▲ 22 r/weirdlittleguys
Beckwith company car notation
Because I'm a sucker for FBI source material...this references two days before the Evers murder
u/Big-Biscotti-6333 — 6 days ago
What You Didn’t Know About the Hattie Cotton School Bombing
For the last two years I’ve been researching the string of bombings from 1956–1958 in which the Confederate Underground claimed responsibility, along with other attacks tied to the same network.
Almost all of my source material comes directly from FBI files obtained through FOIA, and major findings from this research have been confirmed as new to author Betsy Phillips.
Much of this material was being discovered and submitted to MNPD Cold Case in the months just before the Hattie Cotton case was moved to inactive status.
The public statement regarding new findings and the decision to make the case inactive omits all of it.
After reading Phillips’ Dynamite Nashville, I wanted to know what else might still be buried in the files. That led me to an FBI file marked “Confederate Underground” that highlighted a major person of interest and contained informant statements connecting him to both the Hattie Cotton and Jacksonville bombings.
Many, many files and two years of intensive research later, there is far too much to list here. But as it relates to the man at the center of my research:
Harley Hanson Childson was a Florida extremist connected to Bill Hendrix’s group, an experienced demolition worker with easy access to TNT. He moved from Florida to the Knoxville area roughly one week before the Hattie Cotton bombing, with no definitive alibi or whereabouts established in the records I’ve found, and returned to Florida shortly afterward. He also had direct contact with John Kasper and other key figures of the NSRP.
Informants reported that Childson said he had shown “those people” in Nashville how to use dynamite in connection with the Nashville bombings.
He reportedly called the Confederate Underground “his baby,” distributed recruitment and organizational material identifying himself as its leader, and wrote an associate that the FBI knew he headed the CU and that they would need to communicate in code.
Despite all of this, Childson is heavily redacted throughout the publicly available files—appearing by name only a handful of times outside one particularly revealing file.
And then there is Jacksonville.
About one month before the Atlanta Temple bombing, the FBI received an informant statement reporting that Childson named himself, Kenneth Griffin and Leslie Rogers as the men responsible for the April 1958 Jacksonville bombings.
Griffin was later arrested in the Atlanta Temple bombing investigation and confessed to involvement in that case.
Rogers was one of the FBI’s most important Atlanta informants and became a star government witness in the Atlanta bombing trial.
The FBI files then show agents scrambling with the implications of information suggesting that one of their own paid informants might be implicated in Jacksonville while emphasizing protection of informant identities and extreme caution over what would be disclosed to local authorities .
After Atlanta, the federal Hattie Cotton investigation appears to be an after thought.
But the question that has bothered me most throughout this entire project is this,
Why would MNPD not continue pushing this further, not only for justice, but simply to give Nashville the fullest possible truth?
I have found hundreds of pages of new files on this individual since the inactive status decision.
Why move the case to inactive status when substantial previously unknown evidence was still being uncovered and submitted?
Because whatever “inactive” means administratively, this investigation has been anything but inactive.
In two years, I have never stopped finding more.
Thank you for reading, please share and comment as there is so much more to this story.
u/Big-Biscotti-6333 — 12 days ago
▲ 32 r/weirdlittleguys
No Kkk in Mississippi in the 50s?
In the last episode "Black monday" it was said that there was no kkk in Mississippi until the 60s.I have been researching a set of klan related cold cases from this period for a couple years now and thought Id share a screenshot.
u/Big-Biscotti-6333 — 26 days ago