Nonfiction
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THE TEMPLE BOMBING
By Melissa Fay Greene
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 436 pages
Prologue
October 12, 1958
3:37 A.M.
Fifty sticks of dynamite in the middle of the night blew apart the side wall of the Temple, Atlanta's oldest and richest synagogue, which stood in pillared, domed majesty on a grassy hill above Peachtree Street.
The brick walls flapped upward like sheets on a line. Offices and Sunday school classrooms burst out of the building; the stairwell came unmoored and hung like a rope ladder; bronze plaques commemorating the war dead from the two world wars spun out like saucers; the stained-glass windows snapped outward, like tablecloths shaken after dinner; and all was momentarily red-hot, white-lit, and moving like lava. Then the strangely animate flying rooms and objects stood still — as in the childrens' game of musical chairs, the children freeze when the music stops — leaving erratic silhouettes and capricious statues of rubble, burst pipes, ashes, and mud, the whole of it colorfully twinkling in the quiet night from the bright bits of stained glass sprinkled over the scene.
The sound of the blast traveled heavily for miles, a locomotive of sound tearing through the city. Hundreds were startled awake by it, including Governor Marvin Griffin. Some fell out of their beds at the reverberation; windows in a nearby apartment building shattered; and one old lady, reared on Confederate lore, momentarily mistook the boom for renewed Union bombardment in the Battle of Atlanta.
Telephones at police headquarters and at the newspapers bottlenecked with inquiries and with reports of a "loud explosion." At 2:00 a.m. a United Press International (UPI) staff member had logged the receipt of a phone call warning that the bombing would be coming, but the call had been considered the work of a "crackpot" and the information had not been relayed to police. At 3:45 a.m. the UPI staff took another call, this one from "General Gordon of the Confederate Underground": "We bombed a temple in Atlanta. This is the last empty building in Atlanta we will bomb. All nightclubs refusing to fire their Negro employees will also be blown up. We are going to blow up all Communist organizations. Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens." Meanwhile, police cruisers roamed up and down Peachtree, searching in vain for the cause of the thunderclap.
In the four hours between the registering of the sound of an explosion within the city limits and the discovery by a custodian that the historic Reform Jewish temple had been attacked, there were those in Atlanta who permitted themselves to hope that the noise had not come from a bomb. There were civic leaders who fell to imagining the demise of a gas furnace, an industrial mishap, or a backfiring road-maintenance vehicle. For though they lived in the Deep South in its era of mayhem, of violent white backlash to the federal government's proposed course on racial integration, the Atlanta civic leaders believed they had kept terrorism and race hate at bay.
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