Bombing of the Z. Alexander Looby Home

The dynamite that destroyed the Looby house also blew out about 140 windows at nearby Meharry Medical College and slightly injured students; Looby and his wife escaped unharmed. Looby had spent the spring providing money and legal services, with other Black attorneys, to students arrested and jailed in the sit-ins. His legal work continued after the blast. By October his team had won dismissal of the charges of conspiracy to disrupt trade and commerce against 91 students, arrested in the course of the sit-in campaign.

What the plaque says

Bombing of the Z. Alexander Looby Home Z. Alexander Looby (1899-1972) was a prominent civil rights lawyer from the late 1930s until the late 1960s. He also served on the Nashville City Council and the Metropolitan Council. In the pre-dawn hours of April 19, 1960, during a boycott of white-owned businesses to protest segregation in Nashville, this house, occupied by Looby and his wife, Grafta, was bombed. They survived, but later that day, in solidarity with the Looby family, approximately 3,000 civil rights activists, including many students from the city's four Black colleges and universities, marched on the Davidson County Courthouse, By June, the seven downtown Nashville stores originally targeted with sit-ins and other protests desegregated their lunch counters. Concern over the bombing of the Looby residence and the economic boycott helped achieve that result.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.2 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.4 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.6 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.7 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Dr. Harold Dadford West, Sr. — steps away
• Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company — steps away
• Desegregating Nashville's Lunch Counters — steps away
• Hulda Margaret Lyttle — steps away