The Jewish Community Center on West End
16 March 1958Jewish Community Center, 3500 West End Avenue, Davidson County, TN
Dynamite tore through Nashville's Jewish Community Center on a Sunday evening in March 1958, hours after children had gone home. A caller told the rabbi the Confederate Underground had done it. It is still unsolved.
The Jewish Community Center stood at 3500 West End Avenue from 1952 to 1984. It was one of the few places in Nashville where meetings about desegregating the city's schools could be held, and it hosted them.
At 8.07 on the evening of Sunday 16 March 1958, a bomb went off there. It brought down the ceiling of the reception hall and blew in the front door and windows, doing about $6,000 of damage. A meeting had ended and the families and children who used the building had gone. Nobody was hurt. That morning a bomb had damaged the school wing of Temple Beth-El in Miami, nine hundred miles away.
Rabbi William Silverman took a telephone call claiming the bombing for the Confederate Underground, with a threat that more would follow - against Jews and against what the caller called race mixers. Silverman had spoken publicly for school desegregation. Four months earlier a bomb had been found outside Nashville's Temple Beth-El and had failed to go off. Six months later, in September 1958, dynamite destroyed the Hattie Cotton Elementary School in East Nashville the night after a single Black six-year-old, Patricia Watson, enrolled there.
The Jewish Community Center opened the next day. There was a strong suspect in the bombing and no charge was ever brought. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department reopened the city's civil-rights-era bombing cases as cold cases and closed the review without a prosecution, concluding that after sixty-odd years only a confession or a living witness could solve them, and that neither was likely to appear.
No one was hurt; about $6,000 of damage. Unsolved, and formally closed as a cold case without a prosecution.
Sources
- Historical Markers: Religious SitesMetropolitan Historical Commission, Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson Countynashville.govThe city's marker text: the 8.07 p.m. explosion on 16 March 1958 at 3500 West End Avenue, the Center's desegregation meetings, and the Confederate Underground's call to Rabbi William Silverman.
- Cold Case Review of Civil Rights Era Bombing Cases CompletedMetropolitan Nashville Police Departmentnashville.govThe department's account of reviewing the Jewish Community Center and Hattie Cotton School bombings and closing them unsolved.