A plaque marking the 1960 bombing of civil rights leader Z. Alexander Looby's home
Ever since Mayor Freddie O’Connell announced that the Metro Nashville Police Department is reopening the integration-era bombing cases at the heart of my book Dynamite Nashville, people have been asking me what I think and what I think will come of it. And I’ve tried to be honest that I simply don’t know. I never thought the cases getting reopened was genuinely possible, so I surely have no idea what is possible from reopening them. But that’s the benefit of bringing a trained detective in at this point — I’ve done everything I know to do, and I’ve gotten as far as I know how to get. The idea that someone with experience and training would now be handling this? That’s wonderful.
Det. Mike Roland will look into the bombings of Hattie Cotton Elementary School, the Jewish Community Center and Z. Alexander Looby's home
The detective they assigned to the cases, Mike Roland, is very well-respected, it seems. I was told that he’s very smart and tenacious and that he cares a lot about giving victims’ families answers. This gave me a lot of relief, because even though I’m not sure what’s left to be done, everyone I talked to made it seem like he was the guy to figure it out.
Great.
My plan was to meet with Detective Roland, give him all the FBI files I’ve been able to get, tell him a couple of the weird things I’d found (like how it sure seems like Carrie Wray should have an FBI file and should have been looked into because of her ties to John Kasper and her presence at some important events, but no one seemed interested in her at the time), and then wish him luck. Farewell, Nashville’s historical racists. You are someone else’s problem now.
And then Steven Hale over at the Nashville Banner dropped a turd in the punchbowl of my happiness. In the middle of his story about Kathy Morante being replaced as the head of the MNPD's Office of Professional Accountability, he writes: “She has been assigned to assist cold case Detective Mike Roland with the recently reopened investigation into civil rights-era bombings in Nashville.”
Kathy Morante had led Metro Nashville Police Department’s Office of Professional Accountability since 2013
This is going to be a weird column from here on out. I feel like one of my skills is cutting through bullshit to see what’s going on underneath. I’ve sat on having opinions on this for a week now, because I am baffled. I thought that with time would come clarity. But I’m still very confused and unsure about what the hell is going on here. But if I wait to write about it until I have a clearer picture ... well, who knows how long that will be?
I met with Detective Roland and Kathy Morante last Monday. It was awkward, but she was professional. I handed them all the stuff I planned to hand over to them. And I tried to stress to them that, as much as I’m interested in these cases, it was important for them to understand that, for a lot of Black Nashvillians, the bombing of Z. Alexander Looby's home especially is still a very tender sore spot. Nashville’s continuing indifference to solving that case — an assassination attempt on a local politician — stands as the prime example to them of how Black people in this city cannot count on the police and cannot get justice.
And then I spent all week fielding questions from people about the police department’s decision to put Morante on the investigation. And by fielding, I mean like when an outfielder sees the ball in the air headed toward him and then loses the ball in the sun and it hits him right in the head and he’s dazed and disoriented. That kind of fielding. These are the basic things I’m hearing.
Wow, what a huge "fuck you" to the mayor.
The reasoning here is that Morante has been at the center of a lot of issues that O’Connell has been encouraging the police to deal with, and that they may resent his “meddling.” And so assigning Morante to an investigation that is important to the mayor is a kind of malicious compliance — giving him what he wants, served up on a platter of his big police headache.
I keep rolling this around in my head, since it was the conclusion I immediately jumped to. But what I can’t shake is the idea that this is the Goldilocks of ineffective kiss-offs, if that’s what it is. It’s not so subtle that no one but the mayor sees it, and it’s not so bold that everyone sees it for what it is. Instead, if this is some kind of pushback, it’s not good pushback, because the message is muddled. The investigation is still happening. They still have a really good investigator on the case. And one might argue that, whether or not you agree with what Morante’s been up to before this, she does what’s asked of her. So why would the mayor be personally insulted by, We assigned a tenacious hard-worker to help the well-respected detective with this case? If that’s supposed to show the mayor, what exactly is it supposed to show him?
Oh, so this is now the Kathy Morante redemption tour.
The reasoning with this, I think, is that through Morante’s actions as head of OPA and her alleged involvement with killing Nashville's Community Oversight Board, she is seen as corrupt by Black Nashville, and putting her in a position to solve a case important to Black Nashville will mitigate the harm she’s allegedly done.
Extensive complaint says officials ignored department policy, manipulated investigations, lied about reforms and helped pass a law gutting the Community Oversight Board
This was also the second thing I jumped to, so I have a lot of sympathy for it, but I think I was underestimating the massive amount of distrust between a lot of Black Nashville and the police. My personal belief, after all the research I’ve done, is that it’s likely an FBI informant was involved in the Looby bombing. But a lot — a lot — of older Black Nashvillians think it was straight-up the Nashville police. So if the investigation leads anywhere other than there, the current investigation is going to need to be so clean and solid that people will believe it. Otherwise, it’s just Nashville cops covering for Nashville cops. As usual. And considering how many of the accusations lobbed at Morante are of her covering for Nashville cops? It looks suspicious.
The thing is, it’s going to be a very difficult task for Roland and Morante to solve these cases, for all the reasons I had a hard time solving them — police files are missing, people are dead, the FBI is at best slow to cooperate — and Roland is still working on unsolved murders along with this. I have reason to be optimistic that they may find out more than I did, since other police departments might cooperate with them, and as I hoped for in writing the book, some older Nashvillians who read it are realizing they know the people mentioned in the book and remember stuff pertaining to this era. And now they have a detective to tell.
But like I said, if Roland and Morante do all this work and get all this information and in the end say, “Well, we don’t know much more now than Betsy did then,” that only works to make people feel like they tried if they have faith in the investigators. I don’t see how that’s likely. And so I’m having a hard time seeing how that would be enough to change people’s opinions of Morante.
So I don’t think this is supposed to give her the opportunity to look better.
Oh, so the police really don’t care about this, do they?
I don’t have an answer to this. Like I said, Roland is still working other cases. And he’s well-respected. You don’t put a talented detective who’s good at his job on an investigation you don’t give a shit about when he’s got other things he could be doing. Do you?
But also, my personal experiences with Nashville police have been run-of-the-mill encounters with people who seemed very professional and respectful. And it could be that this is a case where a white person, like me, might say, “No, look, everything is working how it should,” and Black people are like, “Dear God, are you dumb? It only looks like it’s working to you because that’s the only side you ever see.”
So I don’t know. This one I don’t feel confident in having an opinion on because I don’t feel confident that I even have enough perspective to be clear on what I’m seeing.
Why would they make Morante work with you?
First, I’m not a part of the investigation. I gave them my stuff, and that was that. So she doesn’t need to work with me. No one’s making her work with me. Also, I’m nice. People like working with me. I think. (Shut up, meany-butt.) But second, it kind of does seem like a strange, shitty thing to put her in a position where I’m paying attention. It won’t always be the case that I matter. I’m not trying to sound like some badass here. But right now, for as long as it lasts, every national media outlet that has interviewed me has asked me to keep them apprised of how things are going in the investigation. If they were to ask me again today, this [gesturing wildly at the past two weeks] is what I would have to tell them. Why would the police put themselves in a position to bring national attention to their biggest controversies, to bring national heat to Morante? It makes no sense.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Going by this perspective, the police department didn’t assign Morante to this investigation because they are pissed at the mayor or covering for Morante or deliberately sinking the investigation or hanging Morante out to dry. They just didn’t think through how this would look to the rest of us. One person told me, “We opened a door, and they walked right by it into a closed window.”
OK, I hear you. But they’re just dumb? This is the explanation? We give them the authority to shoot and kill us and we’re shrugging and saying, “They just don’t think things through.” Um, OK, well ... someone’s a dumbass if that’s true, but I’m not sure it’s only the police.
Talking to author and Scene contributor Betsy Phillips about her new book on Nashville’s still-unsolved integration-era bombings
If someone is supposed to have the smarts to make split-second decisions about whether we live or die, if we need them to have great situational awareness so that they don’t hurt or kill innocent bystanders, how is, “Eh, they didn’t really think about this” about any part of their job with a huge component of public interest supposed to be comforting?
You’re telling me there’s not anyone in the police department in a position of power who can look at a situation like this and say, “You know, this is probably going to upset some people,” and then avoid stepping on their own dicks? Again, this may just be a failure of imagination on my part, but how can this be true in a police department of this size? When you’ve got Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife and the one drunk guy who lets himself into the jail, you can see how stupidity might rule in the office — especially if Sheriff Taylor is home for lunch. But we have hundreds of police officers.
And again, I suspect this is just a point where my imagination fails and I can’t see what’s right in front of me. But to believe that they were just thoughtless means believing that people know we have given guns and badges to an army of idiots and they all do nothing about it.
I don’t know, y’all. I just don’t know. None of these things wholly offers an explanation that makes sense to me, and I genuinely don’t know if it’s because none of these is the truth or if I, somehow, am just in denial about how bad things are.
Frankly, I’m just sticking with the fact that I met with the detective, and he took notes and he seemed cautiously curious. That seemed like the right reaction to being given this task, and I’m hoping nothing else matters.
