PREFACE THE LIMITS OF THIS BOOK AND MY HOPES FOR IT
Nashville Public Library, Special Collections, Nashville Banner Photos
A few months before the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hattie Cotton Elementary School in 2017, I thought I would write something for the Nashville Scene about the bombing and who had committed it and why it remains unsolved. Five years later, I’m still working to answer those questions and more.
Who committed Nashville’s three unsolved integration-era bombings—Hattie Cotton Elementary School in 1957, the Jewish Community Center in 1958, and Councilman Z. Alexander Looby’s house in 1960?
The two most prevalent theories were either that racist agitator John Kasper did it or that the local Ku Klux Klan did it. But these “solutions” only raised more questions. John Kasper was in jail at the time of two of the bombings. Are we supposed to believe he had a batch of such devoted followers that he could order an assassination attempt from jail—and that people would keep quiet about it for sixty years? If it was the Klan, why did the bombings stop? They had successfully terrified the city and nearly derailed school integration, and no one had been caught. Why would they abandon such an effective tool? And again, we’re supposed to believe that a rabble of local racists tried to assassinate a politician and then kept quiet about it for half a century? It didn’t ring true. How could three bombings—one of which, I reiterate, was an assassination attempt on a sitting US politician—remain so thoroughly unsolved?
I set about to see if I could solve them.
What I soon discovered is that Nashville’s local violence of the 1950s was a precursor to the violence that would grip the South in the 1960s and 1970s, an early version of what we would come to know and fear.
This contradicts the myth of Nashville’s peaceful integration. To hear the story, you’d think civil rights organizer and sit-in leader Diane Nash gathered some friends for a stroll one day, happened across Mayor Ben West downtown, and, during a pleasant chat, convinced him of the injustice of segregation, which he ended then and there without incident.
The truth was uglier. It’s true that no one was killed here. There aren’t iconic photos of people suffering (actually there are, but the papers didn’t run them).1 But African Americans who were in Nashville during this era have always spoken plainly about its brutality. The rest of the city hasn’t made a habit of listening.
AP Photo
Which means we don’t know our own stories. Worse, it means we’ve been conditioned to not look too hard at what we don’t know.
Just as these were the early, formative years for the people who would go on to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and head up the Freedom Rides, these were the early, formative years of their organized enemies. Just as Nashville was full of young people who would go on to be American civil rights heroes—Rev. James Lawson, Diane Nash, future congressman John Lewis, and so on—we had America’s nightmare here in J.B. Stoner, Edward Fields, John Kasper, Robert Gentry, and so on. Their evil was still developing when they were in Nashville, so it’s gone unrecognized.
But once you are able to see what you’re looking at, Nashville’s three unsolved integration-era bombings—Hattie Cotton Elementary School on September 10, 1957, the Jewish Community Center on March 16, 1958, and the home of Z. Alexander Looby on April 19, 1960—take on a new importance. It’s not just that these are some of the earliest appearances of the racists who would go on to do so much damage to our country. Nashville is where they first worked out the best ways to do these terrible things without paying any price for it.
Much of this book focuses on the minutia of why these racial terrorists weren’t caught—though most of us already know that the police weren’t uniformly in disagreement with their goals, and that the FBI’s agenda during this time was often at odds with solving these kinds of crimes. That lesson cost our nation dearly in the coming decades.
But another reason these bombings have never been solved is that the people who might have relevant information are still staying silent.
If you’ve ever seen photographs of little first graders integrating Nashville’s schools or of stoic college students sitting at lunch counters, then you’ve seen mobs of furious white people holding signs, throwing rocks, and hurling epithets. The captions of these photos always identify the Black people risking their safety for justice; they very rarely identify anyone in the angry mobs.
These events happened only sixty years ago. Most of the first graders who integrated Nashville’s schools in 1957 are still alive. When white Nashville natives go into the Civil Rights Room at the downtown branch of the Nashville Public Library and see those pictures enlarged on the walls, some of them must know some of the people in the mobs. They must know the names of the managers at the lunch counters. Someone knows who bombed Hattie Cotton Elementary School, the Jewish Community Center, and Z. Alexander Looby’s home. Yet the community at large has been denied that knowledge.
My focus is small: I want to know who did those bombings. If I can’t know that, I want to know why not. I want to know who made the decision that protecting white racist terrorists was more important than telling Nashville the truth.
This book is therefore not directly about school integration or the civil rights movement in Nashville. That work has already been done—you can read The Nashville Way by Benjamin Houston, Making the Unequal Metropolis by Ansley Erickson, Congressman John Lewis’s March, or David Halberstam’s The Children, among others, for yourself. It is also not a biography of Z. Alexander Looby or Avon Williams or other Black Nashvillians who deserve considered examinations of their lives and accomplishments. I’ll be dealing with the ugly underside, the white supremacist side, which, until now, no one has tried to piece together.
To be clear, I have not solved these bombings. Admittedly, this makes for a strange premise for a book: here are three unsolved crimes that, even after we spend eighty thousand words together, will remain unsolved.
Why, then, this book?
I’ll level with you: my answer to that question has changed over the course of writing it. I finished the first draft in 2017, fueled by outrage that someone had tried to kill Z. Alexander Looby—a sitting city councilman, an elected representative of Nashville—and that the would-be murderer was never caught. We can all shrug and say, “Well, it was 1960, what do you expect? They didn’t care about crimes against Black men.” But, folks, it was only 1960 for one year. What has prevented Nashville from investigating the crime in any of the six decades since?
The answer to that last question is why I’ve not chucked this project into a deep hole. When I started writing, I thought the answer was laziness or disinterest. And while I’m sure there’s some of that, what I discovered over the course of writing is that it’s very hard to get answers to these old unsolved cases.
The files of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and its precursor organization, the Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification, are sealed by state law. No one who isn’t in law enforcement can see those files, except under very narrow and specific instances when state legislators might be able to. Even the governor’s ability to see those files is severely limited. This means that, for all practical purposes, the TBI operates without citizen oversight. There is no way for the media to look into a TBI investigation. Families of victims in cold cases can’t review the files on their loved ones to see if the TBI discovered something that is meaningful to the family—a name, a location, something that might give them a clue.
FBI files are theoretically subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. I had very little luck actually getting files. Most of what I asked for they claimed they’d destroyed. The files they hadn’t destroyed (or hadn’t lied about destroying, but we’ll get to that) are at the National Archives. I have standing FOIA requests in at the National Archives, but I have lost hope that those will be filled before I am old or dead, whichever comes first. And, frankly, I did almost die while writing this book.2 People I would have liked to interview—like Kwame Lillard—died before I got the chance. The longer I wait, the more people who deserve the truth pass away without at least some part of it.
I have a lot going for me. I have the support of the Nashville Scene. I’ve had help from former congressman Jim Cooper getting the FBI to admit that they had not destroyed the Looby bombing file. I’ve spoken with a retired US attorney, a working federal defense lawyer, a terrorist, the DA’s office, and witnesses. And I have had all the time I need to write this book (thanks, Third Man Books).
I could not get the information I need to definitively tell you what happened.
This is what motivates me now. Nashville has the right to know the truth about itself. As we struggle to overcome our history and traditions of racism, we need to know the truth about our history. And it’s being kept from us.
That makes me angry. I hope it will also make you angry.
My hope is that this won’t be the last word on these bombings, but the first effort to get the truth.
I believe these crimes are solvable and that someone out there has the missing pieces that will give us definitive answers. I’m hoping that me saying, “This is what we know,” might spur an old memory or make sense of an overheard conversation. It might put other facts known to scholars of this era into context.
I also hope it will spur historians to look more closely at Tennessee during this era. For instance, it’s clear that the Chattanooga Klan was working closely with the Nashville Klan. Like Nashville, Chattanooga had a school bombing, a religious recreational center bombing, and a bombing of the home of a Black civil rights lawyer. The Chattanooga Klan was targeting Martin Luther King Jr. Same as Nashville.
As little work has been done on racist violence in Nashville during this era, it makes for a mountain of research compared to Chattanooga. Two of the most important racial terrorists of the era—J.B. Stoner and the head of the Dixie Knights, Jack Brown—came out of Chattanooga, and no one’s gotten the facts from this part of Chattanooga’s history nailed down. I rely heavily on FBI files, because the Nashville police files from this era were destroyed decades ago (any police files I did find came from other sources—the FBI files, personal collections, and other police departments’ files), and while I suspect the files from the Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification (the precursor to the TBI) must still exist somewhere, it is against the law for the TBI to let me see them.3
So, one of the big challenges was that there was just so very little information from some obvious channels to be found. Police records are missing. Participants are long dead. Family members are reluctant to talk. No one’s yet done the necessary research in other cities.
But the other big challenge is that there’s too much information from the FBI. The files available through the National Archives are enormous. J.B. Stoner’s file is three thousand pages long. The file on the Dixie Knights is around thirty thousand pages long. And there’s no way to browse files to see what might be relevant. In order to get any of them, they have to be vetted to make sure no classified information is released. For less than 500 pages, that vetting is at least a two-year process; vetting more than 500 pages takes more than a decade. Both require a per-page reproduction fee.
I love Nashville, and I believe people here deserve a firm answer about what happened and why, but I don’t have that kind of time or money. So, there are answers, better answers than I’ve been able to piece together here, sitting in the FBI’s files—technically available, but not actually available.
As anyone who has studied the 1960s knows, the FBI ended up doing some very shady, evil things to the people involved in the civil rights movement. We don’t know for sure when the FBI began looking the other way when their Klan informants threatened and harmed Black people, but it’s a matter of public record that they did.
This, sadly, means that we must take everything in their files with a grain of salt. We must balance the information in those files with what scant information we can find elsewhere. We must not assume that the FBI’s end goal with these cases was bringing the perpetrators to justice. In fact, they may have had other goals that directly conflicted with justice.
But, as deeply flawed as the FBI files may be, they’re the most comprehensive primary sources we have on these bombings. This is why I’ve included so many long quotes from these files and other documents; they amount to our first and only opportunities to hear what happened from people who were there.
I also want to make clear one self-imposed limit on the scope of this work. I have a list of about three hundred people tied to Nashville’s racist violence—some only very loosely, some pretty directly. I put together the list so that I could see if the same people recurred in the background of these incidents; or what areas of town might have housed large groups of active racists; or whether there might be family connections from incident to incident, connections that would only be apparent if I realized last names were repeating.
I haven’t thoroughly researched everyone on that list. Some folks only went to Rev. Fred Stroud’s Bible Presbyterian Church in North Nashville, a renegade racist congregation Stroud formed after he got kicked out of the Presbyterian church in the ’30s. Others were only on John Kasper’s witness list at his trial for inciting a riot during his Nashville activities. Their names came up once and never again, so I didn’t look into them.
In that list of three hundred people, not all of whom I’ve looked at closely, I’ve found three cases of patricide—two successful, one not. I know a lot of people, but don’t know anyone who’s tried to kill their father. A one percent father-murder rate seems worth noting.
I’ve looked into these patricides, and these cases have left me with deep sympathy for the killers or attempted killers. Our inability to investigate the Nashville bombings and deal with the violent racists in our midst has come at a steep cost, and it was often the children in the orbits of these racists who paid the direct price.
Choices we made as a city cost these children dearly.
I’m not going to name those children or tell those stories. I want to assure any family members who might be reading of that. But I think it’s important for us to know that our “no harm, no foul” attitude toward these bombings and the violent politics behind them meant we outsourced dealing with these violent, dangerous people to children.
If we don’t like how they handled their situations, we need to remember that, by failing to deal with this head on, we put them there.
These bombings did harm people. They were traumatizing to the people whose buildings were bombed. They were traumatizing to the people in our city who worried that they would be next. Leaving the bombings unsolved further eroded trust in law enforcement. And the kinds of people who are willing to hurt people often remain willing to hurt people, their own children in some cases. Not chasing them down when we had the chance left them in positions to hurt their loved ones, and it forced those loved ones into desperate actions to keep themselves safe.
Some of the bombers in the big terrorist network that got part of its start here went on to other cities and continued their evil. These bombers did have victims. As a city, we’ve just avoided facing them or their families.