When I was writing my book Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the FBI, the KKK, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control, I heard a rumor that the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith was an FBI informant during the civil rights era. If true, it would be the Nashville equivalent of finding out that St. Peter worked for Satan. The Rev. Kelly Miller Smith was the pastor at First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill. He headed up the NAACP for a while. He founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Council. His daughter Joy was one of the first-graders who desegregated Nashville’s public schools in 1957. He was close friends with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He worked closely with the Rev. James Lawson. He taught at the American Baptist Theological Seminary and served as assistant dean at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
If you took a class on the civil rights movement that focused solely on the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, you’d still come away with a pretty comprehensive understanding of the era.
I made some discreet inquiries to find out if anyone locally had ever heard such a thing. No one I asked had. I also really didn’t want it to be true, but I still kept an eye out as I was going through FBI files. And listen, I’m not about to break the hearts of people who knew him. This isn’t a sad story about heroes with clay feet.
However, let me also be clear that whenever I talked to Black Nashvillians who lived through the 1950s and ’60s and told them that I found proof that the FBI was running the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, none of them were surprised. They might not have known specifically that the FBI ordered the Klan around, but they knew — and knew at the time — that law enforcement and the Klan worked together.
There are stories — and there will be more stories — of prominent people who were marching and protesting and sitting in who were also informing for the FBI. Not because they were deliberately trying to undermine the movement, but because they were making a calculation about what they needed to do to stay safe from the death squads.
All this is to say, I found the file in which the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith talks to the FBI, and I promptly closed the file and put it away. Who wants to have to know for sure?
Me. My dumb ass. So after hemming and hawing, I read it — and I’m sad I waited, in part because I bet the FBI was also sad about the discussion.
Author Betsy Phillips’ Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control is scheduled for release via Third Man Books…
So here we are. It’s Sept. 26, 1961, and locally, we’ve been through the bombings of Hattie Cotton Elementary School, the Jewish Community Center and the home of civil rights leader Z. Alexander Looby — all of which were unsolved (well, unsolved-ish). The Rev. James Lawson had been expelled from Vanderbilt. The sit-in protesters had gotten the mayor to admit that segregation was wrong. Nationally, there had been bombings throughout the South, and the world watched as the Freedom Riders were attacked by Klansmen in Anniston and Birmingham, Ala.
And here comes the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith to talk to the FBI about the upcoming meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Nashville. Oh, he has details for them. Martin Luther King Jr. is going to speak. Harry Belafonte is going to sing. They’re going to discuss how to ensure Black people can vote. And then he pulls a move so badass I’m smiling just thinking about it.
Let’s go to the FBI file:
“[Smith] stated that they feel that they will have the backing of the Justice Department of the Federal Government in this effort, and particularly because of the fact that they have been advised by certain individuals in the Justice Department, who he did not identify, that the Justice Department could take legal action with regard to voter registration and that they would be on much sounder legal ground here than they were in the Freedom Rides which they have sponsored to date.”
You see what he did there?! When you get “invited” to share information with the FBI, you’re supposed to be on your back foot. They are the power of the federal government, and the Rev. Smith must have suspected that they knew what the Klan was up to. (The Rev. Smith could not have known this at the time, but in fact, FBI informant Gary Rowe was a direct participant in the attacks on the Freedom Riders that summer.) And here he is just acting like, "Of course the Justice Department, including the FBI, is going to help with voter registration." Surprise, FBI! The Rev. Kelly Miller Smith has shown up to tell you that the SCLC expects you to honor your word.
And then he comes back to talk to the FBI some more! On Nov. 22, he chats again. He tells them that he doesn’t know of any more Freedom Rides, which is ballsy, because Freedom Riders that very day were down in Albany, Ga., testing whether the bus terminal was segregated, and Smith surely knew that. He brags a little about how well the demonstrations in Nashville are working.
And then he names a communist: “Smith stated that there has been only one instance where he has been suspicious of an individual being affiliated with the group as having Communist background. He stated that this individual is a white student at George Peabody College for Teachers by the name of Ralph Frankenberg.”
This is odd for a couple of reasons. White communists in the movement in Nashville had been a headache for Black leadership all along. What’s left of Looby’s FBI file is mostly him having a fight with a white communist who belonged to the NAACP. Basically, Black leaders felt like white communists brought the wrong kind of attention and that, even though they sincerely wanted to dismantle America’s racist system, they still often had the unexamined belief that they — more so that the Black people who lived here — were naturally better suited for leadership in the Freedom Movement. So strange thing one: Smith knows of only one possible communist? Unlikely.
Strange thing two: Who the hell is Ralph Frankenberg?
I found one mention of him in a Nashville paper. On Aug. 17, 1962, The Tennessean named everyone who graduated that summer from Peabody. Among the listed is Ralph Hoover Frankenberger Jr. from Memphis.
Ralph never lived in Memphis.
Ralph’s dad and mom moved to Memphis late in 1959, when Ralph was in his late 20s and living in Miami. Now, Ralph’s mom and dad sure did live in Memphis. They have to be some of the most enthusiastic-about-living-in-Memphis people to ever live in Memphis. They joined all the clubs. They went to all the churches. Ralph’s dad, an electrical engineer, judged various smarty-pants contests. Seems like at least once a month Ralph’s parents were in the Memphis papers just being from Memphis.
Here are two interesting things from Ralph’s dad’s obituary: He was a retired electrical engineer for the Federal Power Commission, and he was a 1921 graduate of Ohio State University who was an Army veteran of World War II. Men of an age to graduate college in 1921 usually served in World War I. When Ralph’s dad went into the Army, he was in his mid-40s and had young children.
After announcing a renewed investigation into three integration-era bombings, Nashville police find no culprits
I find that all strange, just on its own. But now put on your JFK conspiracy-theory tinfoil hats with me and let’s talk about Ralph. Ralph was born in 1931 in Dallas. In 1940, right before World War II, his family lived in Scott’s Bluff, Neb. At some point they moved back to Texas, and Ralph went to high school at the Texas Country Day School in Dallas and became some kind of French genius. After he graduated, he went to Texas Christian University and majored in French and minored in Spanish. He graduated college in 1952. In 1956 he got married in New Orleans, and in 1958, he and his wife separated. I couldn’t find any record of them divorcing, but he married twice more, so they must have.
In 1959, he was living in Fort Worth. On June 8, 1960, he flew into New Orleans from someplace abroad and gave his home address as Miami. We know that in 1961 he was in Nashville, where the Rev. Smith met him, and then in 1962, he graduated. He then went on to ... um, fall off the face of the planet. Other than the marriages, he made no mark on the historical record.
Except for one thing. He’s mentioned in the FBI’s file on the JFK assassination as an affiliate of Fair Play for Cuba, a group that advocated for recognition of and diplomatic relations with Cuba’s communist government. It was a short-lived organization because one of its members, a guy who went to school in Fort Worth and putzed around in New Orleans and had ties to people in Miami, assassinated the president of the United States.
Here’s the thing. If your dad works for the federal government and whatever he does for them is important enough that he — in his mid-40s, with a wife and kids — needs to join the military during World War II, and then he comes home and continues to work for the federal government, you being a pro-Castro civil rights activist should be considered a security risk, especially if you really did live with them over in Memphis while you were in the middle of all this.
You ought to alarm the FBI. If Frankenberg did, there’s no evidence of it. Almost like they knew they didn’t have to worry about him.
And I can’t help but wonder if that’s the move the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith was pulling there, just letting them know that he knew to be suspicious of Frankenberg.
Anyway, if "informing" is insisting that the FBI honor its commitments, lying to them, and then possibly indicating that you know one of their guys, let’s have more of that.
