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Just your regular reminder that there were three Civil Rights era bombings in Nashville all linked to anti-black racism: Hattie Cotton School, the JCC, and Councilman Looby’s house.
One of the enormous drawbacks to these bombings remaining unsolved is that most of Nashville has no idea they’re connected, if they even know the JCC bombing happened.
But, even if it’s not widely known now, authorities had a pretty good idea of who was behind Hattie Cotton and the JCC by the end of 1958 and it was the same people for the same reason.
There is a strain of anti-black racism whose signature is antisemitism. I guess you would call it a philosophical tradition. If anti-black terrorists are also deeply antisemitic, you can pretty accurately trace their philosophical lineage back to the people who terrorized us back
then. I think one of the reasons this isn’t widely understood is that Black and Jewish people have their own histories in the South that have very little to do with this white supremacist fantasy.
The reality is complicated. There can be antisemitism in Black communities the same as in all American communities. Jewish people throughout the South have been mostly functionally white—able to own property and join social groups.
And there have been times when the communities have found common cause. And Jewish gathering places—synagogues and community centers— were some of the only places in the South that weren’t segregated. Not that there were large populations of Black Jews, but where there were any,
they had full access to facilities. And Nashville’s JCC was a place where white and black children played together. But this is all reality. Which is why it was confusing to Nashville when the JCC was bombed. And why it hasn’t been fully incorporated into Nashville’s public
memory. But let me be clear: the white supremacist conspiracy theory that Black people used to be fine with their “proper place” in Southern society and were too stupid to want more than that unless their Jewish overlords told them to want equality was widespread.
And the racists who believed that conspiracy theory were the ones running around blowing stuff up in the 1950s and 1960s.
The guy everyone thinks blew up our JCC was the same guy who was behind the attempt to blow up Rev. Shuttlesworth’s church in Birmingham the second time and the same guy who had one of the earliest known plots to kill Rev. King.
And his friend, who was kicked out of the Klan for being too violent was the ringleader of the terror cell of KKK members and neonazis who tried to blow up the Temple in Belle Meade in 1981.
