Bombing in Miami

...On the morning of March 17, the Miami Herald called the dynamiting "a disgraceful incident," and soberly observed: "There must be no jumping to conclusions...

...We've got to segregate the Jew to the same second class citizenship that the nigger thinks he has but don't really have...

...It is a distraught and desperate state of mind, excited by and in tune with the call to "massive resistance" vociferated by the dominant political leaders of the South...

...Soon after the call to Rabbi Levitan the phone in the complaint room of the Miami Police Department started ringing...

...Rabbi Abraham Levitan, in no way connected with Temple Beth El, was jarred from sleep by an insistent telephone...

...Even the half moon that was climbing into the skies gave off nothing more than a pale malevolence that only enhanced the eeriness of the scene...

...The night was chill and the star-spangled vault of the Florida heavens seemed contrived for the occasion...

...Jews are often included in the mailing lists...

...The violence of 1951, the telephone calls to Rabbi Silverman and Rabbi Levitan, the manner in which the charges were set in Nashville and in Miami, and indeed theBOMBING IN MIAMI 501 bombing attempts in Charlotte and Gastonia, North Carolina, in November 1957 and February 1958, respectively-all these point plainly enough to the existence of a racist motive (though one must always bear in mind the possibility that in the end the Nashville and Miami bombings were coincidental...

...There are temples in Miami and in Miami Beach from whose pulpits their rabbis have discussed the desegregation issue...

...Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders called Sidney Palmer, President of Beth El, with offers of help...

...But Temple Beth El is Orthodox, all the way...

...Patience and forbearance" had prevailed...

...Immediately in front of the platform was ranged a half-circle of about 70 men and women in ordinary Saturday night clothes...

...Seeing that both crimes strongly suggest the handiwork of men who know their trade well, the theory that the acts were warnings or attempts to intimidate remains a working premise for the investigation...

...If Ike wants 'to involve us in the Middle East, instead of sending Americans out there let him send American Yids to fight for Israel...

...Radio Station WQAM offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the culprits...

...Somewhere along the line police learned for themselves that when Jews in a synagogue fall out with one another, the losing faction does not bomb the shul but builds another one...

...The detonation, originally estimated as the product of twelve sticks of dynamite, later at approximately twenty sticks, flushed excited, night-clothed residents out of their homes into the Sunday morning dark as police cars, fire engines, and ambulances screamed into the blast area...

...Invariably the material hysterically relates "mongrelization" of the white race to a "Jew" or "Jew-Zionist" or "Jew-Zionist-Communist" plot...

...Construction jobs require dynamite-in the coral-based earth of Florida, exceptionally large quantities of it...

...One was Jewish, the other the wife of a Jew...

...A year ago last March I stepped into this "embattled" world...

...We don't hate the good nigger...

...The mailings range from handsomely printed and colored window stickers reminding readers that it is the Jew and not the Negro who threatens Southern ways, and that Arthur Spingarn, President of the NAACP, is Jewish, not Negro, to crudely mimeographed paper sheets with the legend: Join the Jewish Kommunist Kremlin Kikes HELP SAVE THE WORLD FOR THE NEGROES AND THE jews The literature is mailed in huge batches and in sometimes seemingly indiscriminate fashion...

...The tolerance accorded to this anti-Semitism helps to spread it...

...Study groups have listened to speakers on the subject and held group discussions, moving on to book reviews of Marjorie Morningstar...

...With an eye north to Nashville, it surmised: "There is now reason to believe that Sunday's bombing may be part of a reign of terror planned for the South by the White Citizens Councils...

...AS WITH any crime, the determination of motive is perhaps the first step along the road to solution...

...Meanwhile, as churches in the Beth El area volunteered the use of their classrooms for the bombed school's students, Harry 'Cohen, Florida commander of the Jewish War Veterans, diverted miscellaneous veterans from assuming personal responsibility for protecting synagogues...

...he pointedly queried...

...In the past eighteen months there have been fully two score bombings in the South of Negro homes and Negro institutions...

...The Klan and the White Citizens Councils must therefore be viewed as an integral part of the Southern "massive resistance" to desegregation rather than as isolated, dissident groups...

...The Ku Klux Klan in Florida had staged a series of rallies ranging in size from audiences of three to seven-hun-502 COMMENTARY dred...

...In Miami the damage was extensive...

...N FLORIDA it is mainly the rural, or I "cracker," world for which this fare is provided, one whose traditional hostility toward the big city is further excited by a fundamentalist envy and scorn for the pleasure domes of Miami Beach...

...The bully who, bomb in hand, does battle with that enemy is socially undesirable, but he is fighting an acknowledged invader, he is fighting back...

...These were smudge pots that gave off both light and a misty, theatrical smoke...

...In what he described as a German or a foreign accent, his caller warned that if Rabbi Levitan did not stop preaching integration in his synagogue it would suffer the same fate as Temple Beth El...

...The loudest exclamations, however, the autohonking that filled the night air, were in response not to anti-Negro but to anti-Semitic diatribes...

...The explosion tore a gaping hole in the concrete rear wall of the school...

...Placing of the motive behind this criminal act might well serve as a guide to law enforcement officials to forestall repetition...

...That it was not a gas explosion but an act of premeditated violence was announced within twenty minutes after the explosion to two separate parties...

...M. B. Sherrill is currently chairman of the St...

...They took long oaths before joining this organization...

...Indeed, some days before the devastating blast, its rabbi had resigned to assume a new post...

...Men predominated, especially younger men...

...Often, locally mimeographed or printed efforts are enclosed as mail fillers...

...He cited Kol Nidre, repeating the old canard that the prayer requires a renunciation of all other vows and oaths a Jew might make...

...Do you realize, can you realize, how many weeks on end go by without my seeing a young face, how much we in Orthodoxy are in the company of old people...

...But even so it requires the bombing of a "Jewish church" or two to break the silence...

...More recently, the newly appointed Dade County Grand Jury has been charged with investigating the Beth El bombing...

...but they bore their hurt silently...

...Four hundred ladies were present, the city's social, political, and financial elite on the distaff side...

...For days one phase of the investigation revolved around belief that the bombing might have been an "inside job...

...But 125,000 votes were also cast for the second-runner, General Sumter Lowry, candidate of the White Citizens Councils...

...By March 21, only five short days after the bombing, the story seemed to have just about run its course...

...For in order to get to the door where the dynamite charge was placed, the criminals had to pass an alleyway where they must have observed two open windows leading into the boiler roomif they had chosen to toss the dynamite through these windows, which are open at all times to allow fumes to escape, the building would have been completely destroyed...

...Police investigations have reached as far north as Pompano Beach and have covered an area of two hundred miles...

...True, no relaxing of the probe must be permitted...

...It is a world intruded upon by a remote, taloned and scaled dragon, the Supreme Court...

...Their silence was only a small part of the omnipresent silence that envelopes the "moderate" South today, a silence that gives encouragement to the demagogue and a kind of left-handed countenance to lawless acts of violence...

...All the crimes, as well as the Christmas 1951 bomb-slaying of Harry Moore, NAACP official of Mims, Florida, remain unsolved...

...it is a world shaken by the vibrations of South Florida urbanization...

...There were many in zipper jackets, slacks and work pants...

...Both telephone calls were made before the newspapers knew about the blast, or if they were aware of it, before they knew it was caused by something other than a gas explosion...

...That was March 17...

...In Florida, they spoke clearly for the "moderate" segregationist, Governor LeRoy Collins...

...Here NATHAN PERLMUrriER discusses the Miami bombing...

...THE dull boom in the evening of March 16, unusual but not frightening, that announced the bombing of the Nashville Jewish Community Center echoed the thunder blast that eighteen hours earlier, in the hushed stillness of 2:30 in the morning, shattered Miami's Temple Beth E1l school annex...

...In Nashville a lady had thought that the sound of the explosion was her next-door neighbor's traveling bags dropping to the floor...

...its confusion and resentment are part and parcel of the persecuted minority complex which the South has felt since before the Civil War...

...The domestic and field hands he has known, who have deferred to him and mistered him and assured him of their lack of interest in integration, cannot be projected into the image of mover and shaker in Washington, D. C. The outsiders who have wrought fleshy Miami Beach, the outsiders with the New York money and the secret influence in Washington, D. C., far more credibly fit that role...

...The desk officer picked up the receiver, was informed of the explosion, and was advised that more bombings would follow unless "segregation" or "integration" was stopped in Miami-the officer wasn't sure which term the caller used...

...At the same time it must be remembered that racial violence is generally the work of tawdry, miniscule minorities, social criminals acting out of conviction rather than ordinary criminals seeking profit or vengeance-individual extremists who rise for a stark, dramatic moment from a class or group in extremis...

...Arrest of those responsible for the bombings must come...

...In Miami most of the shaken neighbors said their first thought was that an airplane had crashed...

...Some 200 persons, none of them in Klan regalia, sat in their cars in the manner of an audience at a drive-in movie theatre...

...If organized racism lies behind the bombings, is there a social ferment in the South today producing these acts of violence and the more recent bombing attempts at Jacksonville and Birmingham, and can we expect the Southern ferment to produce further acts of racially motivated violence...

...In Nashville, too, within fifteen minutes of the bombing, a rabbi, William B. Silverman, received a telephone call...

...Attorneys, shopkeepers, newspapermen, state and local officials are regularly solicited...

...In the past two years Florida has been inundated with inflammatory hate literature...

...That afternoon, the Miami News wondered editorially whether more violence for Miami was in store...

...I attended the rally with Robert S. Bird of the New York Herald Tribune...

...Today, the distinguishing, unique contribution of the Klan and of many White Citizens Councils to the South's "total war" isanti-Semitism...

...At this writing, the bombing of Miami's Temple Beth El also remains unsolved...

...In some instances the mailings are signed and go beyond the mere expression of group libels...

...But it would be error to view the Klan only as an isolated extremist group...

...In a rash of violence ten different explosions had rocked Negro and Jewish edifices and a Catholic Church...

...498 told the gathering crowd that it had been a gas explosion...

...One such, a Florida KKK recruitment letter which enjoyed currency in Nashville, provided Miami police with an early lead...

...Immediately broadening itself to include the Rabbinical Association of Greater Miami, the American Jewish Congress, and the Jewish War Veterans, the committee issued a statement to member agencies of the Combined Jewish Appeal...

...it is easy to imagine the carnage that might have resulted if the bombs had gone off earlier than they did...

...On the same afternoon, the liaison committee of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League convened at the call of the committee's respective co-chairmen, David Fleeman, prominent local contractor, and Paul Seiderman, one-time New York Rackets Bureau chief...

...B. Sherrill, Grand Imperial Wizard...

...In their attempt to trace the dynamite and through it the criminals, the police have discovered, to their dismay, thatstealingunguarded dynamite from construction jobs after dark requires little more surreptitiousness than does trespassing...

...Unmarked night patrols were posted around the synagogues of Greater Miami...

...The Miami crime, even by the lights of its own perpetrators, was clearly a case of knocking at the wrong door...

...This hypothesis was not, however, borne out by investigation...

...That is a goodly sized extremist group-anywhere...

...Bulk shipments of Common Sense, published by Conde McGinley of Union, New Jersey, and of the American Nationalist, published by Frank Britton of Inglewood, California, arrive regularly...

...Not so Temple Beth El...

...The cracker-it is a term of prideful self-description-has lived with Negroes all his life and consequently "knows" that they are incapable of being responsible for the social revolution decreed in the Supreme Court's school decisions...

...It hurled a section of iron railing, cemented to the rear steps of the building, one hundred and fifteen yards onto the roof of a private home...

...Fearful of panic if word of a "synagogue bombing" raced through the alarmed neighborhood, police THE attempt to inject anti-Semitism into the struggle over desegregation presently convulsing the South has been signalized by a series of bombing attempts on Southern Jewish religious institutions...

...Another notion, that the bombing was an act of intimidation perpetrated by antiSemites, has persisted...

...At the close of his remarks, two ladies left...

...Many Jews are members of the Masons," he continued...

...Sometimes the silence is shattered by a bomb, and then everybody starts talking at once-about the Klan and not about "massive resistance," nor their own silence of a moment ago, nor the symbiotic relation the Klan state of mind enjoys with that of the respectable South today...

...Standing guard around the platform were six robed, hooded and masked figures, in white garb, in crimson and blue...

...God stamped ugliness on the face of the Jew for the same reason that he put rattlers on the snake...

...Assurances were given that the police were conducting a thorough investigation, that information from the files of the agencies had been shared with the police, and that all pertinent information would be shared with the organized Jewish community...

...In the Miami case, too, had the bombers used burlap, had they chosen to place their charge somewhat differently, the entire structure would have been leveled...

...Some of it is distributed at meetings of Klan groups and of some White Citizens Councils...

...Sometimes the silent ones have an opportunity to speak-in the privacy of the polling booth...

...THAT the active Klan is a small, tawdry, dwindling affair perhaps requires restating...

...The Klan today represents much more a state of mind than it does an organization...

...Southeastern Florida, the state's Cold Coast, is a busy hive of construction...

...The bulk of its congregation are quiet, elderly people for whom the synagogue is strictly a place for worship...

...The Admiral, discussing segregation among other subjects, launched a tirade against a "hidden force" of "Zionist individuals," and proposed to overcome this "force" with Christian principles "in a bloodless way, if possible...

...The flames bathed the thickly moss draped oaks in a ghostly light and revealed in several of the trees the loud speakers that were carrying the oratorical virulence out into the Florida night...

...the letter was signed, "M...

...This was evidenced some months ago in Pensacola, Florida, a city which for some time now has been receiving large mailings of hate literature...

...Rabbi Shmaryahu Swirsky, former spiritual leader of Temple Beth El, once said to me: "Sometimes there is a knock on my study door, and I pray, I pray hard that when I say 'Come in,' there will enter a young face...

...For in addition to bombs having served over the years as a kind of signature for psychopathic racists, and in addition to the racist telephone calls made in both Nashville and Miami hard on the heels of the detonations, the bombing method used in both cities suggests planned intimidation rather than wantonness...

...The Jewish Community Center in Nashville had been visited by Negroes as guests of the Red Cross and other organizations which met at the Center building...

...The police poured full-strength resources into the investigation...

...But by that time the predictable reactions to the bombing were already in...

...In Nashville, only two hours before the explosion, the Center had been crowded with families and children...

...The rally was a segregationist one...

...Whether the plans are born locally or are part of a nationwide scheme, the important thing is to stop them...

...Individuals posted offers of small rewards...

...Here is his description of the setting: The speaker stood on a small wooden platform under a grove of live oak trees festooned with Spanish moss at the edge of a big field...

...To do so would lead too facilely to the conclusion that the Klan can be snuffed out by proscription against its existence or by incarceration of its leaders...

...One can be sure that many of the ladies present must have been offended...

...He con- tributed "Evangelist Demagogue, 1952 Model" to our number of October 1952...

...Hopefully, the bombings of Jewish institutions have served to rouse the silent South to the danger posed by the extremists in its midst-if so, it is ironical that the Southern Jew, whose own silence has been so pronounced and emphatic, should serve as the alarm bell...

...He is fighting the entire cracker-world's battle-he is, so to speak, an undergrouRd fighter in a "people's war...

...At either side of the platform two 10-foot wooden crosses were flaming and a row of torches was set in a semi-circle around the platform...

...However, the parallelism present in the Miami and Nashville bombings requires a footnote...

...Which set of oaths are we to believe they are violating...

...Indeed, the segregation-at-all-costs theme of the Klan and its city cousins, the White Citizens Councils, is so in tune with much of the prevailing respectable Southern political expression that one is sometimes hard put to it to distinguish their voice in the chorus...

...But the Nashville bombing earlier, and subsequently the bombing, in Jacksonville, of the Jewish Center Synagogue and the Negro James Weldon Johnson School on April 28, and the bombing attempt on Temple Beth El in Birmingham (the dynamite did not go off), also on April 28, made it appear most unlikely that the Miami blast was a mere accident or one-shot affair...

...A good nigger is black on the outside, but a Jew is white on the outside and black inside...

...Perlmutter is director of the Florida office of the Anti-Defamation League and has written for the New Leader, Nation, Progressive, and other magazines...

...In addition, State's Attorney Richard' E. Gerstein, the young prosecutor who last year picked up, interrogated, and publicly exposed John Kasper, dramatically declared his office's official interest in the bombing by convening the three law enforcement agencies and co-ordinating their activities...

...Petersburg, Tampa, and Miami...

...But finding them is, at best, a difficult task and calls for the patience and forbearance of the public...

...It assured parents of school-age children that at meetings of Klan cells to which they were being invited, "There will be bomb lessons and how to handle fire and gasoline...

...His caller, "a member of the Confederate Union," boasted of the dynamiting, warned that the Rabbi's temple would suffer the same fate that "any other nigger-loving place or niggerloving person" would...

...Lucie county White Citizens Council of Florida...

...A cash reward was offered by a Veterans of Foreign Wars post and the national Jewish War Veterans...

...The school's roof and walls were lifted from their foundations...

...Last month Jackson Toby re- ported on the "Bombing in Nashville...

...Beth El, police discovered, was divided into bickering camps...

...The explosive charge had already been located, however-wrapped, ironically enough, in paper yarmelkes, stolen from an outside storage bin...

...Also, had the bombers set their charges in a different place, the building would have been completely demolished...

...Involved in the investigation are the Miami Police Dept., the Miami Beach Police Dept., and the Sheriff's office...

...In the circle of the fire bath, about 100 automobiles were parked in three rows on the edge of a field which stretched far into the shadowy distance...

...The date of that editorial was December 31, 1951...

...The crime in Nashville, in the eyes of its perpetrators, was an act of retaliation for the offense of "desegregation...

...Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin, Jr., retired, a forceful advocate of the WhiteBOMBING IN MIAMI 503 Citizens Councils, was addressing the local Daughters of the American Revolution at that time...

...Questioning of activist extremists in the segregation movement and others continues...

...Much of it turns up in anonymous mailings postmarked in Sarasota, St...

...For the old-timers in Greater Miami-and seven years' residence in that boom town500 COMMENTARY makes one an old-timer-a Miami News editorial of six years ago rang hollowly: "While the investigation is being pressed, it is up to the public to remain calm...

...There was goodly applause, there were questions, all friendly, there was no apology, then or later, for the speaker's remarks...

...Rabbi Silverman himself,BOMBING IN MIAMI 499 while not connected with the Center, had voiced clear opinions that were anathema to hoodlum extremists...

...John Kasper was in Florida and he was featured as a guest speaker at a Klan rally in Inverness, some sixty miles north of Tampa, in the middle of the "cracker" country...

...T E news of Sunday morning's bombing was reported in Monday morning's Miami Herald...

...The rest of the audience remained...

...These blasts echoed fleetingly and then were quickly swallowed in the customary silence...

...Whereas mention of "niggers" seemed to call forth no more than strong disapproval in the mob, the terms "Jew," "Yid," "Kike," and "Zionist" caused them to stir angrily...