CHAPTER 9 THE BOMBING OF Z. ALEXANDER LOOBY’S HOME

Nashville Public Library, Special Collections, Nashville Banner Photos

Guide to the Racists in this Chapter

Emmett Carr Dead Nashville Klansman

Donald Davidson Nashville racist poet

John Kasper Incarcerated Racist

George Lincoln Rockwell American Nazi

J.B. Stoner Racial Terrorism Instigator

George Wallace Segregationist Governor of Alabama and Asa Carter’s new boss

Carrie Wray Kasper’s old friend and National States Rights Party member

As soon as I realized that the story of these bombings was more complicated than we knew, I contacted the FBI and did a bunch of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for files on the bombings and files on people I thought might be involved. The FBI informed me that most of the files that still exist had been transferred to the National Archives. I could request said files from them.

The response they sent to my FOIA request for files pertaining to the Z. Alexander Looby bombing was different. It read, in part, “Records which may have been responsive to your request were destroyed in September 1996.”179

An unsolved assassination attempt on a sitting US politician and the FBI destroyed the files? To put it simply, what!?

I spent a year trying to find someone—either at the FBI or with knowledge of how the FBI operated back then—who could explain to me why the FBI would have done this. I had conspiracy theories—there was something in the file the FBI never wanted anyone to see—and crazy conspiracy theories—my god, the FBI itself must have tried to kill Looby—but I didn’t have good answers. And without the FBI files, the TBCI files, or the police files, trying to piece together what had happened was going to be difficult and incredibly tentative.

Still, that was the work that had to be done.

Then, finally, I was having a casual conversation with Keel Hunt, who had been Senator Lamar Alexander’s right-hand man back when Alexander was governor of Tennessee and had remained close with the senator. I asked Keel for his opinion on why the FBI would have destroyed the Looby bombing files. He insisted I immediately call Hal Hardin, a local lawyer and former US attorney. If anyone would have insight into why the FBI destroyed those files, it would be Hardin.

So, I called Hal Hardin and told him that the FBI told me it had destroyed the Looby files, and he incredulously told me he didn’t believe it. I didn’t know if he meant he didn’t believe me or if he meant that he didn’t believe the FBI.

Turns out it was the FBI story he doubted. He told me to call John Lewis’s office right away. Yes, Georgia representative and civil rights icon, John Lewis. That John Lewis. So, I did. Shortly I got in touch with the person in his office who deals with civil rights issues. I went through my whole spiel again, and she told me, since I wasn’t a constituent of Representative Lewis’s, that they couldn’t open up an inquiry with the FBI on my behalf. I explained that I was merely trying to gain some insight into the FBI’s decision-making process, and she again apologized for not being able to help me and told me that I needed my representative to open an inquiry with the FBI.

Oh, okay. Message received.

I emailed the office of my representative, Jim Cooper, explained everything to them, and they said they were in. Long story short, after his staff exhausted all avenues of trying to understand why and how this happened outside of contacting the FBI, Cooper sent the most delightfully nerdy and badass letter to Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, informing Wray about Looby’s importance, expressing concern that these files had been destroyed, and demanding an explanation for why.

And lo and behold, Cooper’s involvement got the FBI to admit that the Looby bombing file hadn’t been destroyed after all. Turns out, it too was sitting at the National Archives.

Now I just needed to wait two years for the review process so I could get it. This was both great news and a bit of a bummer. So much for having the book out in time for the sixtieth anniversary of the Looby bombing.

But still, I would be on track to have the book out in 2021, maybe 2022. And then COVID hit. And here we are, the end of 2023, and I still don’t have the Looby bombing file. All that work, all that help from the most powerful people I know, and who knows when I’ll get it?

It’s not all bad and frustrating. The National Archives not only has the Looby bombing file, but also has what’s left of Looby’s personal FBI file—the file the FBI kept on him. All twenty pages of it. The National Archives sent it to me.

Those twenty pages contain a little information on the Columbia Riots and a little information on Looby’s supposed feud with NAACP member and perhaps communist, Lee Alexander Lorch. And that’s it.

The guy who was the lone attorney devoted solely to civil rights in the state of Tennessee for years? The guy who made Tennessee the home of many of the first public schools in the South to desegregate? NAACP leader? Attorney for the students who led the sit-in protests at down-town lunch counters? Looby’s FBI file had twenty pages in it the first day they opened it. I would put money on that.

My guess is that this—Looby’s personal FBI file—is the file decimated by the FBI, not the bombing file, and whoever responded to my FOIA request was just sloppy in his or her search for the files. As for why Looby’s personal file was mostly destroyed, who knows? My guess is because the optics of the FBI carrying out massive surveillance on a US politician and failing to stop a terrorist attack aimed at him are pretty bad. But also, it’s possible that the surveillance of Looby could have violated attorney-client privilege in some way. We don’t know.

The FBI did a lot of terrible things during the integration era, but at the moment I believe the destruction of the Looby file is just about getting rid of proof of the FBI’s stupid and unethical behavior, not about covering up something infinitely more evil.

Doing without the Looby Bombing File

But since we can’t get into the Looby bombing file, let’s go over what can be known or surmised without it.

Our local Klan leader, Emmett Carr, had an unbreakable alibi for the bombing of Z. Alexander Looby’s home on April 19, 1960. He’d been dead fifteen days.

John Kasper’s alibi was pretty good, too. He was in the Nashville workhouse.

The general understanding of the bombing is that the sit-ins were going on; Looby was one of the lawyers for the protesters; Looby’s house was bombed because of that; the protesters marched downtown and Diane Nash asked Mayor Ben West to desegregate downtown; he did; then Martin Luther King Jr. came to town to tell us how awesome and inspiring we were.

One of the reasons we think this is that the Tennessean reported that Looby thought the bombing was because of his legal work on behalf of the sit-in protesters who were getting arrested trying to desegregate downtown businesses. But the sit-in movement had been going on for weeks. There hadn’t been any action or event that would seem to have galvanized racists into violent acts. At first glance, it just appears they picked a random day to bomb Looby.

Without the FBI files or police files, without any suspects, without any precipitating event that obviously inspired the bombers, how can we even begin to say why Looby was bombed, let alone who did it? Let’s all shake our heads and give a collective shrug and move on with our lives.

The story as we know it has the excuse for the bombing’s unsolved status built right in.

But once you start to dig into this bombing, even a little bit, a clearer—though not entirely clear—picture begins to emerge.

The Precipitating Events

Let’s start with the bit where there doesn’t seem to be any precipitating event, no build-up to this bombing. First of all, we now know that segregationists in Nashville had been targeting Looby by name since 1957 (or earlier, if we count the note with the cross burning near Belmont University’s campus). We also know that the FBI had good reason to believe Kasper was trying to figure out how to assassinate Looby in 1958. And we know that Looby was at least tangentially tied to our two previous bombings.

Then there’s this: on April 5, 1960, the Tennessean ran a story informing everyone in town, “The Rev. Kelley Miller Smith [sic], president of the Nashville Christian Leadership council, announced that the Rev. Mr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the NCLC’s parent group, the Southern Leadership conference, will speak at the next mass meeting here April 18, ‘if we can find a place big enough.’”¹⁸⁰

Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t come to town in response to the Looby bombing. The Looby bombing was, it appears, planned to be a response to the meeting King was supposed to have on the 18th. The April 5 announcement must have pissed racists off, or at least some small group of racists, enough to plot to do something dramatic.

I think John Kasper knew something was in the works. Look at why the Tennessean reported he was dissolving the Seaboard White Citizens Council on April 17, 1960.

The 30-year-old segregationist said the council he organized in 1956 is being taken over by neo-Nazis and he wants no part of them.

“I am nearly broken by jails, niggers and rock quarries and the cruel life that this is,” Kasper recently wrote a former associate from the Davidson county work-house where he has been confined for about three months. “I have a definite fear of being railroaded to jail again for something I don’t believe in.”¹⁸¹

Sure, yeah, maybe he’s talking generally. Of course, it’s a safe bet that neo-Nazis might do something in the future that he’s going to get blamed for. But two days in the future, Looby’s house is going to get blown up.

There’s no further mention in the white papers of this King rally until April 19, when a Tennessean story announced, “A mass meeting to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will be held at Fisk university gymnasium tomorrow night, instead of at War Memorial auditorium, as originally scheduled.”¹⁸²

Which, oops, if your plan was to bomb the Looby house in response to the King rally, you’ve just bombed the Looby house only to grab a paper and discover the rally didn’t happen the night before.

Then there’s the story of the bombing itself, which also becomes more complicated when you look a little more closely at it.

The Bombing

Civil rights attorney, NAACP leader, and sitting city councilman Z. Alexander Looby’s house was bombed at 5:30 A.M. on April 19, 1960. The blast damaged Looby’s home at 2012 Meharry Boulevard, his neighbor’s home on one side, and the apartment building on the other side. It also shattered 147 windows across the street at Meharry Medical School. Police Chief Douglas Hosse told the Tennessean that, “If that bomb had gone in the window, Looby’s house would have been blown off the face of the earth.”¹⁸³ Hosse told the Tennessean that he thought it was a bomb made up of ten or twenty sticks of dynamite “thrown from the street at a picture window in the front of Looby’s house. The bomb apparently missed the window by about four feet, fell to the ground and exploded at the foundation as the bombers drove away.”

I spent an afternoon at the NAACP listening to old men reminiscing about Looby (who, they relayed, was always a snappy dresser) and the old neighborhood. Cars, they said, usually lined Meharry Boulevard. So, we’re supposed to believe that someone in a car on the street threw a five-to-ten-pound package out a car window, possibly over a parked car, up a slight ridge, and maybe 50 feet to Looby’s house on the first try? Well, put out an all-points bulletin for a racist shot putter with some quarterback experience, because who else could have done it? We’re talking about someone tossing the equivalent of a bowling ball at the house from a car.

In the other bombings, initial reports were also that the bombs were tossed from passing cars. Only later was that revised to the bombs having been carefully placed. I think we have to guess that the same is true here. I have a caveat, though. One afternoon, local journalist Brian Mansfield and I were out at the Looby house with a gallon of water, since a gallon of water weighs about the same as the amount of dynamite investigators thought was used. I was telling Brian that authorities reported that the bomb was thrown from the car, but I just couldn’t see how anyone could throw something this heavy out a car window and get it to go very far.

Brian, holding the gallon jug, went out to the middle of the street and stared for a minute. Then he said, “But what if you were in the back of a truck? And you could just stand up and … ” he swung his arms back and then forward and the water arced over the street and across the lawn and landed almost exactly where the Looby bomb had landed.

Because Looby’s house didn’t appear to be destroyed, white Nashville quickly assumed that the bombing was more cosmetic than deadly, just as the other two bombings had turned out to be. The kinds of follow-up stories that happened with the other two bombings didn’t happen in Looby’s case. We know very little about whether and how the police might have revised their thinking on the Looby bombing. But the house and his neighbor’s house had to be condemned. We do know that. Both Hattie Cotton and the JCC could be fixed. Looby’s house could not.

Maybe a truck was used (though we’re about to get into why I don’t think that’s so), but I think the bomb was placed near the corner of the house deliberately, to try to ensure that if the Loobys weren’t killed by the blast, they’d be killed by the house collapsing onto them. What the bombers likely didn’t know was that the Loobys’ cute brick house hadn’t always been brick. A photo in the Looby collection at Fisk University shows that same house, but with light-colored wooden siding. If you look closely at the bombing photos, you can see that wooden siding under the brick.

I didn’t find any information about why he bricked up the house or when, but I am tempted to assume it was to make the house harder to set on fire—a common danger civil rights leaders faced. But this also meant that the outside walls of his house were much thicker than the bombers would have expected.

Something else, though, about the placement of the bomb that may tell us something about the bombers. An alley ran behind Looby’s house. It still runs down the middle of that block. Looby’s driveway ran the whole length of his property, from the street to the alley. Directly behind Looby’s house—right across that alley—was the office for the organizers of the sit-in protests. Another really juicy target. Across the street from Looby’s house was the hospital, where people would have been coming and going at all times of night.

The bombers would have been much better served to use the alley to plant the bomb under Looby’s bedroom. Their chances of being seen if they were on the street were fairly high (though not high enough, apparently) and their chances of being seen in the alley were very low. Plus, they would have literally been bombing the sit-in office’s back yard. Why didn’t they use the alley?

I’m guessing it’s because they weren’t familiar with the neighborhood. I don’t think they knew there was an alley. This differs from the Hattie Cotton bombing, where the bombers knew how to get out of a rabbit warren of a neighborhood with no problem. Also, it suggests that, unlike the JCC bombing, they hadn’t adequately staked out their target and considered how to use the landscape as cover.

I also think the timing of the bomb is a clue. The generally-sympathetic-to-the-civil-rights-protesters Tennessean published in the morning. The more conservative Banner was the afternoon paper. By the time the Banner came out, civil rights protesters had already gone downtown and confronted Mayor West. What would have obviously been the biggest story of the day in the morning—the Looby bombing—was old news by the time the Banner hit newsstands. Obviously, the bombers couldn’t have known what would bump the bombing from the Banner, but it was a sure bet the Banner would found something else to highlight.

And the bombing happened late enough in the early morning that the Tennessean was already being delivered when it happened. That meant the Tennessean’s first story about the bombing was the next day. If you needed to give your bombers a window of opportunity to get out of town before anyone even knew to look for them, you couldn’t have planned it more perfectly.

The Police Response

I also wonder about the police. They canvased the area repeatedly looking for someone who might have seen something, and the most they got out of it was that someone had seen a newer model car with two white guys in it. The police don’t appear to have gone back to the Whites Creek guys who had initially been arrested for bombing Hattie Cotton to see what they were doing that morning. They don’t seem to have checked in with any of the suspects in the JCC bombing. There’s not even a report of them going to talk to Klan leaders to see what they might have to say.

The police sent officers to guard the homes of the following people: Mayor Ben West; Rev. Kelly Miller Smith; Councilman Robert Lillard; Dr. C.J. Walker (the chair of the citizens liaison committee for the Nashville Christian Leadership Council); and Fisk president Dr. Stephen Wright.

In retrospect, those seem like obvious people to guard. But why were they obvious on the day of the bombing? The past two bombings had been spurred in part by Judge William Miller’s actions or a hatred of him. How did the police know they didn’t need to protect him in this case?

I don’t want to inadvertently downplay Rev. Kelly Miller Smith’s importance to the civil rights movement when I ask this, but it’s a question we need to consider: Why guard Smith’s house?¹⁸⁴ Smith wasn’t the only clergy supportive of and active in the civil rights movement. Just as an example, we talked about Clark Memorial Chapel hosting desegregation talks, which John Kasper attended, and getting a bomb threat in response. How did the police know they didn’t need to guard that parsonage?

Plus, students from every historically Black college and university in town participated in the sit-ins. Why would the police guard Fisk’s president and not TSU’s?

The only way the police’s strategy makes sense is if we look at it with Dr. King’s presence in Nashville in mind. King and Smith were dear friends. When King came to town, he often stayed with Smith. I didn’t find any confirmation that King was with Smith on this particular stay, but it’s a reasonable assumption. The Nashville Christian Leadership Council was the local branch of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council. Dr. C.J. Walker and King worked closely together to coordinate strategies of resistance to segregation. Looby was one of the lawyers representing the sit-in protesters, who were under the guidance of the NCLC. And, of course, King spoke at Fisk.

In other words, the police behaved as if the attack on Looby was a threat against King.

But why did they believe that?

Mayor West Leads the Investigation

There was another very odd thing about the police investigation. Mayor West participated in it. He canvased the area for clues and interviewed witnesses. The mayor of the whole damn city took time out of his regular mayoral duties to conduct a police investigation? What?!

One of the few remaining police files I was able to find is the transcript of the interview Mayor West conducted with the night watchman at Fisk, Lem Dawson, the day of the bombing. At the start of the interview, Mayor West announces “Present is the Chief of Police, D.E. Hoss, Chief of Detectives, Mr. Sidney Ritter, and Mr. Avon Williams, attorney and law partner of councilman, Z. Alexander Looby.”¹⁸⁵

Let’s list what’s weird about this: 1. The mayor is interviewing a witness in a police investigation. 2. On the day of the crime. 3. In front of the bosses of the people you’d expect to be doing the interview. 4. With a lawyer who is intimately invested in the investigation in the room with them.

This is the very same day the silent marchers came downtown to confront the mayor about segregation. Mayor West was right out in front of Looby’s house looking for anything out of the ordinary. The chances that he and the marchers left North Nashville headed for the mayor’s office at the same time are pretty high.

Lem Dawson, the Fisk night watchman, told West a lot of interesting things that may give us some clues as to who did this. First, the night of the bombing, he saw a two-tone Ford—cream top, dark bottom, maybe a 1958 or 1959 model—circling around campus. Dawson recounted, “Well, last night at 2:00 o’clock I met a car that I saw for three weeks prowling around there you know—two white men and one colored man in the back.”¹⁸⁶ He saw them again at three o’clock and four o’clock. He got off work at five, “but I thought I better make another search and so I circled around and couldn’t see nothing you know, where nobody had been around or nothing and so by that time I went down on 18th to make one more last circle down by the boiler room and I heard this explosion and by the time I got to Herman Street and 18th I heard the explosion and I turned around and looked at all my buildings to see if they had blowed and they hadn’t and I didn’t know where it was—then the police come through flying and I trailed them to Mr. Looby’s house and that’s where it was.”

The interview then moves to when Dawson had seen this car before:

Q[uestioner]: Now, before last night—had you seen this car there in this neighborhood?

Dawson: I saw it a week ago.

Q: A week ago—now where did you see it that time?

Dawson: Around on Jackson.

Q: On Jackson.

Dawson: 17th & 18th.

Q: Now, you know, of course, Mr. Avon Williams lives on Marina?¹⁸⁷

Dawson: I didn’t know where he lived.

Q: And President Wright lives on Marina?

Dawson: That’s right.

Q: About what block on Marina—where President Wright lives?

Dawson: He lives at 1803.

Q: Now—where and what time of the night did you see it a week ago?—tell us about that occasion.

Dawson: That was just all around the buildings and coming through up Jackson and back around to Herman and back up around Meharry Blvd.

Q: How many were in it at that time?

Dawson: That’s 4.

Q: Four (4) were in it that time?

Dawson: Yeah—four (4) whites.

Q: Four (4) white you saw—all four of them were white?

Dawson: That’s right.

Q: And—how many times that night did you see it?

Dawson: I saw them at 2:00 o’clock and I saw them again at 3:00 o’clock—I didn’t see the car at 3:00 but I saw two men up behind the building.

Q: Now where did you see the men—behind what building?

Dawson: Behind Scribner Hall.

Q: Scribner Hall?

Dawson: In front of it—I looked from 18th and seen one man standing at the corner and I put my lights out and went up behind the building and then—

Q: Were you armed at that time?

Dawson: Yeah—I was armed.

Q: What did you have?

Dawson: I had a shotgun.

Q: A shotgun?

Dawson: And a pistol.

Q: Now then you came up to that building tell us what happened.

Dawson: I went to the corner of the building and peeped around [smear] this fellow was trying to get the door open and then I blasted right on him that time.¹⁸⁸

There’s a lot to unpack here. But let’s start with geography, since most of us aren’t intimately familiar with 1960 Nashville streets. I’m going to simplify some, but basically “Fisk” was the area south of Jefferson Street and north of Herman Street. Sixteenth Avenue marked its east boundary and 21st its west. The north-south streets were numbered. Seventeeth Avenue took you right into the heart of the academic buildings. Eighteenth Avenue ran between the academic part of campus and Meharry Medical School. Most of the cross roads don’t make four-way intersections on 18th. So, to the west going south, you have Jefferson Street, Meharry Boulevard, Alameda Street, Albion, Morena, Hermosa, and then Herman. To the east, you have Jefferson, Meharry (though it doesn’t intersect with the Meharry to the west), Phillips, Jackson, and then Herman. Jackson is the nearest street on the east side of 18th to Morena on the west.

What Dawson is describing when he talks about how these cars were circling around campus, is that they were staying fairly close to 18th Avenue and seemed to be exploring the blocks just to the left or right of it. Like they kind of knew the location they were looking for, but not exactly.

Also, Scribner was a woman’s dorm. When Dawson shot at the white men who were trying to get into Scribner in the middle of the night, he was shooting at white men trying to get into Black women’s bedrooms. This explains why the police treated the bombing like it was about the sit-ins. They knew what was never made public—that these men who blew up Looby’s house had been skulking around Fisk’s campus all month, driving by Avon Williams’s house and Looby’s house and, perhaps, trying to get their hands on Fisk’s most famous female student at the time—Diane Nash.

Just as a cool side note, when Dawson retired in 1962, he gave an interview to Robert Churchwell at the Nashville Banner where he explained why he worked until deep into his seventh decade of life at Fisk: “I was raised up in the woods … I didn’t have no education and I tried to stay here so people could get one without fear.”¹⁸⁹

I also want to take a minute to talk about the Black guy in the back of the car the night of the bombing. I think the obvious assumption we can make is that the white guys couldn’t nail down the location they were looking for, so they grabbed a Black guy to make him show them. I can’t imagine that poor man having to live with that for the rest of his life. I hope he had a rest of his life, considering he was likely kidnapped by racists who were about to try to murder someone. Would they have had any compunction about killing a Black witness?

But this goes back to the point I made earlier: a Black person familiar enough with that area to point you to Looby’s house would have known about the alley. If this man was smart enough to keep the bombers out of the alley, he saved the Loobys’ lives.

A Confession

Then there’s this: the police quickly got a confession. According to the Nashville Banner, two days after the bombing, Lucian Arzo Neely¹⁹⁰ was arrested after drunkenly telling a bunch of people at the Tennessee Theater that he had bombed the Looby house. He told the two police officers who arrested him that he had done it, and the next morning, after he’d sobered up, he told three detectives he’d done it. For reasons that are unclear, one of the detectives told the Banner “the statements he made Thursday night undoubtedly was alcohol speaking,” even after his sober confession.¹⁹¹ Neely was only charged with being drunk in a public place.

Neely looks like a very, very poor suspect, confession aside. He didn’t seem to have any trouble before this incident, and he didn’t seem to have any trouble after this incident. According to the Banner story, he was an interior designer. According to the city directories, he was a painter. Neither profession gives you a lot of access to or experience with dynamite.

But here’s the thing that might make you wish the police had taken a little more time with him: Neely lived at 2113 Scott Avenue, two blocks away from where police found John Kasper the night of the Hattie Cotton bombing.

By the end of April, the NAACP and other Black organizations in town were calling for the Justice Department to step in and lead the investigation. Only ten days had gone by, and it seemed like Black Nashville was already convinced no one local was going to catch anyone. Little did they know that no one national was either.

Busy Looking the Other Way

In 1967, John Britton interviewed Looby for the Civil Rights Documentation Project. Before they talked about the bombing, they talked about the kinds of racists Looby had problems with. Looby told Britton about a deputy sheriff who tried to make him move from the lawyers’ section in a court room and a district attorney who tried to fight him. Britton then asked, “Did you ever have any problems with the citizens in these communities, like maybe the Klan or anything like that?” Looby said, “No.” Britton said, “It was just the officers—”

Looby explained that he wasn’t out in the crowds that ran into the Klan. The racists he had trouble with were the racists he met. Due to his profession, the racists he met regularly were police officers and city officials and other lawyers.

A few minutes later, Britton asked him, “Did anybody call you or tell you in any kind of way why your house was bombed? Do you have any indication why it was bombed?”

Looby answered, “Never. It was during the time of the demonstrations. Now, the city council put up a reward of $10,000, of course, nobody’s ever claimed it. I knew nobody was going to claim it, at least I didn’t think anybody would, but I’m afraid that some people do actually know. Somebody knows. I think the police could have found out, but they didn’t. They were very busy looking the other way.”¹⁹²

Who Gets Credit? Who Gets Blame?

The rumor started flying around town, or at least around the white parts of town, that Black people had bombed Looby. This (shamefully) became white conventional wisdom on the bombing. And worse, supposedly the bombing happened not because anyone in the Black community disagreed with Looby, but to try to drum up sympathy for the sit-in movement.

This means that the seemingly viable suspects in each of these bombings were not the middle-class white Protestant racists who actually had the means, motives, and opportunities to do these bombings. It was some “other people”: dirt-poor racist rural folks, some of them Catholics who could never be wholly accepted into the Klan, Jews, and Black people. In every case, we see someone arguing that “they” are doing this stuff to make “us” look bad: Emmett Carr said as much about John Kasper; Donald Davidson made that argument about how the JCC bombing was covered; and the chair of the United Church Women’s committee on Christian social relations, which was trying to raise money for the Loobys, had to take to the Tennessean on May 21, 1960, to “scotch a ‘widespread rumor that the bombing was planned by the Negro community and executed by one of their number.’”¹⁹³

Debbie Elliot, on NPR’s Weekend Edition, in trying to understand the popularity of the “false flag” conspiracy theory, tried to get to the bottom of why whites were so quick to blame anyone but segregationists for the bombings of the ’50s and ’60s.

“That’s the most inhumane thing you could think of,” [Birmingham resident Jeff] Drew said. “Who would bomb their own house?”

But that rumor was widely circulated in white circles says Diane McWhorter, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Birmingham Civil Rights movement called Carry Me Home.

“The understood motive was that blacks were bombing their own churches and buildings in order to raise money and get publicity for the movement,” she said.

She says it was repeated publicly by politicians, including Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace. Other common theories were that the bombings were ordered by Martin Luther King Jr., or were part of a communist plot, or were orchestrated by the FBI.

“It was repeated so often—I mean I grew up hearing this from my own father—that, you know, I think they started believing it,” she said. “And part of the reason they were able to believe it was that, until the 16th Street Church bombing in September of 1963 when four young girls were murdered, there had been no real fatalities.”¹⁹⁴

I think this is most of the truth. I do think that many white people were desperate to believe that they were good people and the beliefs they had were good beliefs and that it simply wasn’t possible that good people with good beliefs could be doing these terrible things. Let’s call that 50 percent of what was going on with that.

Then I think another 40 percent was about making it utterly clear to the victims that they weren’t ever going to see justice. A way the police and the justice system upheld white supremacy was by keeping justice inaccessible to non-whites. Appreciate, as Jeff Drew is getting at in the interview, how cruel that is. Not only are you the victim of this terrorist violence, if you involve the police to aid you, you have to know it means they’re going to jack up the life of some Black dude who you know had nothing to do with it. You have to calculate into your calls for help if you’re willing to sacrifice an innocent Black man to the sham investigation that will follow. And if you don’t call the police, then, really, you must not mind getting bombed. It’s sickening.

But there’s also another factor that I think is important, but I’m not sure if I’m a good enough explainer to get at it. Bombers wanted credit for their bombings without consequence. It’s why the Confederate Underground called and took responsibility for the JCC bombing. It’s why J.B. Stoner ran all over the place bragging about the bombings he’d participated in. It’s why Emmett Carr went to the Tennessean to brag about joining up with the Dixie Knights. They wanted to believe that they were beyond the law and that all of white society was on their side—that they could say they did these things, and no one would touch them for it. It’s not hard to imagine the power trip that would be and why bombers would desire it.

But the flip side of this is that it means either the police were hugely corrupt and letting these guys get away with these bombings, or they were idiots who couldn’t solve bombings the bombers were bragging about committing. Don’t get me wrong, both of those things were probably true. But the point is that no matter how racist the system is or how widespread the support for that racist system is, those bombers were making fools of the police, and it’s clear that the police often resented it.

The rumor that the Jews in Birmingham had blown up their own synagogue started among the police and their informants as a way of denying Stoner and his group the credit for it. This was ostensibly to keep from paying Stoner for blowing up Shuttlesworth’s church, but reading through the Birmingham police files, it’s also clear that taking credit for the bombing away from Stoner was deliberately supposed to belittle him and humble him back into doing what the police wanted him to do.

I don’t know how much wanting to deny credit to the assholes you, for whatever reason, weren’t going to arrest played into things here in Nashville, but I think it must have been part of why Black people got blamed for the bombings.

Nazis

If we’re talking about who gets credit and who gets blame for these bombings, here’s one last strange thing. On April 20, the day after the bombing, John Kasper, sitting in the Nashville workhouse, demanded to talk to the FBI. The FBI waited five days to meet with him, and when he launched into a rant about how he wasn’t involved with Nazis, they don’t seem to have questioned him about why he was so anxious right then for them to know that.

This is weird for a lot of reasons. Someone just tried to assassinate a sitting US politician. Regardless of how the FBI and the police might have felt about his civil rights activities, they had to know that other politicians, many of whose politics lined up more with law enforcement’s, wanted to feel assured that would-be assassins are caught. The police were almost instantly behaving like they knew the scope and focus of the plot and that they knew they weren’t going to catch who did it. Then the FBI gets a call from the guy who they knew may have already had an assassination plot against Looby and they lollygag around for five days before going to see him? Perhaps because they knew he wasn’t going to have any information they didn’t already have? And then, who were these Nazis Kasper was trying to distance himself from? If there were Nazis in Middle Tennessee in 1960, they weren’t some new unknown crowd of strangers. They were the same people we’ve been talking about all along, who didn’t like whatever group they’d previously been associated with, so they reconstituted themselves as Nazis.

Or, and this is important, possibly they didn’t consider themselves Nazis, exactly—but Kasper did.

George Lincoln Rockwell started openly calling himself a Nazi and his movement the American Nazi Party at the end of 1959. But Rockwell, especially at that time, kept himself in the D.C. area and farther north. With one exception, when he briefly worked for the NSRP.

I’m less clear on whether Stoner considered himself a Nazi, but he hated Jewish people, thought they were intentionally upending the social order and ruining the world, and he wanted them all dead or deported. Plus, he’d been pen pals with a Nazi in his youth and hung out with people who were straight-up American Nazis in the late ’50s.

Also, I think we have to consider who would have been able to get information to Kasper about any kind of plot. His mail was monitored. There had been a couple of instances when women smuggled letters to him, but there’s nothing in the FBI file to suggest that the smuggled letters were from a different crowd than the people regularly sending him letters—the same old assholes who always hung around Kasper.

Carrie Wray was an elector for the NSRP in 1960. Many of Kasper’s followers had, indeed, followed him to the NSRP and stayed active in the NSRP when he went to prison. If there was some kind of “Nazi” plot against Looby that Kasper was aware of, the likeliest place to look for the Nazis whose plans Kasper might come to know was in local Klan groups and the remnants of Fred Stroud’s church—with the people who had further radicalized and joined the NSRP.

The NSRP gave the impression throughout the early ’60s that Kasper was still a vital and important leader of their group. But going through Kasper’s FBI file, it seems like he was burning out quickly on racist advocacy. Not that he was softening in his racist stances, but he was really tired of going to jail¹⁹⁵ over and over when very few other racists were. And he was growing very bitter over other racists not making more of an effort to appreciate what he was doing for them. Could he have been attempting to turn on the NSRP?

Let’s assume everyone is right: The attack on Looby was aimed at both Looby and King. Nazis (possibly the NSRP) were involved. Looby never had problems with the Klan. His problems were with lawyers and judges and cops. Who does that point to?

Answer: lawyer, would-be King assassin, NSRP leader, organizer of the other bombings here in Nashville, acquaintance of Emmett Carr, and man who was deeply appreciative of his relationship with John Kasper (and thus might try to kill a man Kasper seemed to want dead)—J.B. Stoner.

I know by this point, I’m like Giorgio Tsoukalos on Ancient Aliens. He’s always saying, “I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens,” and here I am, not saying it was J.B. Stoner, but it was J.B. Stoner.

Is there a simpler explanation?

Like I said, in order not to get mired down in bizarre conspiratorial thinking—a risk when you’re trying to figure out a conspiracy—I’m trying hard to make sure I keep asking myself for the simplest explanation.

Is it more likely that we had three completely unrelated bombings in a four-year period? That there were three different, unrelated groups of racial terrorists willing to bomb us, but who each stopped after one? Or is it more likely that there was some through line, some person who wasn’t in jail and wasn’t dead, who would escalate, who was common to all three bombings?

Kasper had written down in his private notes that Stoner was here in August 1957. Considering that Carr was on the verge of chucking his and his Klan’s affiliation and joining them up with the Dixie Knights, it seems very likely that Carr knew Stoner. There’s no doubt Stoner was behind the JCC bombing, and his shared links to Carr again suggest that Stoner’s accomplices probably came from Carr’s circle. Everyone—the FBI, the ADL, the Southern Conference on Bombing—knew that Stoner was behind the anti-Semitic attacks in 1957 and 1958. They knew that by May ’58.

The facts we know in the Looby bombing are few, but what we have also fits Stoner’s methods and mindset.

Was Stoner the bomber? We absolutely cannot say.

But here’s an interesting question no one seems to have ever asked: Are there any known racist bombers with ties to Stoner who also had ties to Middle Tennessee during these bombings?

The answer to that question is yes—two.