Fifty sticks of dynamite at The Temple

Jacob Rothschild came to the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation - The Temple, on Peachtree Street - in 1946, and spent the next decade saying from an Atlanta pulpit that segregation was wrong. After the Little Rock crisis he helped write and circulate the Ministers' Manifesto, signed by eighty Atlanta clergymen, calling for obedience to the law and communication between the races. Five months before the bomb he told his congregation that they must resolve not to surrender to violence or submit to intimidation.

In the early morning of 12 October 1958, fifty sticks of dynamite went off at the Temple's entrance. An entire wall was blown apart, the offices were wrecked, a stairwell was torn off its fixings and the grounds were covered in broken stained glass. The damage was put at between $100,000 and $200,000. The building was empty and nobody was hurt.

Five men were arrested. Only George Bright came to trial. His first jury split nine to three and the judge declared a mistrial; at a second trial in January 1959 his lawyer, Reuben Garland, won an acquittal. The charges against the other four were dropped. Nobody has been convicted of the bombing.

What the bombers did not get was silence. Atlanta's mayor, William B. Hartsfield, went to the scene and was blunt about who was responsible and what kind of politics produced them; Ralph McGill's column in the Atlanta Constitution the next morning laid the bombing at the door of every respectable official who had spent years encouraging defiance of the courts, and won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Rothschild stayed at The Temple and kept saying what he had been saying, and ten years later he helped organise the dinner Atlanta's white establishment held for Martin Luther King Jr. after the Nobel Prize - the dinner that most of the city had not wanted to attend.