CONCLUSION A CITY CAN’T HEAL IF IT CAN’T SAY WHAT HAPPENED
Photo by Andrew Najarian
In September 2017, I spoke before the Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Special Committee of the Tennessee State Legislature about these bombings. Members of Elbert Williams’s family—the NAACP officer lynched in Brownsville, Tennessee, in the 1940s—were also there to speak, as were family members of other NAACP workers who had been terrorized into leaving their homes.
Over the course of the morning, we heard stories about people beaten, killed, bombed, and threatened; families whisked away in the middle of the night; farms and businesses confiscated by white mobs. And yet, when each person testifying was asked what he or she was hoping would come out of this, what they all wanted was for the truth to be told, for what happened to their families to be fully investigated and acknowledged. They didn’t ask for things stolen to be returned or for aid in suing towns where it could be proved that law enforcement was involved in these criminal acts.216 They just wanted the truth to be told.
But it’s stuck with me in the years since then that the people who made the effort to come all this way from Michigan or New York or wherever their families had fled to were asking for one thing: the truth.
It’s such a simple thing. Just say what happened and stop bullshitting about it.
A number of people have heard about this project and asked me, in an accusatory tone, “What do you expect to come from this? Do you really think anyone is still alive or that there’s enough evidence to put them in jail?”
At the time I’m writing this, J.B. Stoner’s dear friend, Ed Fields, is still alive and living in Marietta, Georgia. Every time you hear of some law enforcement agency reopening a civil rights case from this era and then closing it again because there’s supposedly no one who knows anything left to talk to, keep that in mind. People are still alive. Specifically, Ed Fields, who was in the middle of all of this evil and in a position to know who did what to whom, is still alive. Fields may not be in any shape to talk to people now, but ten years ago? Twenty?
But also, no, even if some people involved in these bombings are still alive, I don’t expect them to go to jail. As Gladys Girgenti said, if you want justice, look in the dictionary. That’s the only place you’re going to find it in most cases.
But we can tell the truth. Maybe not the whole truth, because we don’t know it. But we can be as honest as we can about what happened here. And we can let the truth become the story we tell about that time as a city.
Even though we can’t say with certainty who bombed us, looking closer at the bombings of Hattie Cotton School, the Jewish Community Center, and Z. Alexander Looby’s house shows us a much different story of Nashville’s integration era than the one we’ve been told.
We’ve set ourselves up as the peaceful Southern city who did integration right. Unspoken in that is “unlike Birmingham.” But we’re not so unlike Birmingham, it turns out. We were actually, it seems, closely linked to Birmingham, not only through the bravery of the civil rights activists who organized and trained here and went to Birmingham in the 1960s, but also through the activities of the racists who organized here and took what they’d learned here and spread it throughout the South.
Nashville was the precursor to so much American tragedy in the 1960s.
The Shadow Nashville Cast on the 1960s
Some ways we shaped that terrible decade are, at this distance, unknowable. Did J.B. Stoner put together the terror cell that bombed Hattie Cotton and that’s why it looks so much like the cells we know he put together later on? Or did he come here, see that cell, and take a lesson from it?
Also, I think we have to guess, even though we don’t know, that Stoner was paying very close attention to how the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government swooped in, first in Clinton and then in Nashville, to make sure that arrested Klansmen had the monetary support of rich racists and also a high profile public advocate. After Nashville, Stoner often made himself that high profile advocate. Throughout the 1960s, rich racists put a bounty on Martin Luther King Jr.’s head and funneled that money to working class racists willing to make attempts on King’s life. Even now, in the last couple of years, the League of the South has provided financial and logistical support to more actively violent racists.217 That financial model of terrorist funding, at least this iteration of it, was first worked out here in Nashville.
Also, this better understanding of the Looby timeline and the actions of the police in the wake of the bombing tell us that the Looby bombing deserves to be understood not only as the culmination of a series of escalating attacks on school integrationists, but also as an early attack on people working with Dr. King, not so different from what was happening in Birmingham and other Southern cities at the time. Plus, we can better understand—or perhaps understand for the first time—that the bombing of the JCC wasn’t some anomaly but was part of a coordinated attack on Jewish institutions throughout the South. We can also now see how Gladys Girgenti’s later attempted bombing of The Temple in Belle Meade fits into this history.
And then there’s the plot against Looby that the FBI was informed of, where they decided the informant they had was nuts, so they didn’t bother to tell Looby or anyone else in Nashville, that someone might be gunning for him.
This is so similar to what the FBI did to King, where they just failed to warn him about plots against him that they knew were at least semi-plausible. It’s likely that we’re seeing an early example of the FBI’s approach to “protecting” civil rights leaders.
A Little More on Chattanooga
The targets of racist bombings in Chattanooga were very similar to our targets. On July 24, 1957, Black Chattanooga civil rights attorney R.H. Craig’s house was bombed. According to the United Press story, “the porch and front door were splintered and a window shattered by the blast.”218 Z. Alexander Looby was, of course, a Black Nashville civil rights attorney. On January 19, 1958, Chattanooga’s Howard High School was bombed. We had the bombing of Hattie Cotton School the fall before. On January 27, 1958, Chattanooga’s recently integrated YWCA was bombed. Later that same year, we had a religiously affiliated community center bombed, the JCC. Also, like in Nashville, no bombings were carried out in 1959, but they resumed in 1960.
If I’m right about the Looby bombing being related to the presence of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Nashville, then this suggests another possible tie between Nashville and Chattanooga—people willing to do violence to King. In 1960, the number of known people either trying to kill King or expressing a willingness to kill King was very small: whoever bombed his home in Montgomery during the bus boycott in 1955, and Izola Curry in 1958.
We have to think racist leaders were hoping that someone would succeed in killing King. But people making actual plans? We know that J.B. Stoner expressed a willingness to murder King to a Birmingham police department informant in 1958. Stoner claimed that informant offered to pay him; the informant claimed Stoner offered a monetary amount he’d be willing to do it for.
We also know that ardent segregationist and Klavern no. 317 leader Jack Brown was gunning for King in those early years. Since so little research has been done on his groups—Klavern no. 317 and the Dixie Knights—it’s hard to know how early Brown started to focus on King. But we know he was focused.
And it turns out that Donald Davidson and Jack Kershaw219 were not the only “respectable” racists who funneled money and support to Klan members willing to do violence. Lamar Waldron, Stuart Wexler, and Larry Hancock found evidence showing that “Southeastern businessmen raised the money to kill King, then transferred it to lawyer, James Venable,220 who then turned to the most reliably violent and determined racist group in the country, Sam Bowers’s White Knights, to finish the deed in 1967 and 1968.”221
A lot of what we know about the plots of rich racists to kill King comes from Atlanta businessman and massive racist Joseph Milteer, who told Klansman and FBI informant Willie Somersett all about it. Milteer also told Somersett about Brown’s focus on King in 1963. It came up while they were discussing whether Brown would kill President Kennedy:
Somersett: You think he222 knows he is a marked man?
Milteer: Sure he does.
Somersett: They are really going to try to kill him?
Milteer: Oh, yeah, it is in the working. Brown himself, Brown is just as likely to get him as anybody. He hasn’t said so, but he tried to get Martin Luther King Jr.
Somersett: He did.
Milteer: Oh yes, he followed him for miles and miles, and couldn’t get close enough to him.
Somersett: You know exactly where it is in Atlanta don’t you?
Milteer: Martin Luther King Jr., yeah.
Somersett: Oh Brown tried to get him huh?
Milteer: Yeah.
Somersett: Well, he will damn sure do it, I will tell you that. Well, that is why, look, you see, well, that is why we have to be so careful, you know that Brown is operating strong.
Milteer: He ain’t going for play you know.
Somersett: That is right.
Milteer: He is going for broke.
Somersett: I never asked Brown about his business or anything, you know just what he told me, told us, you know. But after the conversation, and the way he talked to us, there is no question in my mind about who knocked the church off in Birmingham,223 you can believe that, that is the way I figured it.224
Part of what’s so frustrating about this is that it suggests that Brown, much like Stoner, played a crucial role in some of the segregationist violence in the 1950s and 1960s. Just like the FBI was quick to dismiss Stoner’s possible role in the King assassination because he wasn’t in Memphis at the time, the FBI also dismissed Brown’s potential role in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing because he wasn’t in Birmingham that day. But as I found repeatedly, that’s how Stoner operated—plan and provide the necessary equipment and then stay away from the area when the event was going down. Is it so hard to imagine Brown would act similarly?
On April 19, 1963, Florida Assistant State Attorney Seymour Gelber and Miami detective Lochart Gracey sat down with an unidentified Florida Klansman, likely Somersett. The Dixie Knights came up. The interviewee told them that Joseph Milteer was at a meeting of many different Klans and Milteer was representing the Dixie Knights on behalf of Jack Brown and his brother, Harry. Gelber and Gracey asked the interviewee if the Dixie Knights differed from other Klans. He replied, “They don’t, as far as I know, except they spread and are more powerful and violent. The Dixie Klan is considered the most violent Klu [sic] Klux Klan in America because they have committed all kinds of bombings and killings in the State of Tennessee.”225 226
The informant also goes on about how Brown and other people in a core group of racists wanted to start assassinating people—like US politician type people—which meant, since he was there on behalf of the Browns, that Milteer was already talking about assassinations.
There are earlier suggestions in FBI files that Jack Brown was talking about the necessity of assassinating US politicians at a Klan gathering in April 1960—coincidentally, the same month someone tried to kill a Nashville politician.
An informant told the FBI about a terror cell—a “den”—inside Klavern 1, the old Klavern no. 317, “consisting of ten members and two alternates, including Jack William Brown, Imperial Wizard (National President) of DK, KKKK,227 Inc., Jack Leon Brown, Exalted Cyclops of Klavern 1, Chattanooga, Tennessee (the local chapter president), and others, all listed as members of Klavern 1, DK, KKKK, Inc., Chattanooga, Tennessee, during July, August, and September 1960, were responsible for five bombings of residences of Hamilton County, Tennessee during July and August, 1960.”228 So there were however many members of Klavern 1, and then there was this small group that did the evil that the other members were kept in the dark about.
Going back to Milteer and Somersett’s conversation, there’s another bit that seems like it could be relevant.
Somersett: I was talking to a boy yesterday, and he was in Athens, Georgia, and he told me, that they had two colored people working in that drug store, and that them, uh, they went into the basement, and tapped them small pipes, I guess that they are copper together, and let that thing accumulated, and blowed that drug store up. He told me that yesterday, do you think that is right?
Milteer: It could have happened that way.
Somersett: Well, that is what he told me, and he is in town right now.
Milteer: Does he know who did it? Do they think these Negroes did it?
Somersett: Oh, no, they killed the Negroes, because they had two Negroes working in the place, that is what he told me. He is in town now, he is from Chattanooga. He knows Brown, he knows all of them, his uncle is in the Klan there. He is a young boy, he has been in the Marines, and he really knows his business. He went there, he went down and looked, and he told me that is what happened. So he has been involved in quite a little but [sic] of stuff, according to his story about Nashville, Chattanooga, and Georgia. I have no reason not to believe him, because he told me too much about Brown’s operation.229
I wish the conversation here was as straightforward as it seems. Apparently, Stoner had that person in Chattanooga he liked to use for bombings. I haven’t been able to confidently identify that person, but we know he was in the military and did demolitions. This conversation between Somersett and Milteer happened on November 9, 1963, in Jacksonville, Florida, while J.B. Stoner was speaking at a Klan rally nearby. If Somersett met a kid from Chattanooga who was in the military and who “has been involved in quite a bit of stuff” including stuff in Nashville and Chattanooga, it seems quite likely that this unnamed kid was Stoner’s favorite bomber.
But get this! In May 1962, J.B. Stoner had sent Fred Hockett a letter, writing, “As you well know, Somersett is an undercover agent for the FBI.”230 That’s a full year before Milteer sat down and yakked with Somersett. And if you read the full transcript of the Milteer-Somersett discussion with this in mind, I think you could argue that Milteer is playing Somersett. Even in what I’ve excerpted here, look at how much Somersett says and how little Milteer says. All Milteer gives up is that Brown wanted to kill King. Somersett’s the one talking about Stoner’s marine and who bombed what and whether someone will assassinate JFK.
Which raises the likely possibility that Somersett isn’t having a straightforward conversation with Milteer but is trying to get Milteer on tape saying something that law enforcement could use against him.
At one point, Somersett says, “They have got a damn, this boy was telling me yesterday about, they have got an explosive that you get out of the army, it is suppose to be like putty or something, you stick it up, and use a small fuse, you just stick it like that, he told me, and I think that is what happened in the church in Birmingham, they stuck this stuff, somebody stuck it under the steps with a short fuse, and went on home. This boy is pretty smart, demolition is that what you call it?”231 That boy is supposedly Stoner’s Chattanooga bomber again. And Somersett is clearly talking about the explosive C4, or something like it. Except the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed with dynamite.232
I tried to figure out what drug store explosion Milteer was talking about. There was none in Athens, Georgia. However, Atherton’s Drug Store in Marietta, Georgia, had exploded as a result of a gas leak ten days before Somersett and Milteer had this discussion. Six people were killed. This appears to have genuinely been a run-of-the-mill accidental tragedy, but at the time Somersett and Milteer were talking, that wasn’t clear.
I’ve been mulling over all of the facts that I know Somersett got slightly wrong—the location of the drug store tragedy, the kind of explosives used at the 16th Street Baptist Church—and I have this nagging suspicion. I think Somersett was trying to get Milteer to correct him, because that would get him on tape knowing information related to these events.
Imagine how Somersett might have been hoping this would go:
SOMERSETT: That boy told me they used some kind of putty explosive in Birmingham.
MILTEER: No, that was just regular old dynamite.
POLICE: Somersett, you are a brilliant hero who has gotten Milteer to tell you a fact only someone involved in the bombing could have known! Here’s a parade.
Or
SOMERSETT: That boy told me he and Stoner blew up the drug store in Athens, Georgia.
MILTEER: No, not Athens. The one in Marietta, Atherton’s. He and Stoner were in on it.
POLICE: Ooo, great work, Somersett. Here are your keys to the city.
Frustratingly for me, if I’m right about Somersett’s rhetorical strategy here, I have to assume he is slightly, perhaps deliberately, wrong about other things in the conversation. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out who Stoner’s Chattanooga man was. I’ve been assuming he’s a real person. I continue to assume he’s probably a real person, but I also haven’t been able to find anyone in Chattanooga who matches and who was seen with Stoner. This may change as more of Stoner’s FBI file becomes available, but for now what I do have available to me suggests no one in the FBI ever laid eyes on this Chattanooga person. They had also heard he existed, but it’s possible they heard he existed from Somersett.
Either scenario is equally likely. I have a couple of suspects I think could have been Stoner’s Chattanooga man—men in Chattanooga who had ties to the Dixie Knights, military experience, and either knowledge of explosives or knowledge of chemistry. But I can’t place them with Stoner or at any of the bombings I’ve linked to Stoner. And I have the Bowling brothers, young guys from Atlanta who hung out with Stoner all the time and who blew stuff up for him. But they weren’t from Chattanooga and, as far as I’ve been able to find, they didn’t have military backgrounds.
Somersett may have heard Stoner say something like, “This is so-and-so from back home,” and assumed that meant Chattanooga, when it actually meant Atlanta, where Stoner was living at the time. He may have expected Milteer to say something like, “I know who you mean, that’s so-and-so, from such-and-such.” But that didn’t happen. Milteer mostly went along with whatever Somersett was saying.
If Stoner had in fact tipped Milteer off to Somersett’s informancy, it also suggests that—more than suggests that—Stoner had ways of learning who police and FBI informants were, which has interesting implications much broader than the scope of my story here. But if Stoner had someone or someones in law enforcement, perhaps in the FBI, sympathetic to his goals, it sure would explain how the FBI could accumulate thousands of pages of files on him without ever managing to catch him doing anything.
To sum up the little we know: folks in Chattanooga were up to really bad stuff that resembles the really bad stuff that went down in Nashville. The Nashville Klan was closely tied to the Chattanooga Klan, which had close ties to J.B. Stoner. We might not be able to say for sure what role the Chattanooga Klan played in our bombings, but it seems very likely that they’re an important part of the puzzle, even if we don’t quite know how it fits.
Atlanta Child Murders
I don’t want to end this book without at least mentioning the Atlanta Child Murders. From 1979 to 1981, thirty or more Black children, mostly boys, were murdered in Atlanta. In 1981, Wayne Williams, a local music producer, was arrested for the murders.
In 1986, Spin magazine ran a story about an investigation they did into the murders. As publisher Bob Guccione explained in a 2015 introduction to the story,
What had been a secret until we poked our noses into it, was that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had been working on a parallel investigation and had extremely solid evidence tying members of the Ku Klux Klan to the murder of one small boy, and further evidence linking them to at least 14 of the other killings, but suppressed it, fearing a race war. When Williams, conveniently black, was caught on flimsy, circumstantial evidence, the GBI quietly, gratefully closed the book on their case, and, in the immortal words of Mark Twain, suddenly remembered another appointment.233
What the Spin writers, Bob Keating and Barry Michael Cooper, found was the Sanders family, members of which had been running around bragging about murdering Black boys. “According to these informants, 30-year-old Charles Sanders was incensed when 14-year-old Lubie Geter backed a go-cart into his car. Sanders swore: ‘I’m gonna kill that black bastard. I’m gonna strangle him with my dick.’ Several weeks later, Geter was found dead, strangled to death in a wooded area in the city. Shortly after, Sanders’ brother Don was heard on a wiretap to tell another Klan brother that he was going out to look for ‘another little boy.’”234
There’s really too much to dig into here, at the tail end of a book about events a quarter of a century earlier. Atlanta is once again in the middle of retesting evidence and reexamining the crimes and we don’t yet know where that will lead. But one detail stood out to me in the Spin article, a detail that had meaning and resonance to me because of this research and I trust the same will be true for you.
A few days later, investigators, recognizing a shortage of information on the Klan, began to process more information on the various klaverns—among them the National States Rights Party/New Order of Ku Klux Klan, to which Charles Sanders and several members of his family belonged. One of five Klan groups active in the state of Georgia, the National States Rights Party was small but rapidly building, due mostly to its strong advocacy of violence.235
Here’s what we know that Keating and Cooper didn’t. The National States Rights Party wasn’t a Klan. It was a pan-Klan movement. It wasn’t small but growing. By 1980, it was practically dead. It was J.B. Stoner, Ed Fields, and some of their friends. If I had to guess, I’d bet they were down to two or three dozen true members. But what this means is that, if NSRP members were kidnapping and murdering Black children (if, indeed, they were) then Stoner and Fields knew about it. And, frankly, there’s a lot about the Sanders clan that sounds familiar: here’s yet another family—like the Cashes in Birmingham, the Adamses in Anniston, the Bowlings also from Atlanta, the Browns in Chattanooga, and we might even include the Rays236—of racist activists with ties to Stoner and ties to terrorist activities. The race war talk was a hobbyhorse of Stoner and Fields’s going back to the era of this book. Stoner’s network was willing to target children—Donal Godfrey, for example—and murder them—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair. They went into Black neighborhoods. We know that because they went into a Black neighborhood to put a bomb at Z. Alexander Looby’s house and into another Black neighborhood to put a bomb at Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s church.
I didn’t research the Atlanta Child Murders. From what I know, it does seem clear that Wayne Williams killed at least some of the people he’s accused of killing. But the investigation into the Sanderses was not some implausible wild goose chase. They were good suspects, especially because of their ties to people who by that point were very well practiced at doing terrible things to African Americans and getting away with it. People who spent some of their early days here in Nashville getting that practice.
We Can’t Heal if We Don’t Know the Truth
We were not unique among Southern cities. We had exactly the wrong evil people here doing exactly the kinds of things they would go on to do more successfully in other places. They just weren’t as good at it yet as they would go on to be. We were lucky. No one died. That’s true. But people were terrorized, and they suffered. Leaving these cases unsolved didn’t lessen that fear and pain.
Nashville has a story it tells itself about how we, unlike those other Southern cities, integrated peacefully and calmly after Diane Nash and her friends went for a walk and politely asked Mayor Ben West to make it happen. Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. complimented us by saying, “I came to Nashville not to bring inspiration, but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community.”
We tend to gloss over the fact that King said those words not to all of Nashville, but specifically to the civil rights activists in the Black community here. He was not complimenting the people who had blown up the home of great civil rights lawyer and sitting city councilman Z. Alexander Looby that morning, or the people who had spent hours on the phones since then calling in bomb threats to every college in town, or the people who had, in fact, delayed King’s speaking engagement with a bomb threat.
It does say something good about the kind of city Nashville wants to be that we all want to imagine ourselves in the community King was addressing.
But in our hurry to reimagine ourselves as the kind of city where the sit-ins were barely necessary, we have left unsolved the crimes that prove we did need, desperately, to change—specifically the bombing of Hattie Cotton Elementary School on September 10, 1957, the bombing of the Jewish Community Center on March 16, 1958, and the bombing of Z. Alexander Looby’s home on April 19, 1960.
You can’t have forgiveness and reconciliation if you can’t say what you need forgiveness for. Someone knows who did these bombings, and it’s not too late to give the city the answers it needs to heal from the terror of those years.
I hope this book is a useful first step.