Mayors and other municipal officials of 28 Southern cities conferring here yesterday on the bombing of synagogues and centers and schools attended by Negro children set up yesterday a liaison organization to exchange information about the attacks in an attempt to halt them once and for all.
After the meeting, Mayor Haydon Burns of Jacksonville who, together with Mayor Ben West of Nashville, Tenn. , had taken the initiative in calling the extraordinary parley, announced that police had picked up a suspect in the twin bombings in Jacksonville last week. The suspect, James Lilley, 29, was being questioned after dynamite had been found in his car, a green Pontiac which was similar to the car seen driving away from the scene of the Jewish Center explosion.
Pooling the various rewards offered by municipalities and individuals in the cities where six Jewish centers or synagogues had either been bombed or threatened by dynamite which did not explode, the conference was able to offer $55,700 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the terrorists. Police believe that the manufacture of the dynamite bombs is the work of one man and that at most he has the support of only a small number of local hate mongers in the wide distribution of the explosives.
Present at the parley were officials from Jacksonville, Nashville, Montgomery, Ala. , Savannah,,Ga. Miami and West Palm Beach, Fla. , Biloxi, Miss., Birmingham, Ala., and 19 other cities whose officials desired no publicity concerning their participation. The advisory group formed at the meeting was seen as having some of the functions which the FBI might have had in the case, had not Attorney General William Rogers ruled that no Federal issue was involved.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
