Early this morning, 58 years ago, the house of Z. Alexander Looby blew up. He and his wife were asleep in the bedroom. He thought the house had been hit by lightning. His neighbor's house had an enormous hole in it. The windows on the apartment building next door were blown out.
Windows at Meherry across the street were blown out and people injured from the flying glass. After a year of research, here's what I know, as in actual fact: Two days after the bombing, the police had a confession. They dismissed it, but media reports aren't clear on why.
John Kasper, that raging asshole, had riled crowds back in 1957 by holding up a noose and suggesting it fit Looby's neck. And then in '58 or '59 (I forget which), the FBI got a call from a guy saying Kasper was trying to hire him to kill "Frank Luby," a Negro city council
member in Nashville. The FBI dismissed this caller as a lunatic. Also, over the years, there's been a slight misunderstanding of the timeline. Martin Luther King didn't come to Nashville in the wake of the Looby bombing. He had been scheduled to be in Nashville for weeks. He was
supposed to give a talk at War Memorial Auditorium, but they cancelled at the last minute and Fisk offered their space for the event. In other words, Looby's bombing coincided with King's Nashville event, but it didn't cause it.
The papers reported that Looby thought he'd been bombed because of his advocacy for the sit-in protesters, but after going through his papers, I don't believe this is exactly true. He always asserted he didn't know why he'd been bombed or who could have done it.
I think the reporter may have asked him something more broad, like "Do you think this could be related to your recent cases?" or "Do you think this could be related to your Civil Rights work?" And, of course he absolutely believed that.
But the other two bombings in Nashville had been tied explicitly to school integration, which Looby was intimately involved in. And the school desegregation court stuff was ongoing. I don't know how anyone could know--unless they had access to the bombers--which thing the
bombers were pissed about. And here are the things I know, because I'm not a fool: that bomb was not thrown from a car, regardless of what the police said. It was placed. It was intended to kill Looby and it would have, except he had not removed the wood siding before he bricked
his house. The outside walls of the house were twice the thickness of a normal house. I suspect he did this to keep his house from being easily burned, but it had the side-effect of making it more bomb-resistant. That saved his and his wife's lives.
Also, the only reason you'd immediately dismiss an unwavering confession is if you knew that person wasn't the bomber. And the only way you could possibly know that person wasn't the bomber is if you had a pretty good idea who the bomber was.
The bomber wasn't Kasper. He was in jail. But there is one person who was both friends with Kasper and friends with the local Klan who disliked Kasper. One person who already had a bug up his butt about King and who had already been involved in a plot to kill King.
One person who already had a network of racist terrorists who had already blown up one building in Nashville in 1958 (the JCC).
J.B. Stoner.
J.B. Stoner.
Robert Gentry left Middle Tennessee, as far as I can tell, at the end of 1960. He moved to Florida where he said he joined the Klan. He blew up a first grader's house in Florida and he shot a black guy for having the audacity to drive near him and his evil buddies.
Gentry admitted to the HUAC that he had been in Birmingham at the time of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. His lawyer, both in the Florida bombing trial and before the HUAC, was J.B. Stoner.
I have a very hard time believing that Gentry went from not being a Klan member to trying to kill a child in a matter of weeks. I also have raised all my eyebrows and the eyebrows of my dog and cat over the fact that weeks after he joined the Klan and tried to murder a child, he
was somehow able to procure J.B. Stoner as his attorney. I think it's much more likely that Gentry was in the Klan up here and knew Stoner from up here, where Stoner was a known friend of our Klan. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Gentry left the state after the Looby
bombing. I FOIAed the FBI's file on the Looby bombing and Robert Gentry's file. They claim both have been destroyed. The unsolved attempted assassination of a sitting U.S. politician and they destroyed the file? We should all raise our eyebrows at that.
