Book triggers investigation into anti-integration bombings in Nashville

Nashville police are reopening investigations into three unsolved civil rights-era bombings that a local author believes were carried out by a network of racist terrorists in the South while the FBI looked the other way.

Mayor Freddie O’Connell announced on July 13 that he had asked the Metro Nashville Police Department to assign an investigator from the department’s cold case unit to investigate the bombings of Hattie Cotton Elementary School, the Jewish Community Center and the home of City Council member and prominent civil rights attorney Z. Alexander Looby between 1957 and 1960.

MNPD spokeswoman Kristin Mumford said the department is still in the early stages of “getting the investigation underway.”

O’Connell made the announcement at the book launch of “Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the FBI, the KKK and the Bombers Beyond Their Control” by Betsy Phillips, an author, historian and Nashville Scene columnist.

Third Man Books, a local publisher, released the book on July 16. Phillips said she worked on it for about seven years, gathering new information to determine who she believes are the suspects in at least one of the bombings.

“This book is not the last word on the bombings,” said a statement from O’Connell’s office. “For 64 years, the question of who was responsible for three bombings remained unanswered. The book does not have all the answers, but it can be the beginning of new insights and a new discussion.”

Phillips said the news was very exciting and she was relieved that, after years of largely isolated efforts, a well-resourced team was now working on the case.

“I don’t know what to make of it (that the cases are being reopened),” she said. “Because I thought it was so unlikely, I didn’t really think about what might come of it.”

Phillips’ research led her to conclude that the two attacks were connected. While some people initially believed that at least two of the attacks might be connected, that notion faded over time, Phillips said.

The Confederate Underground, a secret terrorist network with ties to the Ku Klux Klan in the South that opposed integration and the civil rights movement, was believed to be the group behind the attacks, she said. Phillips said her book also shows that the FBI appears to have been involved to varying degrees in some of the bombings, in part because it was warned of the attacks in advance and did not cooperate with local police investigations.

“They hid witnesses and backdated memos,” Phillips said of the FBI. “They told the Nashville police, ‘You know, we’ll analyze your evidence for you in our fancy lab, but we’re not going to be involved in the investigation.'”

Phillips said she sees a connection between the attacks she wrote about in “Dynamite Nashville” and the presence of neo-Nazi groups in the city in recent months.

“Some of them really know their history,” she said. “They come to Nashville because of that history. So if we as a city try to pretend that these are just unfortunate, isolated (events) that are unrelated, we handicap ourselves when it comes to dealing with these folks.”

One of the biggest obstacles in Phillips’ research was that there were no police records in Nashville from before 1963, she said.

O’Connell also said in his announcement that he is asking Metro Legal to work with the Metro Public Records Commission “on recommendations to improve data retention so that important records are not lost for future generations.”

The bombings

On September 10, 1957, dynamite exploded beneath Hattie Cotton Elementary School in East Nashville in response to the school’s integration. Six-year-old Patricia Watson was the first black student at Hattie Cotton Elementary School, entering the school on September 9, 1957. No one was injured, but much of the school was destroyed.

Phillips said she was “100 percent sure” that she had identified at least two of the suspects. Police at the time believed that the bombing of Hattie Cotton had been carried out by three people.

On March 16, 1958, the entrance to the Jewish Community Center in Nashville was bombed. Phillips noted in a 2018 Scene column that a local rabbi and The Tennessean received calls within minutes from people claiming to be the bombers and who said they had anti-integration motives for bombing the center. No one was injured.

She said it was “very likely” that she had identified two of the men who blew up the Jewish community center.

On April 19, 1960, a bomb exploded under the porch of the North Nashville home of city councilman and civil rights attorney Z. Alexander Looby. Much of the house was destroyed, but Looby and his wife survived. As an attorney, Looby had argued school desegregation cases and represented activists arrested at sit-ins across the city. Later that day, 22-year-old student and activist Diane Nash led a march to the steps of the municipal courthouse and confronted Mayor Ben West about segregation. Within weeks, Nashville’s lunch counters were integrated, making Nashville the first city in the South to do so.

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