I wish I could say I was shocked when neo-Nazis started parading around downtown Nashville last week, wearing shirts emblazoned with swastikas and the words “Pro-white.” I wish I could say I was shocked when they asked passers-by, “Are you a Jew?,” or when they terrified a child, or when they unfurled a hate-filled banner for interstate drivers to see. Even on Tuesday night, when they disrupted a meeting of the Metro Council, spouting “antisemitic, homophobic and racist diatribes,” according to the Nashville Scene’s Eli Motycka, I couldn’t say I was surprised.
Just a week earlier, a different group marched on our streets carrying Confederate flags, and in February white supremacists marched here to celebrate “the great white South.” As a blue city in a deep-red state, Nashville has become an appealing target for people who fear diversity. “Diversity means fewer white people,” read the flyers that last week’s marchers handed out. “Inclusion means exclusion of white people. Equity means stealing from white people.”
In an irony of timing, “Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the FBI, the KKK, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control,” a new book by the Nashville historian Betsy T. Phillips, was published on the same day that white supremacists harassed Nashville’s Metro Council. The book offers a necessary reminder of the world these neo-Nazis are nostalgic for.
“Dynamite Nashville” is an attempt to find out who was behind three unsolved Nashville bombings of the early civil rights era: at the Hattie Cotton School in 1957, the Jewish Community Center in 1958 and the home of Z. Alexander Looby, a Black civil rights attorney and Nashville City Council member, in 1960. No one was ever charged for the crimes.
Hattie Cotton was bombed the night after a Black child enrolled in the previously all-white school. The Jewish Community Center was bombed for all the usual reasons of antisemitism but also, Ms. Phillips convincingly argues, because local white supremacists believed that Black Southerners would have stayed happily in their segregated places if Jewish people hadn’t put ideas of freedom in their heads. Mr. Looby’s house was bombed in part because he was the attorney at the heart of virtually every civil rights lawsuit in Tennessee. These were typical targets for racist terrorists determined to stop the world from changing.
Though I know Ms. Phillips, as well as the historical context of the bombings she investigates, this book astonished me.
“Dynamite Nashville” is rigorously researched and reported, and its findings are scrupulously documented, but Ms. Phillips doesn’t write in the dispassionate language of authorial distance. Each chapter, for instance, opens with a “Guide to the Racists in This Chapter” that includes descriptors like “racial terrorism instigator” and “Nashville racist poet” and “yes, that David Duke.”
The book lays out evidence in the orderly way of a police investigation, and Ms. Phillips is transparent about what her evidence confirms, what it may only suggest and where it falls too short to inspire even an informed guess. She is equally honest about how this yearslong research into racism and racialized violence affected her personally. “Finding out that the F.B.I. was running some Klans has shaken me in ways I honestly don’t know how to process,” she writes.
The relentless facts combined with an almost confessional narrative strategy brings history into the present moment in a visceral way. There are three unsolved racist bombings in Nashville’s history. There are Neo-Nazis marching without shame through the daytime streets of current-day Nashville. The through line connecting these events is direct.
“Dynamite Nashville” includes one particularly outrageous example of racist violence and its systemic underpinnings. In 1958, governors in the region held the Southern Conference on Bombing to share information about what had clearly become an interstate pattern of racist attacks, including the names of dangerous racists in their states. Bull Connor — who a few years later became nationally infamous as the Birmingham, Ala., commissioner of public safety who sicced attack dogs and used water cannons on a peaceful march of Black children and teenagers — served as one of his state’s representatives to the conference. His name was also on the list of dangerous racists that Alabama submitted to the gathering.
To be clear, the presence of a few neo-Nazis harassing people in Nashville does not signal an imminent return to life as we knew it in the Jim Crow South. Even the Republican governor of Tennessee denounced the Nazis. The Republican supermajority of the Tennessee statehouse did the same.
Nevertheless, the presence of Nazis on the streets of Nashville tells us something about the similarity between the politics of the past and our own political moment. The shameless promoting of whiteness. The transfer of odious private ideas to the public arena. The confidence that no harm or even accountability will come to anyone who espouses them.
Republicans may decry the white supremacists disrupting daily life in this city, but they cannot be surprised by any of this. Giving lip service to inclusive democracy while simultaneously working to stomp out inclusive democracy is just what Republicans do now.
In 2017, a former president of the United States, now the leading presidential candidate, said the racists and antisemites who marched on Charlottesville, Va., included some “very fine people.” After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the armed insurrectionists — who were hunting House speaker Nancy Pelosi through the halls of Congress and calling for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged — “unbelievable patriots.” Just last week at the Republican National Convention, people waved signs calling for “mass deportation now.” Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for returning America to Christian nationalist control.
A major political party in the United States of America is telling us something about where we are now, and it looks an awful lot like where we were before.
The number of hate and extremist groups operating in the United States has reached an all-time high. “With a historic election just months away, these groups are multiplying, mobilizing and making — and in some cases already implementing — plans to undo democracy,” said Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive, in a call with reporters in early June.
Those of us who live in the states controlled by Republican supermajorities already enjoy fewer freedoms than those who don’t. Now, aided by recent rulings from the Supreme Court, right-wingers are aiming to make life in the rest of the country look the way it looks here. The way it once looked nearly everywhere.
The difference now, at least here, is that Nashville is telling the neo-Nazis to go home. In response to hate groups’ efforts to recruit from the ranks of military and law enforcement, Jeff Preptit, a Metro Council member, is drafting legislation that would prohibit Nashville police officers from joining a hate or paramilitary group or displaying or posting insignias “that advocate racism, violence, misogyny, homophobia or other kinds of hate or discrimination.”
And Mayor Freddie O’Connell, speaking at an event for the release of “Dynamite Nashville,” announced that he had asked the police chief to assign a member of the cold-case unit to reopen the investigation into three racist bombings that have remained unsolved for more than 60 years.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing New York Times Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
