The recent widely reported attack on the Jewish Community Center in Nashville, Tennessee, has spotlighted a complex situation which is here discussed by a sociologist on the staff of Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
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At 6:20 P.M. on Sunday, March 16, a Negro porter turned out the lights in Nashville’s Jewish Community Center and locked up for the night. Through the darkness considerable traffic flowed past 3500 West End Avenue, a sprawling structure in what used to be the elite residential section of the city. A few hundred feet to the west stood Sherith Israel, the Orthodox congregation, which worshipped in a converted mansion. A couple of blocks away—at 3814 West End Avenue—stood the handsome modern building erected by the Conservative congregation. And several miles farther west, amid the estates of Nashville’s wealthiest families, stood the Reform Temple, the largest of the three synagogues.
At 8:07 P.M., people living in the neighborhood of the Center heard a dull boom, unusual but not frightening. One lady assumed that her next-door neighbor, who is a traveling salesman, had thrown his bags to the floor with extra vigor. At 8:27 the wife of Rabbi William B. Silverman received a telephone call from a man who said he was “a member of the Confederate Union.” “We have just dynamited the Jewish Community Center. Next will be the Temple and next will be any other nigger-loving place or nigger-loving person in Nashville. And we’re going to shoot down Judge Miller in cold blood.” Mrs. Silverman, thinking that her husband’s life would also be threatened, became so agitated that she “slammed the phone down as hard as I could.” Rabbi Silverman telephoned Federal District Court Judge Miller. Threats were nothing new to Judge William E. Miller. On September 13 he had issued a restraining order to halt threats and violence designed to prevent the integration of Nashville’s schools. From then on he had occupied a choice place in the segregationist roster of most hated men.
Rabbi Silverman telephoned the Center. A reporter from one of the Nashville television stations answered and confirmed that the Center had been dynamited. Police and firemen on the scene roped off the lawn to hold back the hundreds of curious persons attracted by the sound of the explosion and the sight of shattered glass from the windows. Traffic was jammed bumper to bumper for several blocks. After detectives searched the area for clues, the crowd was permitted to overflow onto the lawn. Rumors circulated that the Temple had also been dynamited. Officials came and went: Mayor Ben West, Police Chief D. E. Hosse, Fire Chief John Ragsdale, District Attorney General Harry G. Nichols. Comparisons were made between this incident and a previous expression of segregationist hostility in Nashville, the dynamiting on September 11 of one of the six grammar schools into which Negro first grade children had been integrated. The Hattie Cotton school had also been unoccupied at the time of the explosion. However, the Center was less seriously damaged than the Hattie Cotton school. Two sticks of dynamite, possibly three, had been detonated just outside one of the two entrances. Many windows were broken; the front doors and the doors to the auditorium had to be replaced; the metal overhang covering the entrance and the ceiling in the vestibule required repairs; pieces of concrete were chipped from the entry way. But it was necessary to keep the Center closed only one day, March 17. On Tuesday, March 18, the Center reopened. No members had resigned. Attendance at the nursery school and at other activities was normal.
The prospects for catching the culprit (or culprits) are poor. No one saw the actual lighting of the fuse or any person driving away from the scene. Nor has anyone claimed the reward, now totaling $10,000, for information leading to the arrest of the culprit. It is impossible to trace him through his possession of dynamite, since fifty cases of dynamite are sold every day in Davidson County, largely to road contractors and rock quarries. On Tuesday, March 24, an interview appeared in the Nashville Tennessean with David P. Young, vice president of one of the firms selling dynamite in the Nashville area. “Question: How often do you have, say, walk-in trade—people you don’t know who just come in to buy two or three sticks? Answer: Fairly frequently, because a limited number of sticks of dynamite is used for blowing out wells. And in the spring people buy it to blow out stumps. Question: How much does it cost? Answer: Twenty-five cents a stick. Question: In your opinion how do terrorists, such as those who bombed the Jewish Center, get possession of dynamite? Answer: They steal it from temporary magazines on construction jobs.” The chief of police believes that, when the Jewish Community Center case is solved, the Hattie Cotton school dynamiting will be solved too. So far, however, the perpetrators of both crimes remain at large.
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The dynamiter was universally condemned. Governor Frank G. Clement issued the following statement: “I am shocked and sickened at the thought that anyone in Tennessee would commit the sacrilege of wantonly attempting to destroy a building dedicated to the brotherhood of man.” He also offered a $5,000 reward, maximum under state law, for information leading to the dynamiter’s arrest and conviction. The city of Nashville offered a $1,000 reward. The Nashville Tennessean and Nashville Banner printed indignant editorials. The chancellor of Vanderbilt University contributed $100 to the Center to help defray the cost of repairs. (Actually, the $6,000 damage was fully covered by insurance.) Mayor Ben West vowed that “no stone will be left unturned to find the perpetrators of this outrage.” Ministers denounced the “criminal” from their pulpits. The Nashville Community Relations Conference, an interracial organization including some of the highest-status people in the city, issued the following statement: “. . . we believe that the citizens of this community are all partly responsible . . . to the extent that we failed to support adequately with our time, our resources and our ideas the forces in our community working for harmony, justice, equality and dignity for all our citizens. This is the time for good citizens to look inward, to seek out and destroy the seeds of prejudice within ourselves and to join hands in a total community effort for better human relations.” The New York Times ran an editorial on March 20 quoting this statement approvingly.
Although everyone deplored the dynamiting, there were profound differences in the definition of the issues. A small minority, which included, however, several leading ministers, subscribed to the statement of the Nashville Community Relations Conference. These were the liberals. They argued, in effect, that the dynamiting called for a concerted community attack on prejudice. If more non-Jews had adopted a Christion approach to race relations, the Jewish Community Center would not have been perceived by extremists as conspicuously tolerant. A second and much larger group defined the issue as one of law and order. Government officials and businessmen, for example, wanted to live down the South’s reputation for violence. It is a deserved reputation; Tennessee had in 1950 fifteen times as many murders in proportion to population as Massachusetts and ten times as many assaults with a deadly weapon. As for dynamitings, these are not the outlandish crime in the South that they would be, say, in New England. Violence is poor public relations, however, and Southerners are sensitive to public relations considerations. Lynchings and dynamitings do not help Governor Clement’s campaign to attract Northern industry to Tennessee.
There was also a third definition of the issue, one which may have been decisive for the majority of Nashville whites. Bear in mind that a high valuation is placed on religious institutions in Nashville. The governor of the state conducts a weekly Bible class. The juvenile court judge, in his bid for re-election, issued campaign literature containing testimonials from members of his church. No bars or taverns are permitted. Churches fill to overflowing on Sundays. The largest denominations, the Church of Christ and the Baptists, are clearly fundamentalist; the Methodists have fundamentalist leanings—as well as a thriving publishing house. As Dr. Wayland J. Hayes, professor of sociology at Vanderbilt, put it, “Nashville is an unusually ‘churchy’ town.” For Nashville Christians, Jews are a religious group, and the Jewish Community Center a religious institution. They were indignant because they regarded the blasting of a House of God as sacrilege. Ironically, this reaction rested on a misperception of the character of the Center. The emphasis at Nashville’s Jewish Community Center is on Community, not on Jewish. As a matter of fact, when the half-million-dollar structure was still in the planning stage, a controversy existed as to whether the words carved into the concrete should read “Community Center” or “Jewish Community Center.” Currently, 10 per cent of the members of the Center are non-Jewish; the director of the nursery school is a Unitarian. True, the non-Jewish members tend to be the eggheads of Nashville: professors at Vanderbilt or Fisk universities, modernist rather than fundamentalist Protestants, persons without sectarian affiliation, music lovers, theater devotees. Nevertheless, they are not Jewish and this helps to give the Center a cosmopolitan flavor about which everybody seems quite proud.
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The absence of a sectarian criterion for Center membership poses the embarrassing question: what would justify the exclusion of Negroes except deference to local prejudices? At the present time such a question is hypothetical. No Negro has applied for membership. But suppose one did. Negro friends of members have attended plays and concerts at the Center and, on at least one occasion, have used the swimming pool. And suppose he were accepted. This might well provoke further violence from segregationist extremists. Consider that pre-school children attend the nursery school. Teen-agers use the gym, the swimming pool, the auditorium. Consider that the building might be in operation when another stick of dynamite goes off. And it might not be one stick but four or five. . . . Clearly, it requires greater courage to favor integration in Nashville than in New York or Chicago.
Rabbi Silverman, perhaps because of his intelligence and eloquence, perhaps because he has been in Nashville longer than the Conservative or the Orthodox rabbi, perhaps because his Reform Temple is wealthier than the other congregations, is regarded by many Nashville citizens as the spokesman for the Jewish community. Although he has no official connection with the Center, the dynamiters chose to telephone him after the blast. In threatening the Temple, they were paying a backhanded tribute to Rabbi Silverman’s leadership. What course did he recommend for the Jews of Nashville? On March 21, five days after the dynamiting, he wrote a letter to the 650 families in his congregation. He reaffirmed his position that “. . . the attack upon the Negro is the undeniable portent of the attack upon the Jew, and ultimately the Catholic Church, civil liberties, democracy, and Christianity itself.” Furthermore, he announced that he had made one change in his schedule of sermon topics. On Friday, March 28, he would preach on the theme, “We Shall Not Yield.”
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In his sermon Rabbi Silverman reaffirmed his stand: “I favor integration—not only because I am a Jew, not only because my religious faith teaches that God is our universal Father, that all men are brothers . . . but because I am an American [with a] moral mandate to support . . . the decision of the Supreme Court. . . .” He urged his congregation not to heed the fearful voices that had been raised in the Jewish community. He knew that some Jews were thinking of the Nazis and wondering about anti-Semitism. After all, in September, they had watched the Ku Klux Klan burn crosses and provoke street fights in an effort to prevent the start of school integration. John Kasper, the anti-Semitic segregationist from New Jersey, had held nightly rallies in and around Nashville; Kasper urged his followers to stop integration by “shotgun, dynamite or the hanging rope if necessary.” Rabbi Silverman was reassuring. Fascism was not on the march in Nashville. The extremists had been defeated in September on the school integration issue. On September 18, eight days after the start of the fall semester and a week after the dynamiting of the Hattie Cotton school, calm prevailed in the public schools; attendance was normal; integrated classes continued. Rabbi Silverman ridiculed the “jittery Jews” who blamed him for the dynamiting of the Center, who believed “that because of my pulpit utterances during the Holy Days and my pro-integration stand in the community, all of the Jews of Nashville have been and will continue to be endangered.” He revealed that he had been urged to “stick to religion, to Judaism, and the Bible.” He replied indignantly, “What is prophetic Judaism if not a dedication to justice and the implementation of the moral precepts of our faith?”
Clearly, Rabbi Silverman takes his religion seriously. He points out the relevance of prophetic principles to the issue of racial justice although talking about religion less specifically would be safer. Yet Rabbi Silverman cannot change the social context in which Nashville’s 2,700 Jews live. While Tennessee is not the Deep South, the people of Nashville are Southern enough in their attitudes to prefer segregation. No one doubts how a popular referendum on school integration would go. Judge Miller has recently rejected the fourth appeal of the Parents’ Preference Committee to delay integration. Many of the ministers favor segregation. The Nashville Banner argues for states’ rights with the same shrill zest as the Chicago Tribune fulminated against Franklin Roosevelt. Vanderbilt University enjoys a national reputation, but Vanderbilt is not sufficiently independent of local sentiments to admit Negroes to its undergraduate college. Apart from tradition, Nashville whites have a vested interest in keeping the Negro “in his place.” For instance, less money is spent on Negro schools than on white schools. Thoroughgoing educational integration, unless it were accompanied by larger educational budgets, would result in poorer education for Nashville’s white students than they are receiving at present. The vested interest in occupational discrimination is even greater. Negroes constitute only 20 per cent of the population of Davidson County, but they fill the majority of low-paying, menial jobs. Middle-class whites live in better homes and employ more servants than would be possible on the same income in a Northern city. This is because labor is cheap in Nashville—Negro labor, that is. But the biggest vested interest is in a dogma. Those whites who are occupational and educational failures can salve their self-esteem by believing in their innate superiority to Negroes. The followers of John Kasper reported on in the newspapers were largely the street-corner loafers and riffraff of Nashville society. But even the successful members of a competitive society feel inadequate, at least on occasion. According to the anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, this insecurity, generated by the pressure to measure our performances against those of our neighbors, accounts for the seductiveness of the white supremacy doctrine. In short, commitment to segregation as a way of life goes deeper than the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan. The difference between the extremists and the moderates is one of tactics, not values. Keep this massive reality in mind in assessing the problem of Nashville Jewry.
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A week after the dynamiting, the physical damage at 3500 West End Avenue was scarcely visible from the street. The damage to Jewish morale was greater. Despite the brisk business-as-usual policy at the Center, Nashville Jews were worried. They asked one another what the “unpleasantness” had meant and whether they had seen the last of violence. The dynamiting dramatized their dependence on the good will of the white Christian majority. Jews constitute less than one per cent of the Nashville population. What if Jews get the reputation of being “nigger-lovers”? Would they continue to enjoy the equal protection of Tennessee laws? Or would future attacks on Jewish institutions be condoned? Events in other Southern cities suggest that there are grounds for anxiety. Temple Beth-El in Miami was dynamited on the same day as the Nashville Community Center and was much more severely damaged. Two attempts were made to dynamite synagogues in North Carolina. Apparently, Jews do not have secure enough status in Southern communities to assume leadership in the movement for racial justice. Rabbi Silverman, in his March 28 sermon, summarized well the dilemma of those who believe in prophetic ideals and live in a prejudiced community. “It has been said that I am a nigger-lover. That is true! I love and I want God to help me love even more, Negroes and Caucasians, those of every race, every faith, every nationality. . . . Does this mean I will embarrass my congregation? Does this mean that I urge you, my members, to undertake a rash, reckless, immoderate course of action in behalf of integration? No. . . . As I stated in my letter to you, as a Southern congregation we need not initiate or take an overly conspicuous role in advocating integration.”
The Jewish Community Center of Nashville will continue to make its facilities available to the United Givers Fund, the American Red Cross, the Nashville Community Relations Conference, and other organizations in which Negroes and whites work for a common cause. On the other hand, there will probably be pressure, subtle or frantic depending on how the Nashville situation develops, to discourage Center members from bringing Negro friends to use the athletic facilities or on social occasions. As for a Negro becoming a member, this was unlikely before the dynamiting; it is impossible now.
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