Before they came for him with dynamite, they had tried everything else.
Z. Alexander Looby was not from Nashville. He was not from America. He was born Zephaniah Alexander Looby in 1899 in Antigua, in the British West Indies. His father died when he was young. At fifteen, orphaned, he came to the United States alone. He enrolled at Howard University, graduated, went to Columbia Law School, earned a Doctor of Juristic Science from New York University, and arrived in Nashville in 1926 with more legal education than almost anyone in the state — Black or white.
The Nashville Bar Association would not admit him. He was the wrong color.
He taught economics at Fisk University instead, and then he built a law practice that would become the most consequential in Tennessee’s civil rights history. In 1932, he helped found Kent College of Law — Nashville’s first law school for Black students, created because the existing ones wouldn’t take them. He became the lead attorney for the NAACP in Tennessee. He worked alongside Thurgood Marshall. He was not Marshall’s subordinate. They were partners.
In 1946, a racial confrontation in Columbia, Tennessee, led to the arrest of twenty-five Black men on charges of attempted murder. The NAACP sent Marshall and Looby to defend them. In a courtroom in Lawrenceburg, before an all-white jury, they won acquittals for twenty-three of twenty-five defendants — a result so improbable that it made national news.
What happened after the verdict is the part that doesn’t make the textbooks.
Driving back from Columbia after a late hearing, Marshall, Looby, and a third attorney named Maurice Weaver were stopped by police. Then stopped again. On the third stop, officers arrested Marshall on a charge of drunk driving and put him in an unmarked car. They began driving him toward the Duck River — a known lynching site in Maury County.
Looby refused to leave. He and Weaver followed the unmarked car. Community members, alerted by word of mouth, followed them. A small convoy formed in the dark. The police, realizing they had witnesses, drove Marshall to a magistrate instead of the river. The magistrate examined him, found him sober, and ordered his release. Marshall later said he believed Looby and the convoy had saved his life.
Thurgood Marshall went on to become the first Black justice on the United States Supreme Court. He made it there, in part, because a lawyer from Antigua wouldn’t drive away when the police told him to.
Looby kept building. In 1951, he and Robert E. Lillard were elected to the Nashville City Council — the first Black men to serve since 1911, a forty-year gap that nobody in power had been in any hurry to close. After the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Looby filed Kelley v. Board of Education, the lawsuit that began the long, grinding process of desegregating Nashville’s public schools. He also sued to desegregate the Nashville airport dining room and the city’s public golf courses. He won.
By 1960, he was sixty years old, a city councilman, the most prominent Black attorney in Tennessee, and the man who showed up at the jail every time the police arrested another round of students for sitting at a lunch counter. The Nashville sit-in movement had been running since February 13. Waves of students from Fisk, Tennessee A&I, American Baptist, and Meharry had been sitting down, getting beaten, getting arrested, sitting down again. Looby defended them. Every time. He posted bail, argued motions, stood in courtrooms and made the legal case that buying a cup of coffee should not be a crime.
This made him a target.
He was not the first. Nashville had already been bombed twice during the integration era. On September 10, 1957, the day after a single Black child enrolled at Hattie Cotton Elementary School, someone dynamited the building. On March 16, 1958, someone bombed the Jewish Community Center — attacked because the Jewish community was perceived as sympathetic to desegregation. A group calling itself the Confederate Underground claimed credit. Nobody was ever charged for either bombing. The city’s police records from before 1963 are, officially, missing or destroyed.
At 5:30 on the morning of April 19, 1960, a bundle of dynamite was thrown from a car at the home of Z. Alexander Looby at 2012 Meharry Boulevard.
The blast destroyed the front of the house. It blew out 147 windows at Meharry Medical College across the street. The concussion was felt blocks away. The intent was to kill.
Looby and his wife, Grafta, were asleep in the back bedroom. They survived — buried in glass and debris but alive. The back of the house held. A matter of walls and distance, maybe fifty feet, between a bombing and an assassination.
The dynamite had likely been stolen two days earlier from the Simpson Stone Company in Clarksville. A photograph of an eleven-year-old girl from Ohio was found at the theft scene — a detail that would sit in a file for sixty-four years. In 2024, a cold case investigator tracked her down. She was elderly now. She identified an uncle — a man she described as a virulent racist. He was long dead. There was no physical evidence to tie him to the bombing, and there never would be.
The case remains unsolved.
What the bombers accomplished was the opposite of what they intended.
Within hours, more than three thousand people gathered in North Nashville. They formed a line three abreast and walked south in absolute silence — past the houses, past the churches, past Tennessee A&I, past the state capitol, through downtown to the courthouse on Public Square. Three thousand people and not a sound except their footsteps on the pavement. It was one of the earliest mass marches of the American civil rights movement, and it was organized in a morning.
On the steps of the courthouse, Diane Nash confronted Mayor Ben West. She asked him if he believed it was wrong to discriminate against a person based on their race or color. He said yes. She asked if the lunch counters should be desegregated. He said yes again. Three weeks later, Nashville became the first major Southern city to desegregate — not by court order, but because a bomb meant to silence a lawyer had instead put three thousand people on the street with nothing left to lose.
Z. Alexander Looby served on the Nashville City Council until 1971. He died in 1972 at the age of seventy-two. The city named a library and community center after him. In 2021, a 94-foot mural was dedicated at the center depicting Looby alongside Diane Nash and Thurgood Marshall.
The Nashville Bar Association — the one that had denied Looby membership because of his race, the one whose professional community he had outperformed for half a century — posthumously granted him a certificate of membership in 1982. Ten years after his death. They put his name on a piece of paper they wouldn’t hand him while he was alive.
Looby’s house on Meharry Boulevard is gone. But the building across the street still stands — the medical college that lost 147 windows because a man who came to this country as a fifteen-year-old orphan from the Caribbean had the nerve to be a good lawyer. The blast pattern tells the story: aimed at one house, felt across an entire institution. That was Looby’s career in a single explosion. They came for the lawyer, and the shock waves went everywhere.
Nobody was ever charged. The police records are missing. The suspects are dead. The dynamite has been traced as far as it can be traced. Nashville has named things after Looby and built a mural and held commemorations, and all of that is appropriate and none of it is justice.
The case is unsolved. Sixty-five years and counting.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons