Almost two weeks ago, Hamilton County District Attorney Neal Pinkston announced that Gov. Ray Blanton’s administration hired a hitman to kill Samuel Pettyjohn, a cooperating witness in the governor’s pardon scandal.
To bring y’all up to speed, Ray Blanton was governor of Tennessee from 1975 to 1979, and his time in office was scandal-ridden, to put it mildly. Regular readers will know what kind of a history junky I am, and there are too many scandals for even me to keep track of. He burned through state money like it was money his grandma slipped him and said, “Spend this before your mother knows you have it.” He gave jobs to all his friends. He did state business with his family’s company. And he sold pardons. That was the big one. You give Blanton enough money and he’ll pardon anyone you want.
One of the reasons Democrats and Republicans worked together to get him out of office sooner than usual was because he had indicated a willingness to pardon James Earl Ray for the right price. Yep, he was a doozy. If you ever wonder why Tennessee Democrats are cut through with an underlying sense of resigned dread, it’s because for the good of the state they had to work with Republicans to get Lamar Alexander into office ASAP, because the Democratic governor was selling pardons. That’s a defeat that lingers.
And now we’ve learned that his administration had a dude murdered to prevent him from testifying about that scandal.
This is amazing. Hamilton County law enforcement officials investigated a cold case, convened a grand jury, and figured out what actually happened, even though everyone’s dead. In the Associated Press story, investigators concede that this is unheard of:
Mike Mathis, supervisor of Hamilton County's cold case unit, acknowledged that it was highly unusual for a prosecutor's office to pursue a grand jury when most of the involved parties were dead but said the county chose to do so for the first time it because "it gives you a legal closing."
Let me tell you about another Chattanooga-area killing. On May 19, 1960, a mere month after Z. Alexander Looby’s house had been destroyed by a bomb here in Nashville (here's my Scene cover story about that case), the Ringgold, Ga., home of Mattie Green blew up, killing her. We here in Nashville had a school bombing (Hattie Cotton), a religious recreational bombing (the Jewish Community Center) and the bombing of a civil rights attorney’s house (Looby). Chattanooga saw attorney R.H. Craig’s home bombed. Howard High School was bombed, as was the YWCA. At least one member of the Chattanooga Ku Klux Klan was in town for the Hattie Cotton bombing. The guy who bragged about bombing Hattie Cotton and the JCC, J.B. Stoner, grew up in Chattanooga and had been an active part of the Chattanooga Klan until he got kicked out by Klan higher-ups who didn’t like him because he was — get this — too violent. And, y’all, days (days!) after Hattie Cotton blew up, the Chattanooga Klan got kicked out of the United Klans for being too violent. I could find no incidents in Chattanooga or the surrounding counties that could have sparked that.
The Klan believed that Mattie Green’s husband was an NAACP organizer. But the case wasn’t solved back then. And when the FBI reopened the case in 2009, they decided — since everyone was dead — they’d just close it again. Mattie Green’s family has never gotten an honest accounting of who killed her or why. We’re fortunate that Z. Alexander Looby survived the attempt on his life, but that bombing also remains unsolved.
There are reasons these civil rights-era cases remain unsolved. A big one is that, if investigators are only reopening them to see if anyone is left to be prosecuted, then no, in general, there’s no one left. But if our commitment is to the truth, to learning what happened and who did it and why, and using the weight of the legal system to find out, then real possibilities open up. Just the ability to get at records and talk to witnesses would be a big help.
For the other reason it’s probably past time to take investigations of civil rights-era crimes out of the hands of the FBI, read FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s own words from a secret 1965 memo to the attorney general: “At the present time, there are 14 Klan groups in existence. We have penetrated every one of them through informants and currently are operating informants in top-level positions of leadership in seven of them.” How thorough was this “operating” of Klan leadership? In the version of the memo I’ve seen, this part is crossed out (so it's likely the attorney general did not see it): Hoover writes, “But the head of the Klan organization in that state is our informant, and we have had him warn every member of his organization that he will not tolerate violence in any form.”
In another secret memo from 1967, you can read, “In the early stages of Klan growth in the State of Tennessee, we were able to develop as a Bureau informant the Grand Dragon of the United Klans of America, Realm of Tennessee. Through this high-level source we were able to control the expansion of the Klan. More importantly, we were able to discourage violence throughout the state.”
In other words, the FBI had control of the Klan in Tennessee. Historians can argue how early the “early stages of Klan growth” were, but it seems likely that the FBI took control of the Klan after the PR disaster that was the Clinton riot in 1956, when the governor had to call out the National Guard to reestablish order after white supremacists rampaged over school integration there.
Which means that every time the FBI has reopened a civil rights-era case here in Tennessee and seen the Klan’s likely involvement and then shut that case again, we should find that shady as fuck, because the FBI was running the Klan here. Of course they’re not going to find themselves responsible for the violence here.
So, I’m heartened that a prosecutor is willing to reinvestigate a cold case just to find out the truth of what happened, even if there’s no one left to prosecute. Because the "but everyone’s dead" stuff has been used to keep the truth from us for too long. I hope we’ll see more investigations like this in the future.
After all, in 1960, someone tried to assassinate a Nashville city councilman. And no one has ever been held accountable for that. Maybe it’s time.
