A series of unsolved bombings in Nashville during the Civil Rights era may be reopened. Mayor Freddie O’Connell called on Nashville’s police chief to devote resources to answering who was behind the attacks.
Arsonists targeted the Hattie Cotton School in 1957 when Nashville desegregated. A year later, the Nashville Jewish Community Center was bombed. In 1960, bombers attacked the home of Civil Rights attorney Z. Alexander Looby.
O’Connell asked Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake to appoint a lead investigator from the cold case unit.
The call was inspired by the findings of the book, “Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the FBI, the KKK, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control.” Nashville author Betsy Phillips uncovered a file believed to have been destroyed by the FBI. She tells WPLN News that she obtained the FBI file on Looby himself late last year.
The file shows that the FBI detailed the minutia of Looby’s comings and goings, but didn’t contain anything about the threat on his life.
“So, that left me with this question of like, ‘If they had him under surveillance like this, how did they not know that this bombing was going to happen?’” Phillips said. “How did this possibly catch them by surprise?”
It might not have been a surprise to the FBI, according to FBI records and interviews with known bombers. Phillips’s research found that the FBI had multiple informants both within — and leading — the Tennessee Ku Klux Klan around the same time.
As part of her research, Phillips interviewed the woman who attempted to bomb The Temple in Belle Meade. Gladys Girgenti told her that within the Klan, being an FBI informant was an open secret.
“Being an FBI informant, it seemed to me, was, in Girgenti’s world, like working as a stripper to get through college,” Phillips wrote. “It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to brag about in polite company. But the money was good, and people understood why you would do it.”
Mayor O’Connell is also asking Metro’s Law and Public Records departments to work together to improve records retention, so they’re not “lost to future generations.”
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