The record shows that Swift’s most devout followers did more than sit idly as tensions mounted, waiting passively for God’s plan to unfold. They became provocateurs, using incendiary rhetoric and even violence to drop a match in a lake of gasoline. Rev. Potito, as mentioned earlier, stoked racial resentment at Ole Miss. Christian Identity Minister Connie Lynch toured the country to attend counter-
rallies with his friend J. B. Stoner. Together, the men formed what Klan expert Patty Sims called a “two-man riot squad.” Sims describes their escapades in her book The Klan:
Lynch once told a Baltimore rally crowd: “I represent God, the white race and constitutional government, and everyone who doesn’t like that can go straight to hell. I’m not inciting you to riot—I’m inciting you to victory!” His audience responded by chanting, “Kill the niggers! Kill! Kill!” After the rally, stirred-up white youths headed for the city’s slums, attacking blacks with fists and bottles. At another rally in Berea, Kentucky, Lynch’s diatribe was followed by two fatal shootings. Again, in Anniston, Alabama, he goaded his audience: “If it takes killing to get the Negroes out of the white man’s streets and to protect our constitutional rights, I say, ‘Yes, kill them!’” A carload of men left the rally and gunned down a black man on a stretch of highway.22
The Minutemen planned several acts of violence, including placing poisonous gas in the ventilation system at the United Nations and attacking Jewish summer camps. Only poor planning prevented what could have been highly provocative actions in the cauldron of the 1960s. As one New York investigator noted: “Kooks they are, harmless they are not. . . . It’s only due to their incompetence, and not any lack of motivation, that they haven’t left a trail of corpses in their wake.”23
But the Minutemen did attempt to inflame racial tensions between blacks and whites during the peak of civil disorder in the 1960s. They prepared fake pamphlets, designed to look like black nationalist propaganda, urging blacks to riot. “Kill the white devils and have the women for your pleasure,”24 they read. At one point, Minutemen sped through black neighborhoods tossing these pamphlets out the window.
Swift devotee and Minuteman acolyte Thomas Tarrants described the entire phenomenon thusly: “Part of the strategy was to create fear in the black community—but it was more important to produce racial polarization and eventual retaliation. This retaliation would then swell the ranks of whites who would be willing to condone or employ violence as a viable response to the racial problem . . . Our hope and dream was that a race war would come.”25
Ultimately killing Martin Luther King Jr. came to be seen by Samuel Bowers and certain of his associates as the one act that could indeed foment a national holy race war. For years King had been a target of these radicals; he would become the only target. Nearly every serious attempt to kill King from 1958 to 1967 involved Christian Identity zealots or groups who were led by them.
As early as 1958, Stoner had offered to “bring his boys from Atlanta” to Alabama to kill King for a “discounted rate” of $1,500. Stoner directed the offer to members of the United Klans of America, as part of a larger package of violent activity that included bombings targeting other Alabama civil rights activists. Stoner managed to carry out some of the ancillary attacks, but his more brazen plans were thwarted by authorities who knew about them in advance. Stoner was the target of an operation organized by Alabama law enforcement authorities, including arch-segregationist Bull Connor. Interesting that someone as bigoted and barbaric as Connor—he famously arranged with Klan members to let them violently beat the Freedom Riders at Birmingham bus terminals in 1961—would be far outside the mainstream Stoner when it came to violent extremism. In 1958, Connor arranged with a KKK member to coax Stoner into talking about potential acts of violence in Alabama. Prosecutors believed that the effort came too close to entrapment, and did not prosecute Stoner. Stoner did not get a chance to have “his boys” kill King, but as usual, he did not go to prison for his antics, either.26
In 1963, Alabama was home to two additional murder plots against Dr. King. In the early morning hours of May 12, 1963, in Birmingham, a bomb destroyed King’s room at the A. G. Gaston Motel. This came hours after another bomb detonated at the home of his brother, Rev. A. D. King, the night of May 11. The two men had been working with other civil rights leaders began to secure integrationist concessions from Birmingham’s white elites after weeks of protests. That both men survived the attacks can only be attributed to luck. The motel bombers, as King later noted, “placed [the explosives] as to kill or seriously wound anyone who might have been in Room 30—my room. Evidently the would-be assassins did not know I was in Atlanta that night.”27 No one was ever arrested, but internal police investigations show the FBI strongly suspected members of the NSRP, who had held a segregationist rally that night, of participating in the attack. The timing of the attack suggests an additional motive—inflaming the black community. King himself suggested this. “The bombing had been well-timed,” the civil rights leader asserted. “The bars in the Negro district close at midnight, and the bombs exploded just as some of Birmingham’s Saturday night drinkers came out of the bars. Thousands of Negroes poured into the streets.”28 If this was the goal, it had its intended effect. The coordinated bombings triggered the first major race riot in the history of Birmingham, one that almost forced President John F. Kennedy to use federal troops to quell it.
The second major riot occurred four months later, when members of a Klavern blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. The leaders of the United Klans of America, the nation’s largest Klan group, had recently shunned Eastview Klavern #13 for its connections to the over-the-top-violent NSRP, the church bombers associated with Fields and Stoner.29 No one would have expected King to be in the Birmingham church, but King had used the building as a headquarters for his May protest campaign. Rev. King acted as everyone would have predicted in the wake of the horrifying violence—he returned to Birmingham to deliver the girls’ eulogy. He also came, with other civil rights leaders, to help calm Birmingham as tensions remained high following the bombing and large-scale riots. Birmingham was a city on the brink of horrific urban combat, according to civil rights activist Rev. Ed King (no relation to Martin Luther King), who joined the push for nonviolence following the bombing. Ed King saw law enforcement officers with heavy-
caliber machine guns on the streets. He is convinced, to this day, that any additional rioting would have resulted in a large-scale bloodbath. “All it would have taken was a bottle breaking, sounding like a gun,” he said.30
This is likely what Christian Identity believers had intended when they spent the days following the bombing looking for an opportunity to shoot King with a high-powered rifle. The “honor” fell to Noah Carden, a member of the Mobile White Citizens Council and a Swift devotee who was once discharged from the military on suspicion he was psychotic. According to Sidney Barnes, whose description months later of the assassination plot was surreptitiously recorded by informant Willie Somersett, Carden could never get a clear shot on King, who was constantly surrounded by aides. Barnes also revealed that he, Carden, and three other Christian Identity radicals—William Potter Gale, Admiral John Crommelin, and Bob Smith—all met in Birmingham the day before the bombing of the church.31 None were Birmingham natives, and Gale came hundreds of miles from California. This raises the possibility that these men knew about the church bombing in advance. Many suspected Stoner helped mastermind the bombing; he enjoyed close relationships with all five men. Crommelin ran for political office, including, in 1960, vice president of the United States, under the banner of the NSRP. Had Carden succeeded in assassinating the leader of the civil rights movement on the heels of the murderous bombing, Ed King believes it would have triggered massive riots and violence not only in Birmingham, but across the South.32
Barnes and company continued to plot against Martin Luther King Jr.’s life in 1964, according to in
formation Barnes conveyed to Somersett and recorded on tape without his knowledge. Somersett even provided Barnes with a rifle for the task, one that Miami police had secretly marked. King’s unpredictable changes in itinerary continued to keep him alive.33
Records indicate Stoner joined a close friend of his, James Venable, a fellow attorney from Georgia and longtime leader of the oldest national Klan organization, in an attempt to kill King in 1965, one that also involved the goal of triggering race riots. The plot was exposed when a young radical, Daniel Wagner, got caught transporting explosives from Georgia to Ohio. Wagner told Columbus, Ohio, police—and later Congress—about a King assassination plan revealed to him by a bleach-blonde Klan empress, Eloise Witte, one the few female Klan leaders in the country. Witte, who ran a Midwest chapter of Venable’s National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, told Wagner that the Klan planned to gun down King and his family after King delivered a commencement speech at his wife Coretta’s alma mater, Antioch College in Ohio. The plot failed when Witte could not organize enough men in time to participate in the ambush, despite a $25,000 bounty offered by Venable’s Klan. A second witness, a young member of the NSRP, confirmed this account to Congress even as Witte, predictably, denied it. Such an egregious act of violence certainly would have triggered massive violence in Ohio, and possibly across the country.34 But Wagner added something else—the explosives he brought to Ohio, given to him by Venable’s Klansmen, were to be used to blow up buildings belonging to civil rights groups and to the Nation of Islam, a militant, black separatist group. The goal, Wagner said, was to ignite a race war.35
A second 1965 King assassination plot in Swift’s native state of California would have been just as if not more inflammatory had it succeeded. Police arrested a Swift acolyte, Keith Gilbert, with 1,400 pounds of dynamite; the intended target: the Palladium theater in Los Angeles, as the city honored King for recently winning the Nobel Peace Prize.36 In recent years, Gilbert has opened up about the plot, minimizing his own role (and his connection to Swift) but highlighting the part played by Dennis Mower, Swift’s chauffeur. Gilbert described being pressured into the Palladium bombing plot against his will by Christian Identity fanatic Mower. Gilbert even claims that he gave the anonymous tip to the police that led to his own arrest—a way of avoiding mass murder while also avoiding the wrath of Mower. Either way, killing King and hundreds of his supporters in one blast certainly would have triggered violent outrage.37
Because these plots routinely failed, they generally left little concrete evidence to back a prosecution for potential murder. Only Gilbert, who was caught red-handed with explosives, went to prison for his role in a King plot. The FBI, when it had jurisdiction to investigate these crimes, often risked exposing informants at a potential trial, with little or no guarantee that such a leap of faith would be rewarded with a prosecution. It was hard enough to convict someone in the South for actual acts of racial violence, much less potential acts of violence. In other instances the FBI failed to piece together the contours of the plots, questioning their very existence. This was true, notably, of the original plot involving McManaman and Sparks. More than anything, law enforcement agencies at all levels of government failed to see the ideological framework that connected these plots, the two degrees of separation, so to speak, from every serious MLK murder plot and Wesley Swift’s teachings. Christian Identity did not become a commonly understood phenomenon in counterterrorism circles for at least another decade, in part because Swift’s devotees were so good at blending in with more conventional white supremacist groups. No one was better at this game than Sam Bowers.
Bowers faced the same issues confronting other Christian Identity activists—the lack of enthusiasm from rank-and-file racists for anti-Jewish terrorism, the resistance to excessive violence in general, the lack of openness to Identity teachings. Bowers, like the senior members of the NSRP and the Minutemen, had to hide his extremist religious beliefs from his rank-and-file members. He did a good enough job of this that few scholars recognize the impact of Swift’s teachings on the leader of the White Knights of Mississippi. Bowers self-identified as a “warrior priest” in interviews he gave at the end of his life. He also described a spiritual moment in the 1950s, when, in grave condition from an automobile accident, a heavenly power “visited him” and convinced him to serve God. But Bowers’s idea of serving God may well have been influenced by his time in Southern California studying engineering at USC. Bowers attended the school after serving in the navy in World War II. He would have been in Southern California at exactly the moment that men like Swift began to systematize Christian Identity teachings.38
How he first became acquainted with Christian Identity is unknown. But no close student of Bowers’s career doubts his affinity for Swift by 1967. He discussed Swift’s sermons with newly arrived Tommy Tarrants, who idolized Swift, and with Burris Dunn, one of Bowers’s closest lieutenants. Dunn helped distribute Swift’s taped sermons, and his fanaticism for Swift ultimately drove away his wife and children. What even the most avid scholars of Bowers’s career, such as Charles Marsh, fail to recognize is that the Grand Wizard embraced Swift’s ideas from the moment he assumed leadership of the White Knights, in 1964. Dunn, for instance, was on Swift’s mailing list at least as of 1965, and no one who knew the pair would believe that Bowers followed Dunn’s lead rather than the other way around. Informants describe Bowers trying to convince his other Klan members to be an anti–“Jew Klan” rather than a solely anti–“N***R Klan” in 1964, but with little success. But the most obvious signs of Christian Identity influence come via Bowers’s own writings.
In the October 1964 Klan Ledger, the periodical Bowers wrote for the Ku Klux Klan, Bowers protested against the widespread FBI intrusion into Mississippi to investigate the Mississippi Burning murders. But in the back pages, literally in fine print, Bowers shifted from secular to religious writing. The biblical passages he cited include those that are almost never mentioned outside of Christian Identity polemics, even by conventional pastors who used the Bible to justify segregation. Bowers, predictably, railed against “today’s so-called Jews” who “persecute Christians, seeking to deceive, claiming Judea as their homeland and [that] they are ‘God’s Chosen’ . . . They ‘do Lie,’ for they are not Judeans, but Are the Synagogue of Satan!” He adds: “If a Jew is not capable of functioning as an individual, and must take part in Conspiracies to exist on this earth, that is his problem.” Passages also reference “Jew consulting anti-Christs” and assert that “Satan and the Anti-Christ stalk the land.”39
The early influence of Swift on Bowers helps explain why Bowers became obsessed with killing Mickey Schwerner, the Jewish activist who was among the three activists targeted by Bowers’s goons in Neshoba County. Schwerner’s enthusiasm for civil rights was enough to motivate the men, like Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, who arranged the Mississippi Burning murders. But Bowers chose to highlight something else after the three deaths. It was “the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew,” he gloated.
The Christian Identity component of Bowers’s thinking also explains the grand predictions he made on the eve of the killing and the actions he took immediately after. Recall that in a speech given two weeks before the Neshoba murders, Bowers prognosticated that soon-to-pass events in Mississippi would bring forth martial law, that they would create conditions for an internal rebellion in the state, and a cycle of violence involving white Southerners and black militants. Many see that speech as anticipating the violence that would greet the wave of student activists set to “invade” Mississippi during Freedom Summer. But through the lens of Christian Identity, the warning makes much more sense as a prediction of the beginnings of a race war, one that Bowers hoped to stoke with the Mississippi Burning murders. In killing whites as well as blacks, then carefully hiding their bodies, Bowers invited the very federal interference he railed against in his public speech. This was especially true as Bowers co
ntinued to arrange for violent acts for weeks as federal agents searched for the three missing activists. It is important to recognize that Bowers was exploring an assassination attempt on King, using criminals like Donald Sparks, in 1964. He spoke about targeting the leaders of the civil rights movement in the same speech in which he warned of the (supposedly) coming insurrection in Mississippi. Polls show that Bowers almost got his wish, with the majority of the country favoring placing Mississippi under martial law if the violence in Mississippi became more serious in the summer of 1964.40 Had the country witnessed the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., and the rioting it surely would have provoked, that easily would have qualified as “more serious.”
But Bowers could not publicly disclose his true intentions—to provoke federal intervention—to his audience of white Southerners raised for decades to resent federal interference during Reconstruction. Christian Identity beliefs did not hold sway with rank-and-file Klansmen who, if anything, wanted less federal intrusion in their state’s affairs. Bowers’s aide Delmar Dennis in fact described Bowers telling him privately that “the typical Mississippi redneck doesn’t have sense enough to know what he is doing . . . I have to use him for my own cause and direct his every action to fit my plan.”41
He also described that plan to Dennis:
Bowers outlined on a blackboard the overall strategy of which the White Knights were merely a part. He said he was trying to create a race war, and open violence on the part of white Mississippians against native Negro citizens and civil rights agitators. He predicted that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would be required to send troops into Mississippi to restore order. Martial law would be declared and the state would be under full dictatorial control from Washington. The excuse for the control would be the race war he was helping to create by engendering hatred among whites in the same manner as it was being fomented by leftist radicals among blacks.42
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