During the Civil Rights era, white supremacists bombed Nashville three times, attacking a school, a Jewish Community Center and the home of civil rights attorney Z. Alexander Looby. Those bombers were never caught.
Sixty years later, Nashville author Betsy Phillips takes a deep dive into why. Her new book, “Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control” is out now. Her work has inspired Mayor Freddie O’Connell to call for the cold cases to be re-opened.
Phillips sat down with WPLN News to talk about her research.
Marianna Bacallao: Let’s start with the first bombing. At the start of the school year, when Nashville schools were required to integrate, someone bombed Hattie Cotton School.
Betsy Phillips: Yes.
MB: Compared to other schools at the time, that was a more last-minute step into integration. Can you tell us what set that school apart as a target for the KKK?
BP: The little girl who desegregated Hattie Cotton School, no one knew she was coming. She registered the first day of school, whereas the other schools that were integrating that day, the kids had pre-registered. So, racist groups knew to come to those schools in order to protest. But no one came to Hattie Cotton first thing. So, the police made a kind of miscalculation. They knew, or had heard rumors, that there was something in the works against the schools, but they put guards by all of the schools where there had been trouble that day. And since there hadn’t been any trouble at Hattie Cotton, they didn’t put a guard there.
MB: The next bombing target was the Jewish Community Center. That bombing has a connection to a network of racist and antisemitic bombings across several Southern states. Your research shows that it’s not just an outside instigator or just local suspects, but a mix of the two. Who was at the center of that strategy?
BP: J.B. Stoner. He could come in and teach you how to set up a bomb, how to make a bomb. He could give you advice on how to place it. He eventually seems to have gotten to where he would like to use a couple of local guys, and then one outside guy, so … if the police were like, ‘We’re looking for three men in a white Ford or whatever,’ they were never going to find three men in a white Ford because one of those guys went home.
MB: After Looby’s home was bombed, there were some unorthodox methods of investigation. I understand the mayor got involved.
BP: Yes.
MB: And throughout these investigations by police into these bombings, there’s a clear mistrust between them and the FBI. What did you find was at the heart of that mistrust?
BP: So, what we had in Nashville was an incredibly corrupt police department that beat suspects into confessing. At the same time, you know, J. Edgar Hoover was, well, J. Edgar Hoover. His FBI was, you know, a nightmare organization as well. The bombings that the JCC was a part of, you know, these are these region-wide bombings. And they refused to get involved. They kept insisting these are just local matters. We can look at your evidence and run it through our labs, but we can’t really, you know, coordinate this investigation because it’s not national.
MB: When we think of FBI informants within the Klan or FBI agents getting enmeshed in the Klan, we think of somebody who is there to do good. But you spoke with somebody who was very active in white supremacist circles during that time, and she gave you a different impression.
BP: Right, I spoke with Gladys Girgenti, who was arrested and served time for trying to bomb The Temple here in Belle Meade in ’81. But, so, I asked her because I was like, you know, my impression from like, the movies and popular culture is that this is this big, daring thing. And she’s like, ‘No, everybody took a turn as an FBI informant.’ From how she talked about it, it was kind of like if you stripped to get through college. It’s not something that you’re going to mention in polite company, but it’s kind of like you got to do what you got to do. If that’s what pays the bills, that’s what pays the bills.
MB: And in some cases, in your research, you found that there were people who had informed the FBI or were involved with the FBI who did carry out violent acts.
BP: Yeah. In order to protect their informants, in order to keep information flowing, they just stymie those investigations. I would say, in the case of the Ku Klux Klan in the ’50s and ’60s, that it is really hard to argue that there was any benefit to us as Americans for that choice. You know, obviously, the 16th Street Baptist Church still blew up. Martin Luther King was still assassinated. Whatever it was that they were selling as, like, protecting people? People died.
Phillip’s book, “Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control,” hit shelves on Tuesday. Hear Phillips on an episode of This Is Nashville alongside historians Dr. Learotha Williams, Jr. and Linda Wynn, who discuss a recent white supremacist march through downtown Nashville and the connection to the racially motivated violence of Nashville’s past.
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