A Bomb Going Off

For many years, I thought I remembered a bomb going off. I was a child, no more than ten years old. My mother, my two sisters, and I were living in our redbrick duplex in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson. My cousins lived in the same neighborhood. All my friends lived in the neighborhood, and we spent forever wandering its streets, roaming. On other days, because my sisters and I loved it, Mother led us through the concrete runoff ditches that crisscrossed the neighborhood like secret trails. It was our neighborhood, we owned it. We loved it. And I remembered as an adult when a bomb echoed through it.

A bomb did thunder through the neighborhood, I wasn’t wrong about that. In 1967, during the wars of the Civil Rights era, the KKK bombed the home of white activist Robert Kochtistsky on Poplar Avenue. Kochtistsky fought for equal rights and in 1968 served as an alternate delegate for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party when Fannie Lou Hamer became famous. At the time, I only knew someone’s house had been bombed in retaliatory and shameful hate.

As I grew up, I transferred that bombing to the home of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum. The KKK did bomb Rabbi Nussbaum’s home, also for his active support of the Civil Rights movement (so many bombings in Mississippi.) The bombing of his home is the more famous bombing, which as I grew up I heard more about, and I thought it was the bombing I remembered. It was not. Nor was the bombing of Rabbi Nussbaum’s synagogue Beth Israel the bombing I remembered. That bombing destroyed Jackson’s only synagogue, which was re-established, only to have a 19 year old young man set it afire last week.

The white man has said he targeted the synagogue because it was a Jewish place of worship. He wasn’t from Jackson. He was from the suburbs of Jackson. A recent graduate, he went to Catholic school in the suburbs. The school issued a statement condemning his actions. His first court appearance, given a chance to speak, he said, “Jesus is Lord.”

The city has rallied to the support of Beth Israel. The mayor immediately issued a statement condemning the violence. Local churches are providing worship space for the synagogue. But will the city have a conversation about the hate tucked inside its folds?

This is the question my friend asked. Will Mississippi look closely and clearly at the hate?

The attack did not come out of nowhere. If the law finds the young man guilty of the hate crime he is charged with, it will not be the first time in recent years kids from the suburbs came into the city to commit hate crimes. What hate are we sowing in our children that waits until it erupts like a bomb going off? If we don’t quit saying, “This is an aberration we condemn” and instead say “Why is this us?” the bombings and attacks will not stop.