Why Don’t We Know Who Bombed Nashville?

Who pulled off the unsolved bombings in Nashville? Jane Marcellus reviews “Dynamite Nashville” by Betsy Phillips, which advances an intriguing possibility.

By Jane MarcellusSeptember 20, 2024

• History

NEAR THE END of Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the FBI, the KKK, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control (2024), author Betsy Phillips introduces readers to Gladys Girgenti, a Nashville Ku Klux Klan leader from the 1970s and 1980s. Girgenti didn’t live in Tennessee during a series of bombings that hit Nashville in 1957, 1958, and 1960, but Phillips thought she might have information on the unsolved crimes.

“So, I went to talk to her,” Phillips writes. “To ask her myself. And I really liked her.”

Phillips, who writes about politics and civil rights history for the alt weekly Nashville Scene and was “raised to try very hard to not be a racist asshole,” was shocked to find herself enjoying the company of a flamboyant Klanswoman, admiring her crocheted afghan, petting her cat, and listening to “this funny, charming woman” tell stories about her Klan years.

Phillips believes there’s a clue in her reaction to Girgenti that just might help explain why the three bombings remain unsolved. “I felt this overwhelming urge to go along with what she was saying,” she writes, hoping Girgenti would find her “funny and charming” too. “Something so deeply ingrained in me […] let me like her and suppress the warning signals I should have been getting.”

Later, she realized how deluded she’d been—and how afraid. She speculates that “the white people in a position to investigate” the bombings back in the 1950s and 1960s also suppressed warning signals for similar reasons, ignoring information right in front of them.

Whether Phillips’s theory is valid or not, it illuminates two questions. First, who did bomb Hattie Cotton Elementary in 1957, the Nashville Jewish Community Center in 1958, and civil rights attorney Z. Alexander Looby’s home in 1960? The second question is arguably larger: why don’t we know?

Phillips tells readers at the outset that she doesn’t solve the mystery in her book. Although she filed numerous Freedom of Information Act requests and pored over mountains of documents since starting the project in 2017 (with a Nashville Scene column devoted to the first bombing’s 60th anniversary), she never figured out for certain who the culprits were.

But Phillips makes some educated guesses. Much of the book is devoted to labyrinthine connections between several of the area’s most infamous midcentury racists. Girgenti’s friend J. B. Stoner looms large in several chapters. So does John Kasper, a New Jersey–born, Columbia University–educated “rabblerouser” and “lead troublemaker in Nashville,” according to Phillips. Also here, perhaps surprisingly, is Vanderbilt English professor Donald Davidson, as well as poet Ezra Pound, whose writings influenced Kasper, Davidson, and others.

The bombings in question occurred in the years following the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled that using race to separate children in public schools was unconstitutional. Although two Nashville Catholic schools had enrolled Black students in 1954, public schools didn’t do so until forced by a lawsuit brought by Looby. Hattie Cotton Elementary was one of several to enroll Black students, all first graders, when classes began on September 9, 1957. That evening, Kasper held a particularly angry rally at the War Memorial downtown near the state capitol. The school was hit by a dynamite bomb just after midnight the next morning.

The Jewish Community Center, attacked the following year, was one of several Jewish targets in the South, all possibly the work of Stoner and a group of segregationists called the Confederate Underground, who thought that Jews were behind Black people’s desire for equality. In Stoner’s FBI file, a Klan friend’s statement said that Stoner thought “acts of violence against the Jews would stop integration faster than on the negroes.” Among Davidson’s papers at Vanderbilt is a letter he wrote to poet Allen Tate, dismissing the JCC bombing as “the usual propaganda stuff put out by the press services” to discredit segregationists, “including people such as me.”

While no one was physically injured in any of the bombings, and none of the buildings completely destroyed, the attack on Looby’s house at 5:30 a.m. on April 19, 1960, was apparently a bungled assassination attempt. The attackers threw the bomb toward the front of the house, missing the window. They probably did not realize an alley around back was closer to Looby’s bedroom.

Phillips’s attempts to investigate each bombing led her to question how much effort had gone into solving them to begin with. Several times, she was told that the information she needed had been destroyed. Files were incomplete. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation records had been sealed by law, she was told, and the FBI appears to have ignored Kasper. As for the Looby bombing, she was first told the FBI file had been destroyed. Only after contacting former Tennessee congressman Jim Cooper did she learn it was in the National Archives, along with the file on Looby himself. The Looby file was unusually sparse, she thought—only 20 pages. That the FBI would have so little on one of Tennessee’s few civil rights attorneys—an NAACP leader who championed school desegregation and represented students involved in sit-ins downtown—seemed unlikely. “Looby’s FBI file had [20] pages in it the first day they opened it. I would put money on that,” she writes. This and other discrepancies led her to ask, in an audacious two-page spread, if the Klan and FBI were “Best Friends Forever.”

Like Rachel Louise Martin’s A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation (2023), which focuses on events in tiny Clinton, Tennessee, in 1956, Dynamite Nashville can be read as part of an effort to reckon with the state’s history of racist violence. Phillips says that effort has been hampered by local mythology that claims Nashville’s violence wasn’t as bad as in places like Birmingham, Alabama, where a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four little girls in 1963.

“To hear the story,” Phillips writes, “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 there and then without incident.”

The truth is more complicated, Phillips argues. It’s also slower, I would add. The Tennessee State Capitol displayed a bust of Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest until 2021, the same year an unusually ugly statue of Forrest beside I-65 was dismantled. Earlier this summer, the Tennessee Historical Commission denied, for the second time, efforts by leaders at Middle Tennessee State University (where I used to be a professor) to rename a campus building named for Forrest. Meanwhile, a statue of Edward Ward Carmack, a politician and newspaper editor who was allegedly behind an 1892 mob attack aimed at anti-lynching editor Ida B. Wells, was destroyed during a protest over George Floyd’s murder in 2020. (Carmack himself was gunned down in the streets of Nashville one afternoon in 1908.) The Floyd protest took place at the same War Memorial where Kasper led his rally of segregationists in 1957—and where, in July and early August this year, groups of neo-Nazis marched. One group came, ironically, the same day that Phillips’s book was published. The national and regional tug-of-war that has shaped Nashville’s history continues today in a form both different and the same.

Unsurprisingly, Dynamite Nashville is not a pleasant read. This is painful material, and Phillips’s writing style is blunt. Her pull-no-punches approach allows her to convey ideas that are often more difficult to express within the constraints of traditional journalism or academic writing. But a style that works for her columns is more difficult to follow for the length of an entire book, particularly one that is all about tracking clues. Admittedly, part of this could be my problem—I have no head for whodunits—but a detailed index would help enormously. The book also contains some speculation about which segregationists might have had sex with each other, a fruitless digression.

Nevertheless, this book is a public service. It’s the product of several years of dogged determination and keen insights. Blended with the clues, it also shows how white privilege worked in the 1950s and 1960s and how it still works today. It has already made a difference. Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell announced that he was asking Nashville police to reopen the investigation. No doubt many of the perpetrators are long gone or very old, but that’s not the point. As Phillips writes, “Someone knows who did these bombings, and it’s not too late to give the city the answers it needs to heal from the terror of those years.”