1 Katherine E. Delmez, We Shall Overcome: Press Photographs of Nashville during the Civil Rights Era (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018).
2 This sounds very dramatic, but it wasn’t this project that almost killed me. I had a histoplasmosis infestation that formed granulomas in my chest that came bursting out of my neck, and it took six months for doctors to figure out that was what was happening.
3 There is so much information about Nashville in the Birmingham police files, handwritten notes about our suspects, pages out of our police reports, letters from other police departments about our bombings. I sat in the downtown Birmingham library, hand-cranking through their microfilm and taking pictures of useful pages as they appeared onscreen for a whole day and I’m sure I didn’t find everything.
4 Crystal A. DeGregory, “Nashville’s Clandestine Black Schools,” The New York Times, February 17, 2015.
5 Bill Carey, “The Roger Williams Legacy,” The Tennessee Magazine, July, 2012.
6 I found a number of different accounts of this incident—some saying it happened during the trial, not at the end, and some saying it was Weaver who was arrested, not Marshall. The facts of the matter have not been nailed down yet, clearly, but the version recounted here is the story you’re most likely to hear. It’s the version most people believe is true. I also believe it’s the most likely, based on how racism worked. I don’t believe the 1946 Columbia police would have arrested a white Tennessee lawyer and never taken him to the jail. But police harassed Black people like that all the time.
7 These streets don’t intersect, but I suspect the Tennessean means the cross was burned at that almost intersection where Grove runs into 12th Avenue South just north of where Acklen runs into it.
8 “Burning Cross Found Near Acklen, Grove,” Tennessean, March 29, 1951.
9 Well, maybe it’s fairer to say that Looby eventually supported these efforts. In the April 3, 1957, Banner, Looby said that while he respected the people who supported one government, he was worried that it would reverse gains Black people had made in the city. But by January 24, 1960, Looby was quoted in the Tennessean as saying, “A metropolitan government is the greatest need of the city of Nashville and Davidson county.”
10 James Squires, Secrets of the Hopewell Box: Stolen Elections, Southern Politics, and a City’s Coming of Age (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 1996).
11 Laura Riding was the only Fugitive who wasn’t at Vanderbilt.
12 Paul V. Murphy, “Agrarians,” Tennessee Encyclopedia (2017). http://
13 “Jack Kershaw Obituary,” Dickson Herald, September 24, 2010.
14 I don’t know who wrote Kershaw’s obituary, but it sounds like he, himself, could have.
15 A towering stack of books and journal articles have been written about how that wasn’t really true or how they came to see the error of their ways, but mostly that’s just scholars trying to justify to themselves why they like and respond so strongly to the art of these racists, as if racism and talent have to be mutually exclusive. The only Agrarian I feel confident in saying would have not oozed disdain and disgust for any Black person not in a position of servitude to him was Robert Penn Warren—and his contribution to the Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, was chapter called “The Briar Patch,” in which he defends segregation. So, sure, maybe folks improved in later years, but during the time we’re talking about? Racist.
16 Paul V. Murphy, “Donald Davidson,” in Tennessee Encyclopedia (Tennessee Historical Society, January 1, 2010). http://
17 Fred Stroud had been the pastor at Nashville’s Second Presbyterian Church on the corner of 9th Avenue North and Monroe Street. At the end of 1938, the Presbytery of Middle Tennessee removed him from the church. His views had become so radical that the overarching denomination no longer considered him a Presbyterian minister. The ideas that were so out of line with Presbyterian teaching were racist and sexist.
I’ve tried to find some solid history of exactly what these racist and sexist teachings were, but the renegade church Stroud would go on to form no longer exists and the Presbyterians didn’t keep any records on Stroud once he was gone. Still, and this is no offence to the Presbyterians, who were (and still are) considered fairly liberal-ish, this was Nashville in 1938. What kinds of racist and sexist views must you have been expounding to have your denomination kick you out of the ministry?! It’s mind-boggling. A great deal of racist and sexist attitudes were perfectly acceptable and seen as normal. I honestly can’t imagine how bad Stroud must have been, but clearly his positions must have been wildly abhorrent for him to have been banishably outside the mainstream of the time.
18 I don’t know if it means anything more significant than that AVCO was a large employer in Nashville, but John Kasper’s buddy, Robert Wray, who we’ll meet in a bit, and Robert Pittman Gentry, who we’ll also discuss at length, both worked at AVCO.
19 “Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government roster and newsletter,” University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, digital collections (1955). https://
20 Mark Royden Winchell, Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance (University of Missouri Press, 2000).
21 For a brief but insightful view into the long-standing habit of powerful whites using the Klan to get their way, see NPR’s Codeswitch podcast episode “The Story of Mine Mill” from December 5, 2018, about how US Steel created the vigilante group that would become Birmingham’s KKK.
22 See, for instance, Kelly Weill’s story, “Neo-Confederate League of the South Banned from Armed Protesting in Charlottesville,” Daily Beast, March 27, 2018, which outlines the League’s role in organizing the Charlottesville riot and shows how they armed racists.
23 William Keel, ““Wilson Ordered Blasts, Stokes Shouts”,” Tennessean, March 29, 1955.
24 William Keel, “Wilson Actions ‘Maniac’s Work,’ DA Tells Jury,” The Tennessean, March 30, 1955.
25 “Eight Indicted by Grand Jury,” Nashville Banner, February 10, 1936.
26 See Bentley Anderson’s Black, White, and Catholic, for instance.
27 “Catholics Enroll Negro Students,” The Nashville Tennessean, September 5, 1954.
28 FBI, Pro-Southerners--SAC, Miami (Miami, 1954).
29 In Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr., Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock spend a lot of time showing how big a role religion, particularly the Christian Identity movement, played in racial terrorism in the 1960s, specifically in King’s murder. I think Kasper’s close involvement with Stroud and other ministers indicates something similar going on here, but so little attention has been paid to Nashville’s racial terrorists that it’s hard to pinpoint their more obscure national influences.
30 Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
31 Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic.
32 Asa Carter would go on to be a fairly successful novelist under the name Forrest Carter. He wrote The Rebel Outlaw: Josie Wales and, while pretending to be Cherokee, The Education of Little Tree. It’s pretty easy to draw a straight line from “I was a racist agitator” to “I wrote a book about a Confederate who refused to accept Union victory.” The line from “I’m a white supremacist and will go on to be George Wallace’s speech writer” to “I’m passing myself off as a Cherokee” is less clear, but I think you could make the argument that, if you see his claims of being Cherokee as a way of claiming some kind of pure, authentic belonging-to-the-land Southerness, a kind of Southerness that is being lost in the crush of modernity and federal intervention in Southerners’ lives, he’s actually got a very similar aesthetic project to Donald Davidson.
This may also suggest that Carter knew the Browns from Chattanooga well enough to know their family story. Even though they were the leaders of the Dixie Knights, Jack Brown’s brother, Harry, applied to be on the Cherokee role, because they were descended from Cherokee leader Nancy Ward.
33 Read into that what you will.
34 “McCallie Student Gets Message from Nazi Radio Propagandist,” Chattanooga Times, May 28, 1940.
35 1940 was the height of the Nazis’ T-4 program, in which sick and disabled children were killed, many in gas chambers. This program was overseen and carried out by well-regarded German doctors. Though the program was “secret,” it was an open secret. Lord Haw Haw would have known. I think Stoner regarded Haw Haw’s offer as legitimate, but I also think it very likely that it would have resonated differently in Germany, which is both chilling and hilarious.
36 This raises another question I haven’t been able to answer: How and why did the Memphis police know so much about networks of racial terrorists in 1958?
37 “Kasper Planning Session with Klan, White Council,” Tennessean, August 1, 1957.
38 Garry Fullerton, “Kasper Halted at Park Rally,” Tennessean, August 5, 1957.
39 Fullerton, “Kasper Halted at Park Rally.””
40 FBI, “John Kasper File--Knoxville,” (1957), Archive
41 FBI, “John Kasper File,” (1957), Archive
42 William Keel, “Study Continues on Integration,” Tennessean, August 9, 1957.
43 Nashville Public Schools. “School Board Minutes,” (Nashville, August 8 1957).
44 If you’ve seen pictures of the “real” Rosie the Riveters—women building aircrafts during the War—most of those photos were taken at Vultee.
45 Carrie Wray, “Letter to Governor Frank Clement,” in Frank Goad Clement (First and Second Terms) Papers, 1953-1959 (Nashville, TN: Tennessee State Library and Archives, August 1957).
46 Just as an interesting side note, along with being continually outraged about rock ‘n’ roll, Nashville racists (and others, I assume) were apoplectic with rage at Frank Sinatra for his 1958 film, Kings Go Forth. I would have to guess that the reason they hated the movie, and Sinatra, was that it made clear that Sinatra’s regard for Black people wasn’t just kindness toward his Black friends, but was, in fact, his worldview. The coolest man alive and he’s for everything you’re against. Ouch.
47 “Carter Returns to Kasper Fold,” Tennessean, August 26, 1957.
48 “Carter Returns to Kasper Fold.”
49 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file (1957).
50 Wallace Westfeldt, “1st Grade Register Off 43%,” Tennessean, August 28, 1957.
51 Westfeldt, “1st Grade Register Off 43%.”
52 Westfeldt, “1st Grade Register Off 43%.”
53 Westfeldt, “1st Grade Register Off 43%.”
54 “United Press,” Daily New-Journal, August 29, 1957.
55 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
56 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
57 “Kasper Returns, To Try Boycott,” Tennessean, September 6, 1957.
58 Sorry, I know I said that we were going to launch into a recounting of the facts as we know them, but it’s worth taking a moment to worry this notion of “violence” a little. Here’s Norvell, who was so alarmed by what he heard on August 27 that he called the FBI and reported on Kasper. Now, a week later, he’s saying Kasper never advocated violence. Those two things don’t make any sense together. And Norvell isn’t Kasper’s buddy. He’s not trying to save Kasper from FBI trouble. He’s the one that brought Kasper back to the attention of the FBI.
But this idea of violence that is somehow more real and more alarming than regular violence is not unfamiliar in this crowd. J.B. Stoner was kicked out of Chattanooga Klavern 317 for being too violent. Later, the whole of Klavern 317 was kicked out of the Klan for being too violent. Gladys Girgenti, who we’ll talk about in more detail later, was kicked out of the Klan for being too violent.
How in the hell can you be too violent for the Klan? The Klan’s whole purpose is to use violence and intimidation to terrorize Black people.
I have, and I suspect you may have, just assumed that when someone was “too violent for the Klan,” it meant that they were too unstable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable for the Klan, that their presence in the Klan was bringing too much unfriendly attention. But what Stoner, Klavern 317, and Gladys Girgenti all had in common was that they perpetrated violence against white people.
If you go back and add an unspoken “against white people” to what Norvell told the FBI, it actually becomes really easy to understand what shook Norvell enough to go to the authorities. Norvell “has never heard Kasper make any statement indicating that he adheres to violence [against white people] in connection with the radical situation … Kasper has always made statements … that he is opposed to violence [against white people]. Norvell stated that some of the people who have been at the Kasper meetings have talked of possible violence [against white people].” That certainly could shake a segregationist enough that he would go to the FBI.
But who knows if that’s the subtext the FBI heard? If they were thinking of violence as any violent act against anyone (even people the FBI disagreed with), then Norvell would have seemed to them like a lunatic, telling them about Kasper giving a fiery speech talking about shotguns and dynamite, then claiming he never heard Kasper advocating for violence.
59 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
60 You’ll sometimes see the Parents’ Preference committee treated as a fourth group opposed to integration, in addition to Kasper’s mob, the Klan, and the TFCG, but Kershaw gives away the game here. It was a branch of the TFCG. Nellie Kenyon, “12 1st Graders to Enter White Schools Monday,” Tennessean, September 7, 1957.
61 We’ll get into this more in a second, but suffice to say, this is probably “four quart fruit jars”; in the end, Reed says it was a quart fruit jar.
62 FBI, “John Kasper File.”
63 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
64 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
65 Wallace Westfeldt, “Attendance Off by 25-30 Pct,” Tennessean, September 10, 1957.
66 John Egerton, “Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville,” Southern Spaces (2009). https://
67 William Keel, “Kasper: ‘Certain People’ Talked School Dynamiting,” Tennessean, September 13, 1957.
68 FBI, “John Kasper File.”
69 Egerton, “Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville.”
70 “6 Questioned in School Blast,” Tennessean, September 11, 1957.
71 It’s not clear they ever told Nashville police about Norvell.
72 FBI, “John Kasper File.”
73 FBI, “John Kasper File.”
74 FBI, “John Kasper File.”
75 FBI, “John Kasper File.”
76 FBI, “John Kasper File.”
77 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
78 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
79 In order to make a long-distance call in the 1950s, you had to use the operator, who then had to set the call up through a series of other operators. The sound quality was often very poor, and the calls left an extensive paper trail (to make sure the caller was properly billed) as well as a trail of witnesses in the operators who connected the call. This Dalton may have been from Chattanooga, but he was in Nashville when he made that call, or it could have been easily traced.
80 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
81 FBI, Christian Anti Jewish Party J.B. Stoner file (1952).
82 “6 Questioned in School Blast.”
83 Interesting fact: Reed had also been driving around town in a car with KKK on the side.
84 “6 Questioned in School Blast.”
85 For many years, experts thought the Melungeons were an Appalachian tri-racial isolate group—white, black, and Native American. But recent DNA results suggest they may just be a bi-racial isolate group. Also, the term “Melungeon” is seen by some as a racial slur (though others have been reclaiming the term). There’s not another word that so clearly identifies the families that make up this particular isolate group so I’m using it, but with the caveat that, unless you belong to the group, you shouldn’t use it casually. For more information, see the Melungeon Heritage Association website, melungeon
86 Larry Brinton, “Interview at Bellvue Starbucks,” ed. Betsy Phillips (August 3, 2017).
87 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
88 I can’t prove this, but it doesn’t seem like the Nashville Klan had any Catholics in it until Cathedral and Father Ryan desegregated.
89 “Earlier Return of Kasper Seen,” Tennessean, September 20, 1957.
90 “Court Delays Dynamite Cases,” Tennessean, September 21, 1957.
91 I’m not saying he would have been found guilty—this was the South in the ‘50s, after all. But Nashville would have happily jacked him around in the legal system for a while if it feasibly could have.
92 Again, I didn’t get into the religious beliefs of these men as much as I would have liked to, but there is a lot of important work that could be done here. It’s clear that Christian Identity leader Wesley Swift’s racist theology was known to many of the segregationists, and I can’t help but wonder if Mercurio was the conduit by which Nashville racists came to be aware of Swift, who also hailed from the west coast.
93 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
94 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
95 FBI, Hattie Cotton Elementary School Bombing file.
96 Frank Houchin, Testimony, ed. O.O. Lee (Nashville, January 10 1958).
97 Houchin, Testimony.
98 His first name, not a title. He was a handyman.
99 Frank Houchin, Testimony, ed. O.O. Lee (Nashville, January 10 1958).
100 FBI, 62-116395.
101 See, for example, Chris Gavaler’s article in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Volume 4, Issue 2, “The Ku Klux Klan and the Birth of the Superhero” for discussion.
102 Wayne Whitt, “Ku Klux Leader Admits Klavern in Nashville,” Tennessean, April 13, 1950.
103 Don Whitehead, “Florida KKK Recruiting During Wave of Terrorism,” Tampa Tribune, January 6, 1952.
104 “Recent Crackdowns Lead to Disunity in Klan Ranks,” Tampa Bay Times, August 20, 1952.
105 “Hendrix Gets Evangelist’s License,” Pensacola News Journal, June 23, 1953.
106 Yes, Klan is in the name twice. I can only assume whoever was in charge of naming Klans was also the first person to use the term ATM machine.
107 Will Muller, “Ku Klux Klan Reins Held by Auto Painter,” Star Press, September 5, 1955.
108 Shelton rose to power in a time when the Alabama Klan was also a viper’s nest of infighting groups. You had the Gulf Coast Klan, the Alabama Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and Asa Carter’s Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy all billing themselves as alternatives to a Klan that was too worried about being respectable. Shelton’s gift, such as it was, was in straddling the line between seeming respectable enough for the comfort of some Klan members while being violent enough for others.
109 FBI, Pro-Southerners--SAC, Miami.
110 Mims is on the eastern coast of Florida.
111 John Fleming, “The Death of Willie Brewster: Guns, bombs and Kenneth Adams,” The Anniston Star, March 24, 2009.
112 Dan Carter, “The violent life of Kenneth Adams: A story of justice delayed,” The Anniston Star, May 14, 2021.
113 The 5 looks like a 3, but I think that’s a typo since Liuzzo died in 1965.
114 FBI, 62-116395.
115 Yes, that’s right. Hoover was bragging to the attorney general about the FBI’s work helping to solve a murder an FBI informant was involved in, while protecting that informant from any repercussions.
116 Howell Raines, “Police Given Data on Boast by Rowe,” New York Times, July 14, 1978.
117 FBI, 62-116395.
118 FBI, 62-116395.
119 David J. Garrow, “The Troubling Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Standpoint, June, 2019.
120 Aimee Horton, “Letter to the Journal,” The Knoxville Journal, August 1, 1963.
121 Aimee Horton, “Letter to the Journal,” The Knoxville Journal, August 1, 1963.
122 “Tennessee Topics—Re-Election Glow Lights McKinnis’ Political Star,” The Commercial Appeal, August 22, 1965.
123 “State Klan Centered in Knox, E-T Area,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, October 19, 1965.
124 “House to Bypass State Klansmen,” The Commercial Appeal, February 5, 1966.
125 “State Klan Clamps Secrecy on why Grand Dragon Quit,” The Commercial Appeal, February 5, 1967.
126 FBI, 62-116395.
127 Michael Newton, who literally wrote the book on the National States Rights Party, The National States Rights Party, says that the party wasn’t founded until mid-1958. I agree, but I also think it’s clear that there was some pre-party floundering where the people who would eventually settle on organizing the NSRP tried to decide what they wanted to do now that they had all these angry white people looking for ways to oppose integration. That floundering toward the NSRP seems to have started in earnest in November 1957.
128 Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the clearest information we have about how these Klans were set up at the time comes from the HUAC testimony of James Venable, a Klan leader who fought with both Jack Brown and Robert Shelton and had reason to lump them together and accuse them of being worse than him. Venable was also good friends with J.B. Stoner; they shared a law office—Venable was also a lawyer—in Georgia. Suffice to say that in 1958, Klan allegiances were shifting and new terrorist networks that crossed Klan groups and incorporated the NSRP were forming. J.B. Stoner sat at the nexus of those networks.
129 House Un-American Activities Committee, “Activities of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in the United States,” in Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities House of Representatives, Eighty-Ninth Congress, Second Session (February 1-4, 7-11 1966).
130 If you were trying to trace, say, how dynamite of a brand available in East Tennessee came to be used in so many bombings in Alabama where it was not sold, it’s probably pretty important to realize that every time you see a mention in the history books of “Anniston Klan leader Kenneth Adams,” what you’re really seeing is “Anniston Dixie Knight leader Kenneth Adams.” Once you know that Kenneth Adams and Jack Brown were in the same group, the mystery of how East Tennessee dynamite got into Alabama clears up easier than a Scooby-Doo mystery.
131 The FBI says they destroyed the file on the Mattie Green bombing in 2005. Much of what we know about that bombing then comes from a redacted copy of the file that the Southern Poverty Law Center got before then. The two men suspected in her murder were Klansmen brothers, Lester and W. E. Waters.
132 And, as Wexler and Hancock discovered, ten years later, Jack Brown’s friend and likely Dixie Knight, Joseph Milteer, was instrumental in paying for King’s assassination. Even if the group’s importance dwindled—and who knows if that’s actually true?—the individuals involved in the early years of the Dixie Knights remained prominent, active, and dangerous.
133 FBI, J.B. Stoner File.
134 FBI, “Bombings and Attempted Bombings,” in Racial Matters (1958), Archive
135 FBI, Bombings and Attempted Bombings.
136 David J. Meyer, “Fighting Segregation, Threats, and Dynamite: Rabbi William B. Silverman’s Nashville Battle,” American Jewish Archives Journal (2008).
137 Donald Davidson, “Correspondence—Outgoing, July 21, 1957 - June 29, 1958,” in Donald Davidson Papers (Vanderbilt University Special Collections).
138 “2 More Questioned in Center Dynamiting,” Tennessean, April 17, 1958.
139 Remember, he went to federal prison at the beginning of 1958 as a result of his actions in Clinton in 1956. Then, once he got out of federal prison, he came back to Nashville in order to be a giant douche and to face charges resulting from his activities here in 1957.
140 See, for instance, Donald Davidson.
141 I’ll be honest, I don’t know enough about Christian Identity—nor do I care to learn—to know if the folks who would go on to be recognized as the leaders of the movement were already saying this explicitly, but this was the thought-train they were riding.
142 FBI, Bombings and Attempted Bombings.
143 FBI, Bombings and Attempted Bombings.
144 “Bethel Church Bombing and Temple Beth-El Bombing,” in Birmingham, Ala. Police Department Surveillance Files (Birmingham Public Library, Department of Archive and Manuscripts).
145 AP, “Birmingham Reports Break on Bombing,” Tennessean, May 2, 1958.
146 NSRP file (1959).
147 Though Fields had a number of mistresses and NSRP folks regularly complained about how Stoner’s womanizing kept him away from party business—so, hey, finally bisexuals have some noted villains in their ranks.
148 Jacksonville Conference on Bombings, State of Florida (1958).
149 Maury County.
150 Jacksonville Conference on Bombings, State of Florida (1958).
151 Dublin, Georgia
152 Jacksonville Conference on Bombings, State of Florida (1958).
153 FBI, J.B. Stoner File.
154 FBI, J.B. Stoner File.
155 Until I read this in Stoner’s file, I hadn’t ever heard about the Confederate Underground taking credit for this bombing, but this is firm proof that the Confederate Underground wasn’t only anti-Semitic. They were also plain old anti-Black racist. The bombings of Jewish buildings were a part of wider segregationist goals.
156 FBI, NSRP file.
157 FBI, NSRP file.
158 Gladys Girgenti told me that so many Klan leaders became FBI informants because the money the FBI paid them was tax-free. I don’t know for how long this has been true, but according to the IRS’s website, it is indeed true.
159 FBI, NSRP file.
160 Though let me be clear: all we can know from the materials still available is that someone was in both Miami and Nashville on the same day. Morris is saying Stoner was in both cities for both bombings. But the fact that anyone was in both cities for both bombings is a fact only the attendees of the Southern Conference on Bombings knew. Morris seems to know that and who that person was.
161 FBI, J.B. Stoner File.
162 FBI, John Kasper File.
163 The ticket the NSRP ended up actually running in 1960 was segregationist hero, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus for president and Crommelin for vice-president, but in August 1958, the ticket they were toying with was Crommelin for president and possibly Kasper for VP.
164 FBI, John Kasper File.
165 FBI, John Kasper File.
166 FBI, NSRP file.
167 FBI, John Kasper File.
168 Rachel Louise Martin, A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
169 FBI, John Kasper File.
170 FBI, Robert Wray (1958).
171 UPI, “Ku Klux Klan Trial Set for Today,” Tampa Bay Times, June 30.
172 The Archives of the State of Florida has the materials from this June 1958 hearing. The whole hearing is in Series S1486, Box 4, folders 20–23. Sherrill’s testimony is covered in folders 22 and 23.
173 Tampa Tribune. “Contempt Action Voted for Sheriff of Suwannee.” June 27, 1958.
174 AP, “Undercover Man for FBI Testifies: Orlando Klan Blamed for Fatal Bombing,” News-Press, June 28, 1958.
175 FBI, John Kasper File.
176 Stoner worked for the State Farm Insurance company at the time.
177 FBI, J.B. Stoner File.
178 Digging through the Birmingham police files and seeing how often Stoner’s name and 16th Street Baptist Church bomber Robert Chambliss’s name come up together, it does lead me to wonder if Stoner’s Birmingham guy wasn’t old’ Dynamite Bob himself.
179 “FOIPA Requestion No.: 1372396-00 Subject: Z. Alexander Looby Bombing (April 19, 1960),” in FBI correspondence (May 1, 2017).
180 Talley, “Negroes Boycott Downtown Firms,” Tennessean, April 5, 1960.
181 Mac Harris, “Kasper to Dissolve Own Citizens Council,” Tennessean, April 17, 1960.
182 Tennessean. “King’s Speech Location Moved to Fisk University.” April 19, 1960.
183 Pat Anderson, “Looby Bombing Reward Voted,” Tennessean, April 20, 1960.
184 In the 1958 city directory, Smith’s home address is 1229 Caldwell Avenue. This is two blocks away from where the letter threatening Looby was found under a burning cross. This is just an odd coincidence, though. In 1951, he and his family were living on 22nd Avenue North.
185 Fisk Night Watchman interview transcript, ed. Ben West (April 19 1960).
186 Fisk Night Watchman interview transcript.
187 This is obviously Morena Street.
188 Fisk Night Watchman interview transcript.
189 Churchwell, Robert. “Fisk Guard Retires from 20-Year Walk.” Nashville Banner, December 11, 1962.
190 Old folks may remember that Looby had a Black political rival named Neely. This is not him. This Neely was white.
191 “Confession of Bombing Discounted,” Banner, April 22, 1960.
192 Looby, Z. Alexander. The Civil Rights Documentation Project. Interview by John Britton, 1967.
193 “Church Group Pushes Looby Fund Drive,” Tennessean, May 21, 1960.
194 Debbie Elliott, “Blaming Victims for Mail Bombs Carries Echoes of Civil Rights Bombings,” NPR
195 And getting beat up by Black inmates. He really hated that part.
196 I mention his middle name because there are a ton of Gentrys in the area and at least one other Robert Gentry our Robert’s age who was running around getting into ordinary young person trouble, like speeding and such, who was not connected to racial terrorism.
197 Nancy Bradford, “Lawmen Wept During Arrests: Ex-Klansman,” Tennessean, October 20, 1965.
198 House Un-American Activities Committee, “1965 Ku Klux Klan Investigation,” in Records Relating to the Investigation of Members of the KKK (National Archives, 1965).
199 David M. Hardy, “FOIPA Request No.: 1374017-00 Subject: GENTRY, ROBERT PITTMAN,” in FBI correspondence (June 27 2017).
200 Donal Godfrey and his mother.
201 I’m certain this is clear to you, but just in case, this quote is the investigator’s own words typifying Gentry’s information, not a direct quote from Gentry.
202 Committee, Activities of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in the United States.
203 Committee, Activities of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in the United States.
204 Meaning, yes, she was in the Klan before our bombings.
205 Fun fact: Bill Wilkinson was an FBI informant. It’s like Eastern Promises but with no naked fighting. That we know of.
206 Thompson, Jerry. “Klanswoman Leader in ’80 Rally.” Tennessean, May 26, 1981.
207 This is almost certainly not true. Emmett Carr might have let Catholics in his Klan, but no Klan at that time was going to let Catholic Italians in.
208 Remember, he might have been one of the early members of the Dixie Knights.
209 She regularly spoke at their gatherings, but Girgenti says she was never a member.
210 According to Girgenti, this was true.
211 King says 20. Girgenti says 30.
212 Jerry Thompson and Robert Sherborn, “New Klan Group Takes on Name of ‘Vigilantes’,” Tennessean, May 27, 1981.
213 Girgenti says that the FBI raided her house after this bombing, accused Nick of being one of the bombers, and then stole Nick’s wall crucifix. At the least, I think we can take this to mean the FBI suspected someone in the Girgenti household was tied to that bombing.
214 “Judge: Drop 1 of 5 Bomb Plot Counts,” Tennessean, August 4, 1981.
215 Gladys Girgenti, Gladys Girgenti at her apartment, ed. Betsy Phillips (August 4 2018).
216 It should go without saying, but we can’t assume this is true for all family members or for these family members all of the time.
217 See, for instance, Kelly Weill’s story, “Neo-Confederate League of the South Banned from Armed Protesting in Charlottesville,” The Daily Beast, March 27, 2018, which outlines the League’s role in organizing the Charlottesville riot and shows how they armed the Klan.
218 Jackson Sun. “Blast Damages House of Negro Attorney.” July 24, 1957.
219 Both Stoner and Kershaw represented James Earl Ray right after King’s assassination.
220 Venable once shared office space with Stoner.
221 Stuart and Hancock Wexler, Larry, Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. (Berkeley: Counterpoint).
222 Kennedy
223 The 16th Street Baptist Church
224 Harold Weisberg, Joseph Milteer, The Weisberg Archive, Beneficial-Hodson Library, Hood College.
225 FBI, Dixie Knights.
226 We didn’t have any racist killings in Tennessee during the reign of the Dixie Knights, to my knowledge, but if anyone has an unsolved murder of a Black person from the late ’50s, early ’60s, maybe look into these guys.
227 Dixie Knights, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, two “Knights,” right in a row. You’d think a social movement with so many poets in it could have come up with another K word that would work, but there was a lot of infighting.
228 FBI, Dixie Knights.
229 Harold Weisberg, Joseph Milteer, The Weisberg Archive, Beneficial-Hodson Library, Hood College.
230 FBI, Dixie Knights.
231 Harold Weisberg, Joseph Milteer, The Weisberg Archive, Beneficial-Hodson Library, Hood College.
232 And you can’t explode C4 with a flame fuse, but that’s kind of irrelevant, since we don’t know for sure that’s what Somersett is talking about.
233 Keating, Robert, and Barry Michael Cooper. “Atlanta Child Murders: Our 1986 Feature, ‘A Question of Justice.’” Spin
234 Keating and Cooper
235 Keating and Cooper
236 After King’s assassination, Stoner was one of James Earl Ray’s attorneys and Ray’s brother worked for Stoner.
237 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “157-HQ-203,” n.d.
238 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “John Kasper File—WFO, SAC,” 1958.
239 It’s actually more complicated and interesting than this, but suffice to say, since Reconstruction this is when the first Black officers joined the force. For more information on Reconstruction-era Black police officers in Nashville, see Justin Farr’s “‘The Mongrel Regime!:’ The Untold Story of Tennessee’s African American Policemen During the New South and Jim Crow Eras, 1867-1930,” his honors thesis from Middle Tennessee State University in 2016.
240 “Police Trainer Urged for the City,” Tennessean, January 30, 1960.
241 According to third-generation African American Nashville police officer Sergeant Gary Smith who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the Nashville police and whose grandfather was one of those first Black officers to join the force, Bailey wasn’t a detective yet when the bombing happened.
242 LS T-2 designates a Louisville confidential informant.
243 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “157-HQ-203.”