Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Tommy Tarrants and Stan Chassin: Deliver Us from Evil

Tommy Tarrants and Stan Chassin DELIVER US FROM EVIL Mobile W alking slowly across the grounds of Murphy High School, Stan Chassin looks for the spot where “the most violent thing I’d dealt with in my life” happened. “Here’s where it took place,” he says, coming to a covered walkway by the auditorium. He touches his chest. “I can feel my heart racing again.” It was spring 1964, not long after the court-ordered desegregation of the all-white school. Law enforcement was present to keep order—Chassin remembers a sheriff’s posse riding horses around the quadrangle—but Murphy had returned to relative calm. Chassin’s days were otherwise nothing out of the ordinary: classes, sandlot baseball, an after-school job, and youth group meetings at the synagogue where his grandfather had been rabbi. Then one day on the way to the auditorium for an assembly, an older student named Tommy Tarrants approached. At six foot three, he towered over the five foot, six inch Chassin. With thousands of students at the school, Chassin knew Tarrants only by reputation: “He was tall, gangly, violent. He was a hood.” “He did not know who I was,” Chassin says, thinking back, “but what I was.” Tarrants passed closely and said: “Kike bastard.” “Hood bastard,” Chassin returned. Tommy Tarrants at the C. S. Lewis Institute in Springfield, Virginia, 2007. Photo by Louise Krafft, courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register. Newspaper headlines from the Mobile Press-Register detailing the criminal career of Tommy Tarrants. Photo by John David Mercer, courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register. TOMMY TARR ANTS AND STAN CHASSIN 113 Tarrants grabbed Chassin by the throat and slammed him against a wall. “If I see you again, Jew bastard, I’ll kill you!” “He held me like this,” Chassin says, leaning against that same wall and clutching his own throat, a 59-year-old man hurtled back in time. “I was shaking.” Chassin did not report the confrontation to school officials, but it was all the talk among students. “You’re sixteen, seventeen, you try to be tough.” The next day, Chassin was in English class when the principal, R. B. Taylor , summoned him. “Stay away from Tommy Tarrants,” the principal told Chassin. “He’s dangerous. He could kill you.” Chassin stayed away, but Tarrants cast a shadow. It was around that time that a swastika was painted on Chassin’s synagogue , and hate calls were placed to the two rabbis in Mobile and to black civil rights leaders in the area. Tarrants, it was later discovered, was the perpetrator . That summer, Tarrants was pulled over by Mobile police late one night Stan Chasin on the grounds of Murphy High School, Mobile, Alabama, 2007. Photo by John David Mercer, courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register. 114 THE JOURNEYERS while driving through a black neighborhood with a sawed-off shotgun. He was convicted of a federal firearms violation and placed on probation until his twenty-first birthday. But Tarrants was not to be stopped. In 1967, he was picked up in a stolen car in Mississippi with a .45-caliber submachine gun—and in the company of Sam Bowers, leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Tarrants returned to Mobile on bond, but soon dropped out of sight. In the spring of 1968, Tarrants returned to his house in Mobile one afternoon to find FBI agents waiting. A car chase ensued. Tarrants got away, and fled on to Mississippi . Chassin, by then a student at the University of South Alabama, followed the news. On July 1, 1968, Chassin picked up the Press-Register to see a shocking story datelined Meridian, Mississippi: “Mobile machine gunner is shot, woman companion dies in firing: Thomas Tarrants and 2 others critical in Meridian hospital,” shouted the headline. The story explained, “A commando squad of policemen, defending the home of a prominent Jewish businessman, sprang a trap on suspected nightriders early Sunday, wounding a young Alabama man and killing his woman companion .” Being chased by police, according to the article, Tarrants fired a 9mm submachine gun, wounding one officer. Tarrants, in turn, was shot in the arm, leg, and abdomen. Police found a notebook in Tarrants’ pocket that vowed: “Gentlemen: I have committed myself to totally defeating the Communist-Jew conspiracy which threatens our country—any means necessary shall be used.” Chassin remembers what he felt at the time: “I...