avco would have given Wray access to aluminum to make aluminum knuckles. Wray was born in 1920, so he certainly could have been in the Pacific to pick up a gun during World War II.

Judging from the FBI file, the information this D.C. couple gave the FBI was very similar to what the FBI had been hearing from other sources. In a memo dated 4/29/58, the SAC wrote, “It is noted that information was furnished by REDACTED to the effect that ROBERT WRAY, in approaching him regarding possible membership in the Dixie Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, stated that he had picked up a carbine and one or two other rifles with ammunition in service in Europe and that he had smuggled these out of an Army camp when he returned to the United States.” The FBI interviewed Wray’s boss at Avco. They looked into his credit. They interviewed his grocer. And they called on someone, “REDACTED PSI, former Exalted Cyclops, Klavern 13, US Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc.” who “advised that he is acquainted with WRAY by reputation only and has seen him on one occasion. He advised that he has no information that WRAY has any Army guns.”¹⁷⁰ The FBI determined that the situation had been somewhat inflated. Wray didn’t have the arsenal that rumors attributed to him. He hadn’t served in the Army, but in the Navy. And, even without adjusting for the sexism of the time, what comes through in the files is that, while Robert was a true believer, Carrie was the one who was actually carting Kasper around and doing organizing work for the Tennessee White Citizens Council and becoming an elector for the NSRP. Carrie, supposedly, has no FBI file.

Return to the Florida Klans

But we do get two bits of important information here. One is that Wray was sniffing around about possibly joining the Dixie Knights and that the FBI already, by April 1958, had a Dixie Knights source. This is a different person than the REDACTED who was the Exalted Cyclops of Klavern No. 13. That’s the second important thing: the FBI had an informant who was the Exalted Cyclops of Klavern No. 13.

Can we know who that was, even with the redaction? Maybe. But it requires returning to Florida.

We’re going to get more in-depth into this when we discuss Robert Pittman Gentry, but in June 1964, five men would go on trial in Jacksonville, Florida, for bombing the home of Donal Godfrey, a first grader integrating his neighborhood school. Those men were Barton H. Griffin, Jacky Don Harden, Willie Eugene Wilson, Donald Eugene Spegal, and Middle Tennessean Robert Pittman Gentry. The UPI reported that “the FBI said Griffin was the Exalted Cyclops or President of Klavern 13, Harden was Exalted Cyclops of Klavern 8, Wilson was former Old Titan or Goodwill Ambassador for the Florida Klan organization, Spegal was Klokard or Lecturer for Klavern 13, and Gentry was Kligrapp or Secretary of Klavern 8 and Grand Klexter or Outer Guard of the State Klan group.”¹⁷¹

We have to go out on a bit of a limb here. As we’ve discussed, Klans were constantly breaking apart and reorganizing. We only have even odds that if Klavern No. 13 was in Florida in 1964 it was in Florida in 1958. But what if it was? Any interesting Exalted Cyclopses in Florida in 1958?

In June 1958, a Florida legislative committee was looking into the Klan. They cited Suwannee County sheriff Hugh Lewis with contempt for refusing to tell them about a 1955 attack on a Black farmer, Richard Cooks. Eldon Edwards, the Imperial Wizard of the US Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was also forced to testify. He told the committee that Dick Ashe, of Lakeland, Florida, had told him folks were trying to start a rival Klan (as we’ve already discussed). Edwards also said that Ashe was the Exalted Cyclops in the Lakeland area.

As a side note, M.B. Sherrill was also called to testify.¹⁷² He refused on state and federal constitutional grounds, since he didn’t have his lawyer. But what’s interesting is the question the committee attorney asked him. According to the Tampa Tribune, “One question Hawes asked was: Did Sherrill have any connection with the bombing of a Jewish Synagogue in Nashville, Tenn. Sherrill has been linked to Ku Klux Klan activities at Nashville and with anti-Jewish organizations. A letter purportedly written by him was introduced into evidence. The letter said the Klan was prepared to show Nashville residents how to make bombs and control fires and gasoline. Sherrill blurted out that he didn’t write the letter.”¹⁷³

The next day, we get this bombshell:

A self-proclaimed FBI undercover agent today laid the 1951 bomb slaying of a NAACP leader and his wife at Mims at the door of the Orlando Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Richard L. Ashe, 31, Winter Haven public relations man, testified before a Legislative investigating committee he had learned also that Klansmen at Jacksonville, Orlando, Lakeland, and Tallahassee have large stores of firearms and ammunition ready to oppose school integration with violence. He said the Orlando Klansmen have stockpiled dynamite in a warehouse.¹⁷⁴

There’s a lot here we suspected but didn’t know—folks had already made the connection between Florida and Nashville. The umbrella organization of the Klan headed up by Eldon Edwards was active in connecting and overseeing various Klans under it. There were explosives and weaponry that were set aside for segregationist violence and moved to communities where it was needed. There were terrorist workshops available to local Klans. (It’d be interesting to know if this was Stoner or if this is just where he got the idea. I suspect this was Stoner.)

And then there’s something we learn I’m not sure anyone has realized. Here’s the prototype for Gary Rowe. Like Rowe, Dick Ashe wasn’t in the KKK before he started working with the FBI. Like Rowe, the FBI recruited and placed Ashe into the Klan and then used him as a funnel for information. The FBI publicly claimed—like they did with Rowe—that Ashe wasn’t an FBI agent, per se, but just someone who worked with the FBI. Ashe told the committee that he got a salary and his expenses covered and that he was run by Special Agent Rae Jett.

Now let’s relook at that bit from Robert Wray’s FBI file: “REDACTED PSI, former Exalted Cyclops, Klavern 13, US Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc.” PSI is Personnel Security Interview, the interview you have to go through to work for the FBI. People who just gave the FBI information didn’t have to go through that process. If REDACTED had a PSI, then REDACTED was genuinely working for the FBI. He wasn’t just an informant. And, if REDACTED is Ashe, then this file confirms that he went through an interview process with the FBI.

If I had to guess, I think the semantic game the FBI is playing here is that in order to be an FBI agent, you have to go through training. In today’s terms, it means you go to Quantico. Clearly, neither Ashe nor Rowe did that. They were just guys hired by the FBI to infiltrate Klans and report back. They weren’t going to have jobs with the FBI when this task was done. But how much does that matter to us out here in the real world? These men may not have been FBI agents, but they were sure acting as agents of the FBI. And, in this case, the FBI’s guy was running the Lakeland Klan—not just informing on people in it but running it at the behest of the FBI. To spell this out: the FBI ran the Lakeland Klan for a time.

I’m harping on this so much both because it tells us that Gary Rowe wasn’t a one-off mistake, but a longstanding FBI strategy, and now one we know they were employing in some fashion in Klans throughout the South.

But we’re not quite done with Florida racists yet. Who was this D.C. couple who visited John Kasper in Nashville and gave the FBI all this information on Robert and Carrie Wray? They appear to have known John Kasper through the Seaboard White Citizens Council in D.C., which he was one of the leaders of. The man could be Floyd Fleming, who would go on to be good buddies with George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. Kasper and Fleming would split over this because Kasper thought Nazis were losers and he wanted a winning kind of American racist fascism and nothing to do with George Lincoln Rockwell. If so, it’s a huge deal that the FBI had an informant in Rockwell’s inner circle from the start.

But I don’t think it was Fleming.

How Fred Hockett Stayed out of Trouble

In another place in Kasper’s file, they fail to redact who came to visit Kasper. Oops. The special agent in charge of the Washington, D.C., field office wrote to Hoover on November 6, 1958, to provide Hoover with a little more information about Fred Hockett, who Agent Norwood had said was staying in the Boxwood Motel in Nashville with John Kasper and a blonde who could have been Hockett’s wife: “It should be noted that FRED HOCKETT participated in burning fiery crosses Washington, D.C. 1956, and was arrested Miami, Fla., either 1956 or 1957 for attempting to burn cross on lawn of Negro. HOCKETT was characterized as dangerous by WFO sources in 1956. Information was also received that HOCKETT at times is armed.”¹⁷⁵

Hockett was a member of Kasper’s Seaboard White Citizens Council who had moved to Florida and had been arrested not just for burning a cross on a lawn (the lawn of local musician Frank Legree, who had purchased a home in a formerly all-white neighborhood) but also for plotting to kill five NAACP leaders and dynamite Black homes in Miami.

It seems likely that we’re seeing here why Hockett didn’t get in more trouble for that. He found he had some friends in the FBI he could approach in order to stay in the clear.

But this also shows the dysfunction of the FBI. The D.C. field office clearly had no idea Hockett was an informer. They’re operating as if he could be a danger to FBI agents. Meanwhile, other parts of the FBI are treating him like a valuable asset giving them a ton of information on Kasper and his associates. The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. No wonder they couldn’t catch people.

How Stoner Set Up and Ran His Bombing Squads

In December 1958, William Hugh Morris told the FBI (or told the Birmingham police who told the FBI) that he and Stoner had been driving to Louisville and Stoner made a big deal of stopping in Nashville to get a map. Morris alleged that Stoner had confessed to him again about several bombings in the South on this trip. Stoner also apparently gave Morris details on how he set up his bomb squads:

I know that there is a group in Chattanooga. Now, those groups, I don’t believe any of them would consist of over five men, probably three. He has talked about a group in Atlanta and one in Florida. He says it is not necessary for over three men to go on any of them unless they wanted to ride “shotgun”.

…

Now, STONER, so he says, needs a car. He did tell me this. You see he would pick out a target__this is the way it operates__and he would go get his man on the weekend. The company¹⁷⁶ furnished him a car and to keep from showing so much mileage on these trips, he would disconnect the speedometer. He didn’t try to cheat the company__he paid for his own gasoline and everything except for the wear and tear on the car. He would go and see the target for himself. He has a map of all of the southern states and all of the major cities, showing the major highways and roads. He would get his man who was going to do it and they would look it over together and then he would furnish him the dynamite, gasoline and oil for his car and if that man’s car needed a tire or anything, he would furnish that, and then he would also furnish the whiskey after it was over to celebrate the victory. He didn’t tell me exactly how much it would cost, but I just imagine that it would cost $100.00 a job. He said he had spent about $1,500.00 of his own money to get this stuff done and nobody has been interested enough in it to help him out. I got the impression from talking to him that his man in Chattanooga is the best man he has got. He says some of these boys use just one fuse but this boy uses three. They have no timing device, they make the fuse long enough so they can get away. He said it wasn’t necessary for a man on any job to be there over one minute. They light the fuse before they get there and set it out burning, and get back in the car and are gone. They ordinarily find a place where there is a concrete porch or something and they always like to be on the upper side because it has a tendency to go down, and the more travel there is, the more they like it because, if somebody saw them, they would be gone and the person wouldn’t think about what kind of car they were in.¹⁷⁷

There’s a lot about what Morris is saying here that resonates with what we know happened in Nashville. The Hattie Cotton bombing crew was small, or so one of the alleged bombers claimed—just three men. Both Hattie Cotton and the JCC were bombed in covered entryways. We may have had a man from Chattanooga in Nashville for the Hattie Cotton bombing. And it seems ominous that Morris wanted authorities to know that Stoner wanted a map of Nashville.

But let’s take a minute to step back and think about what Morris is describing here. At this time, Stoner lives in Atlanta, where he apparently knows some guys who, in mob parlance, can do the thing—one of whom was Richard Bowling. He also knows a guy or two in Chattanooga and a couple in Florida. I’m just guessing, based on the fact that it was a hotbed of violent racist activity at the time, that this crew was probably in Jacksonville, which should give us cause to raise our eyebrows when we encounter Robert Gentry in Jacksonville later.

Chattanooga and Jacksonville are both a day’s drive or less from Atlanta. This means Stoner has guys he can deploy who are less than a day’s drive from most of the South. Looking at the bombings we’re discussing (our three in Nashville and the ones that have come up tangentially): Clinton and Nashville are both easy drives from Chattanooga; Charlotte, NC, and nearby Gastonia are easy enough to get to from Atlanta, as is Birmingham; and someone in Jacksonville could get to Miami.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the main reason these bombings were never solved is racism. But second to that was the assumption that these were mostly local incidents, that even if John Kasper or J.B. Stoner or someone else had come in and riled folks up, these bombings were planned and committed by locals.

When the facts didn’t line up well with the roused-up locals theory—like how could a bunch of folks in a bunch of Southern towns all decide independently to bomb Jewish buildings in their towns and all independently call themselves by the same group’s name and all come up with nearly identical language to use when they took credit?—then the impulse has just been to credit Stoner solely: he organized this and planned it and came to town to direct the locals on how to do it.

But what we’re seeing is that there was a layer of middle management in some of these bombings. Stoner could come up with a bombing plan, deploy a regional bomber to your community, and that regional bomber could help you set up a crew (or be on your crew) and leave town so that the local investigations were always missing one crucial piece of the puzzle when it came to solving the crimes and prosecuting them.

Stoner didn’t need to be there. Just his regional bomber.

It’s pretty easy to see the benefits of this setup. Locals willing to do acts of terrorism don’t have to spend time learning how to bomb things (which would open them way up to the possibility of getting caught). They can rely on the expertise of whoever Stoner connects them with. Stoner’s expert doesn’t have to run around any particular town getting better at bombing. He has the whole South to practice in.

And it seems very possible to me that the locals and the regional bomber wouldn’t even know each other. The regional bomber could just be “Stoner’s guy.” The local guys are just the local guys. In this scenario, there’d be very little they could tell police, if they did get caught.

If the crew is three people, the local police are never going to see a likely group of three suspects, because at least one isn’t from there. They might be deeply suspicious that, say, Joe, was on a three-person crew, but if they only ever see Joe with Brad, then can they really be certain Joe was involved? Joe doesn’t have a third trusted friend.

And that third person isn’t going to pop back up, because the third person doesn’t live in town.

You can also see how this protects Stoner, too. He can funnel a lot of resources through his regional person without ever being the person who hands the bombers the dynamite or places the bomb himself.

Which brings us back to the Birmingham situation. Morris had to do a lot of work to get Stoner to agree to bomb Rev. Shuttlesworth’s church, and even after Stoner agreed, he still changed the plan, and the bomb went off early. This suggests that Stoner didn’t completely trust Morris.

Part of the reason Stoner must have been wary is obvious: Birmingham had bombers. Rev. Shuttlesworth’s home had been bombed on Christmas Day, 1956. On April 10th, 1957, the home of the pastor of 1st Baptist Church Kingston, George Dickerson, was bombed. On April 28th, the Allen Temple AME Church in Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, was bombed during services. And, as mentioned, in 1958, also on April 28th, terrorists tried to bomb Temple Beth-El. This last one was Stoner, but there’s no clear indication that the others were. Stoner must have wondered why Morris was coming to him and not to the locals who knew what they were doing.

But it’s also likely that the reason Morris came to Stoner was because Stoner had a fourth node, a fourth city where he knew a guy who could do a thing, if a thing needed doing—Birmingham.¹⁷⁸ Stoner had deep Birmingham ties, and the city was important enough to him that the NSRP headquarters, along with Ed Fields, moved to Birmingham in 1960. Morris, being a Klan leader, would have been exactly the kind of person who would have approached Stoner about getting something done.

I don’t think Stoner was some kind of boss man. He seems like a supervillain in part because he was functionally unstoppable, and he was audacious. But in reality, he was more of a facilitator. If someone in your town wanted something bad to happen there, but didn’t know how to do it, Stoner could help. But I haven’t found any clear examples of Stoner doing something without local cooperation. Stoner (or his guys) didn’t come into town and do a thing without the local bad guys being okay with it and without locals helping him pull it off.

I want to show how Nashville’s bombings fit into the larger patterns of segregationist violence in the South at that time, and the direct link is Stoner. But I don’t want to give the impression that Stoner was the only one with brains, motivation, and plans, and that everyone who fell into his orbit was an unthinking minion.

Stoner was, for a great portion of the South, the guy who knew a guy who could do a thing. But someone had to want Stoner to have his guys do the thing.

This doesn’t look to me like some kind of top-down organization where Stoner gives an order sitting in Atlanta and that activates the people in his network to go do it. It’s more mutually beneficial and the power balance more equal.

On May 9, 1959, John Kasper held a rally for his candidates for mayor and vice mayor of Nashville, Bessie Williams and Henry Jerrell, on the steps of the county courthouse. Very few people showed up—mostly local media and college students who heckled Kasper. But one of Kasper’s speakers was J.B. Stoner, who, judging by the FBI files, the FBI did not have as close a watch on as one might hope. They didn’t know when he’d arrived in Nashville, how he’d gotten here, or where he was staying. He spoke out against school integration and Jews.

In March 1960, Stoner mailed Klan literature to Kasper in jail.