When I was working on my book Dynamite Nashville, one of the toughest parts was knowing that the stuff that was happening here in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s was leading up to the killings of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair in a Sunday morning bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church down in Birmingham, Ala.
I was writing about infuriating things that were often also hilarious, but no one in Nashville had been killed. So as long as you could keep yourself from looking down the long hallway of history toward the deaths of those four girls, what happened in Nashville was a long time ago — interesting, but not too heavy. It wasn't as important, really, that the Nashville bombings had never been solved. But I stood at the other end of the hall. I had to look through those killings to see what was going on in Nashville. Those girls and their families and friends were always on my mind. The events in the book I was writing culminated in that tragedy.
If we as a city had thrown even the slightest hitch in the lives of men like J.B. Stoner and Asa Carter when they were here, these girls’ lives might have been spared.
Republican lawmakers understand that not dealing with Nazis could lead to our ruin, but they’re not willing to take responsibility for making them feel welcome
I’ve also been trying to sound the alarm every time Nazis come to Nashville to march that they’re not coming here by accident or random choice. This city means something to them, because they have a long history and traditions and connections to each other that we don’t know. We act like they’re independent, all these random bouts of hate. We are wrong.
I’m going to tell you something true now that sucks so much I can’t stand it.
When prominent racist J.B. Stoner was here in Nashville, helping to bomb the Hattie Cotton Elementary School in 1957 and probably being the bomber of the Jewish Community Center in 1958, he was also starting the National States Rights Party — a far-right political party and terrorist organization. “Fun” fact: George Lincoln Rockwell briefly helped pull the NSRP together before he went on to found the American Nazi Party. In the 1970s, Joseph Paul Franklin became a member of the National States Rights Party, as well as the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. Like Stoner had complained before him, he found most white supremacists lacked the desire to kill people. So Franklin took it upon himself to go on a three-year, 11-state racist murder spree. He killed two dozen people and wounded both Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt.
William Luther Pierce was a compatriot of previously mentioned American Nazi Party founder Rockwell, and founder of the National Alliance, a white nationalist group that aimed to overthrow the U.S. government. Pierce was so inspired by Franklin’s killing spree that he loosely based his novel, Hunter, on the murders. Later editions of Hunter were even dedicated to Franklin. Pierce’s other book, though, is the real doozy — The Turner Diaries. It’s hard to overstate how influential this book has been. When Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was arrested, he had pages from The Turner Diaries on him. When John William King chained James Byrd to his truck in order to drag him to his death, King supposedly said, “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early.” If you’ve ever heard racists using the term “Day of the Rope,” it came from this book. Researchers have tied this book to 200 killings.
The racist bank robbers and killers who called themselves “The Order” had named themselves after a white supremacist organization in The Turner Diaries. They also killed disc jockey Alan Berg. One of Berg’s killers, David Lane, either coined the phrase “white genocide” or was almost singlehandedly responsible for popularizing it. He also created what’s known as the Fourteen Words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” When you see “1488,” that’s a reference to these 14 words and the eighth letter of the alphabet; two Hs in reference to "Heil Hitler."
Charleston murderer Dylann Roof had pictures on his website posing with a Confederate flag and having written "1488" in sand at a beach. Murderer Curtis Allgier is covered in racist tattoos, including “1488” on his temple. When Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart planned to kill Barack Obama, they also intended to behead 14 Black children as a reference to the Fourteen Words.
Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch, New Zealand, killer, referenced the Fourteen Words both when he wrote all over his weapons and ammunition and in his manifesto, which he called The Great Replacement — a reference to the conspiracy theory that someone (usually “The Jews”) are trying to genocide white people in order to replace us with non-white people.
Gunman shot two students before turning the gun on himself; reunification efforts underway
Which brings us back to Nashville, where Solomon Henderson — an admirer of Brenton Tarrant — recently killed Josselin Corea Escalante before killing himself.
One hate-filled person to another, passing along evil ideas to inspire the next. An unbroken chain of violence that has whipped back around to Nashville and struck us right in the heart.
What if we had stopped Stoner in the 1950s? Would we still have lost Josselin this year? I don’t know. A lot of the people in line between Stoner and Henderson were some of the worst America has to offer. Surely some of them would have done some of the things they did whether or not Stoner had been there to do the terrible stuff he did. Hell, Stoner wasn’t even the only deeply evil person in Nashville opposing integration during that time. Even if we had put Stoner in jail, maybe Asa Carter instead would have inspired Joseph Paul Franklin. But who knows? By the time Franklin was headed out on his killing spree, Carter had been pretending to be a tolerant Cherokee man for half a decade, probably not something that would have moved Franklin.
Obviously we can’t change the past, but we owe it to all the injured and dead people who followed in Stoner’s wake to change the present. Henderson had a large social media footprint, and according to this ABC story, he was in some sort of contact with Natalie Rupnow, a school shooter in Wisconsin, and he was so well-known to people in the darkest pits of the internet that “some people in those groups publicly identified Henderson as the school shooter long before his identity was confirmed by authorities.”
Henderson was 17. Rupnow was 15. If they can find each other on the internet, why didn’t someone at the TBI or another law enforcement agency find them? Why do we have to wait until they’ve killed people to find out they’ve been talking about killing people on the internet for months? We’re being targeted. Why aren’t we availing ourselves of the ability to surveil the chatter of the people targeting us?
In Henderson’s case, people online had tried to warn authorities about him. Police had been to his house on a couple of occasions, and he reportedly pulled a knife on a student earlier this school year. In this infuriating story from ProPublica and WPLN, we learn that no one even bothered to warn the girl he pulled a box cutter on that he was back in school.
That’s on us as a city. We failed to get Henderson any kind of real help at any point before he started down his internet hell hole. We failed his first victim. And we have some responsibility for Josselin’s death. If we want to take accountability and do our part to keep this from happening again, we need to change.
Someone made the decision to keep Henderson in school after he threatened a girl. That person has to go. Someone made a decision to yank the metal detectors. That person has to go. We need to have a real discussion as a city about whether our school system needs overhauling.
It might be time to revisit our school curriculum. If kids are finding corners of the internet that fill their heads with racist and antisemitic beliefs, are we teaching them how to think critically and find facts and research primary sources? What skills are we giving them to recognize and resist white supremacist propaganda?
And it is embarrassing that we are continually outsmarted by troubled children. Do the police or the TBI have a plan for better monitoring what the MNPD calls “non-traditional sites that most would find harmful and objectionable"? Or are we just going to be surprised again the next time this happens?
We have to recognize how anti-democracy white supremacy is. And we have to accept that white supremacy and our democratic impulse as a country have always been at war — in the case of someone like Thomas Jefferson, even at war within ourselves. You can’t believe “all men are created equal” and also believe that white men are superior to everyone else. It’s one or the other. And we’re all picking sides, aware of it or not.
Yes, it’s a scary time to take a stand for what’s right. But it’s terrifying to have to go to school and be surprised by the kid who pulled a box cutter on you. We keep offloading the handling of these white supremacists onto children. That was even the case in Stoner’s day. We can’t be asking children to be braver than we are. We need to fight this fight for them.
