Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the FBI, the KKK, and the Bombers Beyond their Control
“You don’t know Nashville—the South, or America’s dark soul—until you’ve read Dynamite Nashville. Betsy Phillips' true stories tell us who we are. Her unique voice—personal, funny and tragic—should be listened to and savored.” — former U.S. Representative Jim Cooper
"Phillips' patience, attention to detail, and dogged determination have provided us with a work that not only describes these events in sharp detail but names the villains responsible for these cowardly actions and in many instances the villains who allowed them to fade into obscurity. " — Dr. Learotha Williams, Jr., professor of history at Tennessee State University and editor of I’ll Take You There: Exploring Nashville’s Social Justice Sites
Dynamite Nashville is a prequel to the racist violence of the 1960s–the story of how racists came together to learn how to terrorize communities, to blow up homes, schools, and religious buildings, and to escape any meaningful justice.
Just as Nashville was where Civil Rights icons like John Lewis, James Lawson, and Diane Nash began, Nashville is also where a network of racial terrorists began. Worse, in Nashville, we see how the differing agendas of local police and the FBI allowed these bombers to escape prosecution until decades later, if at all.
On September 10, 1957, Hattie Cotton Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee, blew up. On March 16, 1958, the Jewish Community Center was bombed. On April 19, 1960, the home of Civil Rights attorney and Nashville city councilman, Z. Alexander Looby was dynamited. He and his wife were lucky to escape with their lives. These bombings have never been solved.
J.B. Stoner, a suspect in the Nashville bombings, perhaps best known by the public as one of James Earl Ray’s attorneys, headed up a loosely-connected network of racist terrorists. Members of this network would commit at least twenty bombings between 1957 and 1963, including the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four little girls (a bombing for which Stoner allegedly provided the dynamite).
In Dynamite Nashville, Betsy Phillips pieces together what really happened in Nashville at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. It has national implications for how we understand the violent white response to desegregation efforts then and white supremacist actions now.
Author:
Betsy Phillips
photo by Rachael Johnson
Betsy Phillips has written for the Nashville Scene and the Washington Post. Her fiction has appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Apex Magazine, among others. She was named 2019 Best Historian in the Best of Nashville edition of the Nashville Scene and has served on the board of Historic Nashville, Inc. She lives in Whites Creek, Tennessee.
