EPILOGUE THE FILE FINALLY ARRIVES

November 2023

Of course, after the book has been turned in to the publisher, I get an email from the National Archive informing me that the Looby bombing file is ready for me to download. Of course.

I had been under the assumption that, if the FBI had to be cajoled by a US congressperson into revealing that the file even still existed, that it must contain some explosive (pardon the pun) revelations. I assumed I’d be pulling my book out of production and completely rewriting it. I had been fantasizing about the thrill of knowing this terrible secret and trying to keep it until the book came out. I expected some “Holy shit” moment equal to the headache getting the file had been.

There is no such moment. I wanted the truth. Instead, what I got was enough knowledge to know that the truth isn’t in this file. More upsetting, it’s only because I’ve been sitting with these bombings for so long that I know the file is … I don’t want to say incomplete, because I have no way of knowing if this is all the materials that were ever in this file. This may be the complete FBI file. And anyone who had just received this file but hadn’t been steeped in this stuff would find it complete. It looks like the FBI supported the Nashville police however the police asked them to. They helped chase down sources of evidence. They checked on the whereabouts of suspects like J.B. Stoner and Robert Wray. They seem to have shared everything with the police and the TBCI. The file reads like you are getting a complete document.

But things are missing. Whether they were ever in the file and now aren’t or if the FBI–second only to the IRS for getting into the minute details of whatever has its attention–just wasn’t interested in compiling these details, I’m not sure. Some things were clearly left out at the time. Take, for instance, the description of Looby that FBI headquarters was sharing with field agents:

As a background to this situation, it will be noted that sit-in demonstrations have been conducted in Nashville, Tennessee, by Negro students, from colleges in the Nashville area, which resulted in approximately 160 arrests in all. LOOBY, as a principal attorney for the NAACP, has been prominent in the defense of these students who were arrested. LOOBY has long been identified with NAACP in Nashville, and was largely responsible for successful court case integrating public schools in Nashville.237

See what’s missing? Any mention of Looby being an elected official. And this is throughout the file. I can’t be sure, but it seems that any typification of Looby as a councilman comes from the Nashville police, but memos generated by the FBI focus on his NAACP role. There are fewer than five mentions of him being an elected official at all. This is a file dealing with vandalism against an NAACP lawyer, not an assassination attempt on a sitting US politician.

A couple of other things stood out to me as being glaring omissions and there’s no way to tell if these are things that were never in the file or if they were removed at some point. One is that we know from his FBI file that John Kasper was asking to speak to FBI agents right after the Looby bombing. We know from this file that the FBI didn’t know where Robert Wray was the morning of the bombing: “All accounted for except Robert Wray, who got off work at twelve thirty am, nineteenth instant, and whose car believed missing from residence at five forty am, by neighbors. UACB, by eight pm, central standard time, Nashville, Tenn. PD being advised that Wray-s whereabouts cannot be accounted for. Bureau will note Nashville PD known to be aware of Wray-s close association with Frederick John Kasper and PD known to have interviewed him previously concerning racial matters.”

To be clear, the FBI didn’t know where Robert Wray was the morning of the bombing. They knew, and they knew NPD knew, that Wray and Kasper were friends. John Kasper asked to speak to the FBI and they took their sweet time getting to him. Well, okay, then. But they did go talk to him. Eventually. Why isn’t there anything in this file about what Kasper told them? Maybe because, according to Kasper’s file, they didn’t talk about the Looby bombing at all, only Kasper’s hatred of Nazis and the bad conditions at the Nashville workhouse.²³⁸

I also find it strange that there’s no mention in the FBI file of Mayor West being the one heading up the investigation into the Looby bombing, especially with Avon Williams—Looby’s law partner and fellow sit-in lawyer—being right there. The FBI was deeply worried about “the communist” influence on American society and there had been communists in the Nashville NAACP (white guys, though). If the mayor was breaching protocol to do police work with an NAACP lawyer at his elbow, wouldn’t that have been right up the FBI’s paranoid alley? And yet, there’s no mention of it. Did they not know? If they didn’t know, that suggests that the cooperative relationship between the FBI and NPD that appears in the file didn’t exist in real life and that NPD, as in the other bombing cases, was not being fully open with the FBI. If they did know, why isn’t it mentioned in the file?

Then there’s the discussion of the information provided by Fisk nightwatchman, Lemuel Dawson. At first, it doesn’t differ much from what he told Mayor West. But then we get to this:

In subsequent interviews with Dawson by detectives of the Nashville Police Department, he states that he had seen this same automobile at the vicinity of Fisk University on one or two occasions since the bombing, but he did not report it to the Nashville Police Department. As a result the Nashville Police Department specifically assigned two Negro detectives to keep a close contact with DAWSON and to attempt to locate instant automobile. These officers worked with DAWSON for some time and subsequently stated that they believed that he was lying about the whole incident, or if he believed it himself he was suffering from hallucinations.

What do we even make of this? Sure, maybe it’s true, but this would require us to believe that Fisk kept an armed old hallucinating man as its night watchman for two more years after this (Dawson retired in 1962). Remember, this is 1960. Nashville had only had Black police officers for twelve years at that point.²³⁹ Nashville got its first Black detective, Harold Woods, in January, 1960.²⁴⁰ Judging by the FBI reports, it was Detective Harold Woods and Floyd Bailey who followed Dawson around three months later.²⁴¹ We had very few Black cops on a predominately white force that had already failed to solve two racist bombings before this. Tensions were also high because of the pressure of the sit-ins. I think we have to assume that Black police officers may have felt a little cautious of their white peers. We also have seen evidence that NPD, in general, was not completely forthcoming with the FBI in the past regarding bombings. And, in fairness, the FBI hid witnesses from them. NPD distrust of the FBI was warranted.

Did these Black detectives truly think that Dawson was lying or did they look around and realize this case, too, was not going to be solved any time soon and that putting Dawson’s name out there as a credible witness was putting his life in danger if the bombers were looking to tie up loose ends to ensure it was never solved? Did they protect him by lying about his credibility?

I don’t know.

I have also been thinking long and hard about what it might mean that Mayor West headed up the investigation into the Looby bombing, that the FBI didn’t seem to know that, and that the Nashville police seem like they might have deliberately fed the FBI information discrediting a witness. Here’s what’s sticking in my craw. If Nashville knew it was being targeted by racist terrorists (they did), and if they were so aware of the FBI’s refusal to help that they helped organize and participated in a multi-state conference on these bombings to share information because the FBI was being no help (they did), and if they had reason to suspect that the FBI had connections in Nashville’s KKK scene (they did), might they have been concerned that the FBI was capable of feeding information to the KKK?

And if Nashville became suspicious that the FBI wasn’t just unhelpful, but was actively working against Nashville investigators (and what other assumption could you draw after the Hattie Cotton debacle?), might Nashville have decided it couldn’t trust the FBI? Might Nashville have gone rogue? And, if you were a city that had just decided that you actually weren’t going to cooperate with the FBI in this case because you didn’t trust them—maybe you even worried they were giving information to the Klan—might that explain why the mayor took over the investigation? To provide cover for his police force should it ever become clear they were not actually cooperating with the FBI? After all, he took charge. If the FBI was unhappy, West was to blame, not the police who would still need a working relationship with the FBI when this was over.

Obviously, I don’t know. But damn, I wonder.

Also missing from the file is any information from the FBI’s confidential informant, Memphis T-1, Frank Houchin. They had an informant who was in the Klan and who hung out with people who left the Klan because it wasn’t violent enough and they didn’t feel like talking to him about Looby? According to Kasper’s FBI file, Memphis T-1 was still providing the FBI with good information during this time, just, apparently, not about Looby.

We know there’s a whole network of people the FBI knows who would have been capable of harming Looby–some of whom, as far as we know, were unknown to Nashville police or the TBCI–and the FBI didn’t include any information from any of them in the file. The file contains three pages of unrelated complaints about uncooperative communists but not one phone call to Frank Houchin.

Also, remember that the FBI knew about that guy in Alabama who told them Kasper wanted him to kill Looby? And how they dismissed him for being a lunatic? Okay, well, now someone has tried to kill Looby. You don’t go back and talk to the Alabama lunatic?

I don’t know what all might be missing from this file. But I know at least some of the things I’d have expected to be in there aren’t there. And I don’t know what these absences mean. Did the FBI really not talk to their informants in Nashville about this? And, if not, why not?

Here’s the fundamental problem with this file, with this whole thing. If the FBI was running the Klan in Tennessee earlier than scholars know—and my opinion is that it’s very likely this arrangement started in response to the Clinton riots in 1956 and not the mid-60s—and if the Klan blew up Looby’s house, then the FBI is mixed up in the attempted murder of an elected official. There is simply no way that any information stating that clearly is going to be in any FBI file. They’re not going to confess to being behind an assassination attempt on a sitting US politician.

So, when I look at this file and I see how it way, way downplays Looby’s political role and that the Klan is mentioned only in passing, I can’t help but wonder if this is to keep this incident from raising alarms that would ultimately implicate the FBI. And, I mean, if you wanted to make sure no evidence pointed to your guys, being the folks who analyze the evidence is a super convenient way to make that happen.

My gut tells me this is the most likely scenario. But the historian in me says it’s a leap too far to say for sure. My whole goal for this project was to tell Nashville the truth about what happened during those terrible, turbulent times. Or at least the truth to the best of my ability. That truth is everything in this book AND that I still think there are important pieces of this puzzle we don’t have. And I don’t know if we don’t have these pieces because, well, it’s been almost sixty-five years and things get lost in that time or because someone dumped those pieces in the trash as soon as they realized what the puzzle would show.

The FBI did clear J.B. Stoner to their satisfaction. He had been in Louisville, Kentucky with Ed Fields the night of the bombing and no one had seen him leave. They didn’t ask about Stoner’s whereabouts the week before the bombing, even though, by 1960, they had enough experience with him to know that he was often in town right before a bombing but gone by the time the explosion happened.

I’ll leave you with one last mystery from the file, one that on its surface doesn’t seem like a mystery at all. But now you’ve read this book. So, you know some about J.B. Stoner. What do you make of this?

On April 21, 1960, LS T-2²⁴² advised that on that date J.B. Stoner had remarked that the recent bombing of a Negro home in Nashville, Tennessee, had been done by the “Niggers” themselves in order to gain sympathy and to have a reason for the march by the “Niggers” on the City Hall at Nashville, Tennessee.²⁴³

Here’s what strikes me. First, if Stoner didn’t have anything to do with the bombing, why was it on his radar? As far as I can tell, the Louisville Courier-Journal ran one story mentioning the Looby bombing, that ran on an inside page, on April 20th. The big news in Kentucky was some scandal about the state leasing trucks from a company that maybe didn’t exist for the Highway Department.

But second, we know this line of reasoning—Black people did this to themselves for sympathy—was used by the Birmingham police to deny Stoner credit for the bombing of Rev. Shuttlesworth’s church. And we know that Stoner knew that. So, in saying this, is he thinking “Well, since ‘Black people did it to themselves’ equals ‘Stoner did it’ but without me getting in trouble for it, if I tell my friends who know my history that Black people did it, that’s me bragging about doing it?” Or is he mad that he wasn’t included in on this bombing and so he’s using tactics used against him previously to deny the bomber the satisfaction of credit?

And should we make anything of the fact that this “explanation” for the bombing very quickly became conventional wisdom in white Nashville? Did the “explanation” come from Stoner to contacts in Nashville who spread it? Or was this a common enough white excuse for violence against Black people that it came from multiple places?

Is this a clue or isn’t it? Is it just a villain saying villain shit or is this as close to a confession as we’re likely to get?