Killing King
Page 4
Swift and a handful of other seminarians attending Bible school in Southern California focused their attention on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As World War II raged, their thoughts paralleled the worst racist dogma of Hitler’s Third Reich. According to Swift and his friends, conventional understandings of the story of the forbidden fruit missed a key element. Swift agreed with some conventional religious scholars that the account is a metaphor for a sexual relationship between Adam and Eve; this is the great (original) Sin that leads to the Fall of Man after the serpent, Satan in reptilian form, tempts Eve to disobey God and eat from the Tree of Knowledge. But Christian Identity’s originators believed that the book of Genesis alludes to a second intimate relationship—one between Eve and the serpent/Satan. The first act of intercourse produces one seed-line of humanity, through the person of Seth. This seed-line produces the people who will reach a covenant with God through Abraham, and settle the Kingdom of Israel to fulfil God’s promise to Abraham’s descendants—the “Chosen People.” Consistent with the earlier, if speculative, scholarship, these are the “Chosen People” who are exiled from Israel and migrate to Europe. But the second act of intercourse, between Eve and the serpent, produces a demonic seed-line, through the person of Cain. Cain is the offspring of Satan in this rendering, and “so-called Jews” belong to Cain’s bloodline. So, according to Christian Identity scholars, the people who call themselves Jews today are really imposters, falsely asserting their status as Chosen People while really operating on Satan’s behalf. As for people of color—they are subhuman descendants of the “beasts of the fields” described in Genesis as created before God formed Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib. The essence of Christian Identity theology thus becomes this: the satanic, imposter Jews manipulate people of color in a two-thousand-year cosmic conspiracy against the true Chosen People, white Europeans.4
Embraced at first by a very small group of people, this radical theological interpretation had far-reaching consequences—ultimately producing a unique motive for Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The motive grew out of Christian Identity devotion to their own view of End Times—God’s final judgment on humanity, before the righteous are saved and Jesus returns to earth in a thousand-year reign in a paradise on Earth. Like other fundamentalist Christians, Identity believers look for guidance from the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, to understand what God has in store for the world. They share a belief that the prophecies in the Book of Revelation will signal the pending End Times. Notably, Identity Christians, like many fundamentalist Christians, believe that God will impose a series of enormous calamities on the Earth, during a period known as the Tribulation. A false prophet—the antichrist—will seemingly solve the world’s problems but, in reality, he is Satan’s minion. The forces of Satan will amass an army and terrorize humanity until Jesus, and the army of God, vanquish them at the final battle—the Battle of Armageddon. God will then bless his faithful followers with a thousand-year reign, with Jesus as king.
But Swift and his devout followers interpret the End Times differently than do conventional Christians, differences largely rooted in their reinterpretation of the origins of mankind. The antichrist, in their telling, is not just one man, but the entirety of world Jewry. Moreover, since the birth of Cain, these minions of Satan have been working against mankind. Swift’s sermons frequently asserted that Jews, using international communism as their tool, manipulated everything from the American government to the United Nations to the civil rights movement for satanic ends; he referred to this as “the Beast system,” a description of what other Christian Identity followers (and other fundamentalist Christians) believe is the rule of the antichrist implied in the Book of Revelation. The End Times is simply an accelerated period where their true intentions are exposed, and where God ultimately saves his Chosen People, white Europeans. The foot soldiers for the army of Satan, in this scenario, are the subhuman people of color who operate at the whims of the imposter Jews. And the Battle of Armageddon, in essence, is a holy race war.
Another distinctive feature of Christian Identity theology explains why so many of its members, as it will become clear, engaged in provocative acts of violence to incite this holy race war. A large number of conventional fundamentalists believe that faithful Christians will be spared the Tribulation through something known as the Rapture. Devout Christians will literally vanish before the world experiences plagues, earthquakes, and related horrors. But Christian Identity believers reject the Rapture. To the contrary, they believe that good Christians—for example, white Europeans—will have to fight the forces of Satan during the Tribulation. Christian Identity zealots stockpiled weapons at alarming rates throughout the 1960s (and beyond) in part because of this understanding. And when they began to see signs of End Times, in the social upheaval that marked the mid- to late 1960s, they increasingly became willing to use them.5
And it fell to Swift, from his pulpit at the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, to interpret and convey those beliefs to Christian Identity followers, a group that included some of the most well-known and violent racists in the country, several of whom had already conspired to assassinate King in multiple plots. The charismatic Swift’s influence derived from his radio ministry. Swift began his racist and anti-
Semitic sermons in the 1950s; estimates suggest that by 1967 he reached tens of thousands of listeners on the West Coast. Those who could not get Swift’s signal could hear his sermons on tape, via an informal distribution network that included his most devoted followers. And Swift ordained a number of ministers in his Church of Jesus Christ Christian; they relayed his ideas to audiences across the country while Swift preached to a mostly female audience in Hollywood.6
In his sermons, Swift used a combination of astrology, current events analysis, biblical exegesis, and even ufology to divine evidence that the End Times were approaching. A key moment came in February 1962. An alignment of astrological and real-world international events convinced Swift that the world was entering the “zero hour,” the final period before the onset of the Tribulation. Swift told his parishioners:
Zero hour has come . . . We will watch the signs as they develop and we will watch the measures as they follow in the course of this year.
Do not forget the sign of the “son of man” in the heavens. It will only end when the skies are filled with the crafts of heaven to make your experiments of rocketry look like amateur experiments, when all the hosts of heaven join you in the greatest show of power, of glory in all the earth. When your race shall be elevated to its position with the smiling face of our Father in all His majesty and glory saying—these are my children with whom I am well pleased.7
Events in Mississippi that September convinced Swift his prognostication was accurate. Black air force veteran James Meredith challenged the University of Mississippi’s racial exclusion policy by enrolling in the institution, a court-supported action that nonetheless inflamed the citizens of Mississippi and provoked white supremacists from across the country who flocked to Mississippi to protest. Governor Ross Barnett personally and physically blocked Meredith’s entry into Ole Miss with the help of state troopers, forcing President John F. Kennedy to send National Guard troops to impose the court order and protect Meredith. Havoc ensued. Protestors and college students battled the federal troops, using everything from rocks to rifles. Several participants on both sides sustained injuries; a local man and a foreign reporter died in the melee. Things only settled after JFK sent hundreds of additional troops to Oxford, Mississippi, to impose order.8
The Ole Miss race riot inspired Swift, whose fellow Christian Identity minister, Oren Potito, helped incite the crowds to violence. In the immediate aftermath Swift told his audience:
I want you to know that you are in the latter days. “And as it was in the days of Noah” [refers to] a massive program of Satan’s kingdom which is to mongrelize your race. They want to implement
this program with troops. They want to back it by every conspiratorial measure that Satan can dream up. And some of these brainwashed people lifting up a standard of self-
righteousness which is Satan’s own lie—behind this shield they march to destroy . . .
. . . I am going to tell you this. [The Lord] is coming in with a long sword and a sharp sickle. And He is coming in to reap the Grapes of Wrath. And to trample the Wine Press of Judgement. I want you to know tonight, that you are a part of this battle. So don’t surrender. Don’t give in. If they are going to try to force your Race with violence, then we shall meet them in like token. Let me assure you of this. That in this occupation, have no fear. For He said:—“I shall be like a wall of fire about you.” “No weapon formed against you shall prosper.” . . .
Again, I say that we are not alone. As I said this afternoon, He said—“I shall never leave nor forsake you even until the end of the age.”9
Just as importantly, the events at Ole Miss appeared to confirm an important element of the Christian Identity worldview: that rank-and-file whites could be energized into violence against the federal government, whose leaders, as Swift indicated in his sermon, “worked” at the behest of their antichrist Jewish puppet masters. Before 1962, Christian Identity believers found little sympathy, even among aggressive racists, for their vitriolic anti-Jewish message. Raised on a very different version of Christianity from their youth, and focused on resisting integration, most Southern racists could not understand the call for genocidal violence against Jews. The Klan employed anti-
Semitic rhetoric since its second revival in the 1920s, but actual violence against Southern Jews and Jewish targets was rare in part because Southern Jews had largely assimilated into the modern American South.10 But if they could keep their anti-Semitic message to a whisper, Christian Identity ministers could find natural allies in the Jim Crow South among conventional racists looking to preserve the so-called Southern Way of Life. Reverend Potito, a Christian Identity minister, helped rile up the white crowd at Ole Miss into a violent frenzy without mentioning Jews.
Potito belonged to a group whose name deliberately obscured its extremist and Christian Identity disposition: the National States Rights Party (NSRP). The NSRP was formed in 1957 by white supremacists J. B. Stoner, a limp-legged Georgia lawyer, and his friend and fellow Georgian Ed Fields, a chiropractor. The group did run people for elected office, as their name implies, including for president and vice president of the United States in 1960 and 1964.11 But they also were among the most violent white supremacist groups in the country, earning a place on California attorney general Thomas Lynch’s list of the most dangerous terrorist groups in his state by 1965.12 The group’s periodical, The Thunderbolt, did frequently feature blatantly anti-
Semitic articles, but in public, the group chose not to feature the racist elements of its platform. Stoner’s history illustrates why.
Having openly supported the Nazis as a teenager during World War II, Stoner likely became familiar with Identity ideas as early as the late 1940s, as they filtered to Georgia from Western Canada. He soon moved to Tennessee and began to write books that echoed the Christian Identity message that Jesus was not Jewish, that Jews were imposters and literally Satan’s spawn. He also started his white supremacist career by calling for the mass extermination of Jews. Hitler, in Stoner’s view, did not go far enough. His public focus on condemning Jews, even above blacks, led the Tennessee Ku Klux Klan to expel Stoner from their ranks. Other Klan organizations shunned him, forcing Stoner and Fields to form the Christian Anti-Jewish Party in the 1950s, but that group failed to attract enough members.13
Ultimately the two men chose to form the NSRP in large part to disguise their ideological and violent intentions. Stoner attempted to awaken the white masses to his cause by orchestrating a wave of Jewish temple bombings across the country in 1957 and 1958. But this only confirmed his frustrations and those of his followers. White Citizens Councils, which included some Jewish members, condemned the bombings. President Dwight Eisenhower publicly denounced the bombings and formed a task force that helped identify the immediate perpetrators but failed to develop a case against Stoner. To Stoner’s chagrin, although Klan groups deployed anti-Semitic rhetoric, they directed their violence almost exclusively against blacks. Anti-
black violence satisfied only part of the Christian Identity agenda; it struck at the symptoms rather than the disease. For the Christian Identity End Times prophecy to be fulfilled, “everyday” whites would have to join in the holy race war against Jews and people of color. The Ole Miss riots showed this was at least possible.14
The Ole Miss riots helped galvanize racists across the country; thousands joined the KKK and similar organizations to resist federally mandated integration. Others saw the government’s intervention in the South as a sign that they should join militant antigovernment groups, like the Minutemen. This presented opportunities for Christian Identity fanatics but also risks. If the upheaval in the American South illustrated signs of the End Times, then these radicalized whites could become the foot soldiers people like Swift needed to wage war against the Beast system.
But the Christian Identity believer’s concurrent anti-Semitism and advocacy of egregious violence ran the risk of turning off even hardcore Klan sympathizers. Christian Identity believers had to walk a fine line between their religious imperatives and their need for a widespread following. If they did not form their own organizations, followers of Swift assumed roles in the upper echelons of conventional racist groups while hiding their violent, race-war agenda from rank-and-file segregationists until their God “demonstrated” his message. Swift, with his second in charge Lieutenant Colonel William Potter Gale, was no exception to this balancing act. He used the Church of Jesus Christ Christian as the first “front” in a four-front structure later referred to as the Christian Defense League. Researcher David Boylan describes the system:
Faithful members of the CJCC were recruited for the “Second Front” . . . the AWAKE movement. The more militant members were then recruited in to the “Third Front” which was the Christian Knights of the Invisible Empire “which will have the outward impression of a political-religious group not interested in violence.” It was from this group that the most militant members were recruited for the “Inner Den.” These recruits were the ones that committed acts of violence. Gale stated that “leaders in our country might have to be eliminated to further the goals of the CKIE” and that “God will take care of those who must be eliminated.”15
Several Swift devotees assumed key positions in other supremacist groups. Gale, who enjoyed a hot-and-cold relationship with Swift, worked within the California Rangers, an overtly antigovernment and anticommunist group but one, with Gale in charge, that could also serve a religious agenda. The Minutemen were like a national version of the Rangers. Again, under the auspices of antigovernment and anticommunist militancy, the group attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of members across the United States, people who might have been turned off by talk about astrological signs and the two seed-lines of Adam. But several of the most important leaders also were key figures in Swift’s church. Walter Peyson, the right-hand man to Minuteman founder Robert DePugh, was a Christian Identity fanatic.16 Dennis Mower, the West Coast leader of the Minutemen, was Swift’s personal aide;17 Kenneth Goff, leader of the largest Minutemen subgroup out of Colorado, wrote Christian Identity books.18
It was an easy sell for men like Peyson, Mower, and Goff to get rank-and-file Minutemen to prepare as an army in a future civil war, using the fear of communist subversion of the U.S. government as the pretext. Minutemen collected an enormous arsenal of weapons. In the raid of just one Minutemen compound in New York, federal authorities discovered
1,000,000 rounds of rifle and small-arms ammunition, chemicals for preparing bomb detonators, considerable radio equipment—including 30 walkie-talkies and shortwave sets tuned to police bands—125 singl
e-shot and automatic rifles, 10 dynamite bombs, 5 mortars, 12 .30-caliber machine guns, 25 pistols, 240 knives (hunting, throwing, cleaver and machete), 1 bazooka, 3 grenade launchers, 6 hand grenades and 50 80-millimeter mortar shells. For good measure, there was even a crossbow replete with curare-tipped arrows.19
Another raid of one Minuteman’s ranch in California uncovered “eight machine guns, and one hundred rifles, shotguns and pistols. When they searched his barn they found an ammunition dump for heavy caliber rockets, bombs, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.”20
At a secret Minuteman compound, senior Minuteman leader Roy Frankhouser (another Christian Identity follower) showed a reporter thirty four-foot-long rockets he claimed could strike targets several miles away. Of course, such over-the-top weapons hoarding was also consistent with the religious prophecy of Swift, one in which the forces of God must do battle with the antichrist when the Tribulation begins.
As racial unrest intensified in the long hot summers of 1966 and 1967, Swift encouraged his followers to see the prophetic implications. “No wonder there is confusion in the land,” Swift told his audience in the aftermath of the summer’s rioting. “This confusion comes from the mind of Lucifer whom Jesus said was from the Netherworld while the Children of God came down from above. Thus out of the Netherworld comes a constant revolution and ferment into your society, and this continues until it is destroyed.” But to destroy it, white Europeans would have to start their own “great uprising . . . against the evil in [the nation.]”21