Obscure civil rights sites in Mississippi capital are fading away

Many are forgotten and in danger of being lost

Former Republic of New Africa headquarters on Lewis Street, near downtown Jackson

During the civil rights era, my parents sometimes drove my sisters and me past KKK bomb sites in our hometown, Jackson, Mississippi. Like most children, we thought our world was the norm, so these outings did not feel as strange as they might sound. I was an adult before I realized that not everyone grew up watching bombed-out buildings pass by their car window on the way to Mammaw’s house.

One of the sites, White’s Barbershop, was not far from our home. It was a small shop operated by a conservative white man who gave only old-fashioned haircuts for $1.50. When I asked my mother why White’s got bombed, not once but twice, she suggested that other barbers were retaliating because he undercut their prices.

If bombs were that handy for settling barber disputes, dynamite was obviously in ready supply in Jackson at the time, and in fact, there was a business on the western outskirts named Dixie Dynamite, in a building that today houses a Black church — one of many ironic twists in Jackson’s civil rights history.

As Mississippi’s state capital and its largest city, Jackson was on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement, and several related sites have been preserved, including the modest home where activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963, now a designated national historic landmark, and the headquarters of COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), a museum. There is also a list of sites put together years ago by the City of Jackson, though it’s unclear if the tour is still being maintained.

Many other sites have slipped quietly into obscurity, unmarked and largely unknown except to those who witnessed their key moments, if only in passing.

My family and I were basically tourists navigating a fraught matrix overlaid upon our own familiar world. We were never threatened by the violence, though we knew a few people who were. Occasionally, the conflict moved within closer range, as when a group of Black men and women showed up our church during a Sunday service and were turned away by deacons. As we sat in our pew near the back, we heard loud talking in the vestibule; my Sunday School teacher later informed the class that “agitators” had tried to enter who were not actually there for Christian worship. I asked if it was up to us to decide their reasons for being there, which did not sit well with the teacher, who offered no response. Broadmoor Baptist Church eventually moved to an outlying suburb because the neighborhood was “going Black,” in the white vernacular of the time. In response, my parents moved their membership elsewhere.

Jacksonians who were more attuned to what was happening could no doubt point to other lingering evidence of the era’s tumult, but the sites that populate my personal Atlas Obscura-style map of civil rights-era Jackson offer a few telling examples. When I recently drove past one of the landmarks, Rabbi Perry Nussbaum’s former home, which was bombed in 1967, it occurred to me that such hidden or forgotten mileposts should be documented before they fade away. Toward that aim, I spent a day revisiting and photographing those that I remember.

• Rabbi Nussbaum’s house

A passerby would note little of interest about this house at 3410 Old Canton Road, which stands vacant and in disrepair in the affluent, trendy Fondren neighborhood. It looks like a logical tear-down, with an odd Plexiglas picture window that doesn’t fit its circa 1950 suburban architecture – a detail that points to its troubled past.

In 1967, the house was bombed by KKK operatives, leaving a huge hole blasted in its front wall. The hole was later repaired and outfitted with the picture window, and because the window stood out, the house remained on my personal radar long after its story faded from the news.

Rabbi Nussbaum, according to this site, was a Toronto native who alienated some members of Jackson’s Beth Israel synagogue with his strident – and obviously dangerous – public support of the civil rights movement. In 1964, he helped found the Committee of Concern, an interracial group of ministers that raised money to rebuild bombed or burned churches. At the dedication of Beth Israel’s new temple in 1967, both Black and white ministers participated. The new temple was itself subsequently bombed by KKK terrorists, who bombed Nussbaum’s house a few weeks later. Though the rabbi was home with his wife at the time, no one was injured.

Mayor Allen C. Thompson announced that the City of Jackson was offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bombers, and segregationist Gov. Paul B. Johnson temporarily broke character to call the bombers “depraved.” Jackson’s Jewish community had been assimilated into the city’s prevailing white culture, but violent outliers now revealed a fault line.

One of the perpetrators was KKK terrorist Tommy Tarrants, who reportedly bombed the Beth Israel synagogue and the home of Jackson civil rights supporter Robert Kochtitzy, a member of the Committee of Concern who lived in the Belhaven neighborhood. Tarrants’ other known targets were the parsonage of a Black church in Laurel, Miss., an administrator’s residence at Tougaloo College, and a synagogue in Meridian, Miss. He was captured in an FBI ambush in Meridian, served time and eventually renounced racism and became a preacher. His frequent accomplice and reported lover, Jackson school teacher Kathy Ainsworth (née Capomacchia), was killed in the FBI ambush during an attempted bombing of a Jewish leader’s home using 29 sticks of dynamite. Several of my friends were in “Miss Capomacchia’s” elementary school class and adored her because she was nice, young and pretty; she also taught Sunday School. They were shocked to learn of her secret life, including her involvement in the bombing of the Nussbaums’ house.

Rabbi Nussbaum remained in Jackson until his retirement in 1973, after which he and his wife moved to California, where he died. Fifty years later, in December 2023, Beth Israel received another bomb threat that caused an interruption of its services.

• The doomed motel on Highway 51 (now North State Street)

Sometime between 1962 and 1964, a motel (previously misidentified as an apartment complex) under construction on Highway 51 between Jackson and the Black community of Tougaloo was bombed – like White’s Barbershop, twice.

I’ve found little documentation about this episode, but I remember it being bombed. After the debris was cleared, construction resumed, which prompted a second bombing that led to the project’s abandonment.

The May 12, 1964, Clarion-Ledger newspaper reported that Jackson police had found a cache of dynamite they believed was “connected with the bombing of a partially completed Negro motel on Old Highway 51 North” that had been under construction for several years. This appears to have been the second blast. For years I’ve noted the survival of the pinkish brick pillars that marked the entrance to the place, and they’re still there. The property remains undeveloped after more than 50 years.

The motel was in the vicinity of White’s Barbershop and Tougaloo College, the latter of which was a hotbed of civil rights activism. It was also on Highway 51, a route followed by the famous March Against Fear, led by James Meredith, who had integrated Ole Miss and was shot during the 220-mile protest in 1966 but survived. The march continued on to Jackson without Meredith, culminating in the largest mass protest in state history, involving an estimated 15,000 people. Contemporary visitors to the Mississippi State Fair would be surprised to learn that cattle pens at the fairgrounds were used to imprison protesters following mass arrests.

As a result of these violent intersections, my elementary friends and I often wondered what was up with the part of town fronting Highway 51. During the Meredith march, our parents forbade us to leave our yards, but my friend Owen was luckier: Her progressive mother drove her down to the Blue & White Shopette to watch history unfolding. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when Jackson kids had to lug duffle bags loaded with drinking water and canned goods to school in preparation for a potential nuclear attack, my friends and I also wondered why the Soviets would want to blow up our town, and decided their target must be the Presto plant, the largest factory in our area, which was located in the obviously explosive Highway 51 zone.

• White’s Barbershop

Not far from the Presto plant, on what was then Jackson’s northern edge, White’s Barbershop suffered what appears to have been collateral damage. During my personal crew cut phase I got my hair cut at White’s a few times, but none of my friends would have been caught dead there once Beatle haircuts became the rage. It was something of a relief for us when the barbershop was bombed, which seemed to eliminate the chance that our parents would take us there for a “regular” haircut. But White’s reopened. Then it got bombed again.

After the second bombing, the shop’s plate glass front window was sheathed in plywood. The barbershop eventually closed, after the area began transitioning to a Black majority. The tiny building that once housed it is now a Black-run fish hut, still with plywood where the plate glass window used to be.

• The downtown library

The former downtown library is one of the few sites on this tour that is well documented and even has a historical marker, so it is not technically forgotten. Neither did it get bombed. But the building stands vacant, overshadowed by the nearby Two Museums, one of which is dedicated to the civil rights era.

The downtown library was the biggest in town, with an extensive collection, notable also for the black and yellow signs designating its basement a fallout shelter during the missile crisis. As I roamed the stacks as a child, I was unaware the facility was reserved only for white people. There was a lot about 1960s Jackson I didn’t know.

This site reports that on March 27, 1961, nine Tougaloo students staged a sit-in at the downtown branch to protest the racial segregation of city libraries. African Americans were prohibited from using the main library and had to satisfy themselves with “colored” libraries with inferior books. The Tougaloo Nine, as the students came to be known, were trained in civil disobedience by Medgar Evers, president of the Jackson NAACP. They stepped up to the plate.

According to Black Past, the females among the protestors entered the library wearing dresses while the men wore slacks, shirts and ties. They had first visited the colored George Washington Branch to request books that they knew would not be available there, then went to the main library and attempted a “read-in,” during which they sat at different tables quietly reading library books. The librarian called the Jackson police, who arrived and asked them to leave. When they did not, they were arrested, charged with of breach of the peace, and jailed.

Later that day, students from all-Black Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) organized a prayer vigil in their support, which was broken up by Jackson police, reportedly with the support of the college president. Three students who organized the vigil were expelled. The next day, students boycotted classes in protest, held another rally and marched to the city jail, where the Tougaloo Nine were being held. They were joined by protesters led by Medgar Evers. Jackson Police used tear gas and dogs against the protesters and an 81-year-old man reportedly suffered a broken arm from an attack by a police officer with a nightstick.

The Washington Post described a melee that broke out during the trial, which began on March 28, 1961: “The courtroom was split down the middle, half Black and half White, and a line of 25 police officers and two German shepherds were stationed outside, ready to pounce at the first sign of ‘agitation.’ When a crowd of Black supporters burst into applause as the Tougaloo students arrived outside the courthouse, the officers and dogs attacked. Medgar Evers took a pistol blow to the head, and many were clubbed and mauled.”

Though the students were convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $100, the judge suspended the sentences on the condition that there would be no further demonstrations. There were none. Today, the empty library’s future is uncertain.

• Thompson’s Tank

Thompson’s Tank was notorious at the time, though few white Jacksonians ever saw it in person unless during occasional public displays. Any Black person who encountered it at large was likely in serious trouble.

Outfitted with shotguns, teargas guns and a submachine gun, the armored bus was acquired by Mayor Thompson in 1964 to be used against protesters, including, he warned, against those that behaved peaceably. In 1968, it was borrowed by Memphis police to transport James Earl Ray after he shot Martin Luther King Jr. It was also used during a 1970 Jackson State protest, or riot, as it was described in newspapers at the time (protesters set fires, overturned a vehicle and hurled rocks at police).

Though it was a vehicle, the bus was designated a Mississippi Landmark in July 2014. It has since been withdrawn from public view, though it can be glimpsed from a distance, parked behind a locked gate next to an old police cruiser at the Jackson police firing range. The police department, like Jackson’s population, is now majority Black, which makes its possession of Thompson’s Tank another ironic twist.

• The headquarters of the Republic of New Africa

This landmark represents a coda to the civil rights era, having come to the fore in 1971 during a police shootout with armed militants intent on setting up a Black separatist nation in former Confederate states. In what the Jackson Free Press (now the Mississippi Free Press) described as an unassuming house at 1148 Lewis Street, RNA members had allegedly stockpiled weapons and engaged in a shootout with police after they surrounded the place. The RNA’s headquarters was familiar to me because I had a summer job at the downtown post office and always tried to sneak a peek through the box slot when someone picked up the mail for the provocatively named group. The shootout took place that summer at what is now a forlorn-looking and apparently vacant residence.

Another ironic twist: Chokwe Antar Lumumba, whose father was an RNA member, is currently the mayor of Jackson (as was his father before him).

• Jackson State University women’s dorm

This report describes an event that was in some ways a capstone of the city’s civil rights violence, though it was also a bridge to a new era of civil disobedience related to the anti-war movement. The episode took place in 1970, during the Vietnam War, and began with a protest in support of civil rights and against the war.

Two students watching a showdown between police and rioters were shot and killed near JSU’s Alexander Hall women’s dorm. Though their deaths came soon after the infamous shooting deaths of four students by national guardsmen at Kent State University, the JSU episode received far less national attention.

At the time, my friends and I were 15 years old, with driver’s licenses, so we drove the main thoroughfare through campus to view the dorm’s shattered windows. Soon after, the street was shut off to all but pedestrian traffic. Fortunately, a marker was eventually installed at the site. Bullet holes still punctuate the dorm’s facade.

Beyond a nearby campus fence, in a neighborhood of ruined and abandoned houses, a faded civil rights tour marker is affixed to a post, though it is unclear what, exactly, happened there. Such is the fate of countless landmarks from the city’s most turbulent period between the civil war and its current epidemic of violent crime.

Correction: The March Against Fear was in 1966, not 1967, as was previously reported.

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Images: Former RNA headquarters (author); Rabbi Nussbaum’s former home (John Sewell); brick pillars, apartment complex site (author); former White’s Barbershop (author); downtown library (John Sewell); Thompson’s Tank at police shooting range (author); women’s dorm after shootings (Jackson State University)