Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  the white knights of the ku klux klan of mississippi (wkkkk): The most violent Klan group in America, led by Samuel H. Bowers, its Imperial Wizard, the White Knights was formed in December 1963 with members from the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (out of Louisiana) and others in Mississippi. These men were disaffected with the lackluster response to integration in the South, and pushed for greater and bolder acts of violence. At its peak from 1964 to 1965, the White Knights membership may have had reached ten thousand, though by 1968 membership was less than a few hundred. The FBI credits the group with over three hundred separate acts of violence; most notably, the White Knights are credited with killing three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi (the Mississippi Burning murders), killing voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer in 1966, and a wave of bombings against black and Jewish targets from the fall of 1967 through the summer of 1968. Its most notable members, beyond Bowers, included Danny Joe and Joe Denver Hawkins, Burris Dunn, Julius Harper, Alton Wayne and Raymond Roberts, Byron de la Beckwith, Deavours Nix, and L. E. Matthews. Kathy Ainsworth and Thomas Tarrants may have been informal members of the group, as some documents describe them as members of the “Swift Underground” who performed terrorist acts on behalf of the White Knights.

  the national states rights party (nsrp): The NSPR was the overt, political face of white supremacy in the 1960s, even as it covertly recruited and inspired groups and individuals to perform acts of extreme violence. Formed by J. B. Stoner and Edward Fields in 1958, the group ran candidates for office, including vice president of the United States, although they never received even a small fraction of the national vote. On the other hand, the NSRP was actively involved in some of the most violent acts of resistance to integration in America, acts so extreme that they even offended local Klan groups, such as the United Klans of America in Alabama. The NSRP had its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and then in Birmingham, Alabama, and it focused its activities in the Southeast. Its major publication, The Thunderbolt, was a major source of information for racists across the nation.

  the national knights of the ku klux klan (nkkkk): This was, in the 1960s, the second-largest Klan organization in the United States, after the United Klans of America (UKA), in terms of membership. Headquartered in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the National Knights was led by Imperial Wizard James Venable. The NKKKK had affiliated groups and Klaverns across the country, including in Ohio and California. Notably, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (CKKKK), formed in 1966 and led by Wesley Swift minister William V. Fowler, were an offshoot of the NKKKK. James Venable spoke to the California Knights on several occasions in 1967.

  the “traveling criminals” or “crossroaders” or “dixie mafia”: These were loosely knit groups of outlaws willing to commit crimes, especially robbery and theft, across long distances. More of a phenomenon than an official organization, career criminals would join forces in decentralized gangs and work across state lines for major jobs. Primarily engaged in bootlegging across state lines, as some states remained “dry” after Prohibition was repealed in 1934, these criminals expanded their activities in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. This became more and more common as increasingly available phone communication and interstate travel, by plane or over the new interstate highway system, made cross-state activity more possible. The “traveling criminals” were especially active in two regions: the Southeast (stretching from the Mississippi Delta to Florida) and the Great Plains. Not to be confused with the Sicilian Mafia, these criminals lacked a hierarchy and were far less structured than conventional, organized crime syndicates. They were often, at the same time, more bold than the Sicilian Mafia, targeting even law enforcement officials (famously Sheriff Buford Pusser in Tennessee) and federal judges. By the 1970s, this loose-knit coalition was one of the major forces for criminal activity in the United States, with some crediting its members as having committed more actual killings than the Sicilian Mafia. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, in response to this growing criminal gang, law enforcement began using the shorthand “Dixie Mafia,” even though both terms are misnomers.

  white citizens councils: These groups were formed, major city by major city, in the 1950s after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court set the stage for ending segregation; their goal was to formally undermine integration. Often comprised of prominent business and civic leaders, they used their influence and resources to outwardly oppose the civil rights movement in a more “respectable” and legal way than that of the Ku Klux Klan. However, many White Citizens Council members were directly and indirectly tied to more violent groups, such as the NSRP and the KKK, even if those connections were often informal and covert. Joseph Milteer claimed to be an informal member of the Atlanta White Citizens Council, and Noah Jefferson Carden was a member of the Mobile White Citizens Council. Both men were connected with purported plots to kill Martin Luther King Jr.

  americans for the preservation of the white race (apwr): Formed in the mid-1960s in Mississippi, this group was similar to the White Citizens Councils, in providing an outwardly “civil” response when undermining integration efforts. The group would, for instance, raise money for the defense funds for racists accused of hate crimes or publish newsletters opposing the integration of schools. However, the FBI recognized the APWR as a front for the White Knights, and its most prominent members and leaders were almost all, to a person, followers of Sam Bowers.

  Timeline

  1946The Church of Jesus Christ Christian is founded by former Klan organizer Rev. Wesley Swift in Lancaster, California.

  1957–58Wave of bombings of Jewish synagogues across the Southeast; J. B. Stoner is suspected of planning the bombings, but he is never convicted for them.

  1958The National States Rights Party (NSRP) is formed in Tennessee; J. B. Stoner is its legal counsel. In Alabama, Stoner offers to plot the murder of several civil rights leaders, including Rev. King, for money.

  September 1962Riots at the University of Mississippi over the admission of its first black student, James Meredith, galvanize militant white supremacists across America.

  May 1963 King’s room at the Gaston Motel in Birmingham is destroyed by a bomb; almost simultaneously, the home of King’s brother, A. D. King, is destroyed by a bomb.

  June 1963 Assassination of Mississippi NAACP activist Medgar Evers by white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith; riots in Jackson, Mississippi, erupt following Evers’s funeral.

  September 1963Former admiral John Crommelin, Noah Carden, Sidney Crockett Barnes, and former colonel William Potter Gale, all Swift followers, reportedly plot a King assassination in Birmingham, Alabama. Bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by Klansmen kills four young girls; riots follow.

  December 1963The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi is formed by disaffected Klan members in Louisiana and Mississippi; Sam Bowers is named their Imperial Wizard (leader).

  1964Reports say Carden, Crommelin, and Barnes continue to plot the murder of King. Reports say the White Knights are pursuing a contract-for-hire murder plot against King involving a criminal killer.

  May 1964In St. Augustine, Florida, the cottage where King was supposed to have been staying is the target of a machine-gun attack.

  July 1964The first of several major urban race riots breaks out in New York City. Sam Bowers inspires the murder of three civil rights activists in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in what will be known as the Mississippi Burning killings.

  1965The FBI receives informant reports that J. B. Stoner and National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard James Venable are plotting to murder Rev. King. Informant Delmar Dennis informs the FBI of a White Knights plot to assassinate King in Selma, Alabama.

  February 1965Swift follower Keith Gilbert plots to kill Rev. King in Los Angeles.

  June 1965National Knights–connected racist Daniel Wagner says he was rec
ruited into a failed plot to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Ohio.

  August 1965Urban race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California, receive national attention.

  January 1966Voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer dies in Mississippi as a result of a firebombing/shooting attack plotted by the White Knights and Sam Bowers.

  June 1966On orders of Sam Bowers, innocent farmer Ben Chester White is killed in hopes of luring Rev. King into an ambush in Mississippi.

  April 1967James Earl Ray escapes from the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri.

  May 1967Soon-to-be released inmate Donald James Nissen is approached by a fellow prisoner with a $100,000 bounty offer from the White Knights on the life of Rev. King. James Earl Ray, now an escaped fugitive, visits St. Louis and finds work in Illinois.

  June 1967Donald Nissen, released from Leavenworth Penitentiary, reveals the $100,000 plot to the FBI. Start of the “Long Hot Summer”: urban race riots erupt across America including in Atlanta, Georgia; Boston, Massachusetts; and Tampa, Florida. James Earl Ray flees to Canada in hopes of eventually escaping North America. Nissen is asked by a Klan-connected acquaintance to deliver a package to Jackson, Mississippi; he later learns the package contained money for the King bounty.

  July 1967Race riots continue across the country.

  August 1967Failing to escape North America, James Earl Ray returns to the United States, specifically to Birmingham, Alabama. He assumes the false identity of Eric Starvo Galt and purchases a white Ford Mustang.

  September 1967Despite an FBI crackdown on its operations, the White Knights begin a months-long wave of bombings against black and Jewish targets; the bombings are later attributed to Thomas Albert Tarrants III.

  October 1967James Earl Ray moves from Birmingham, Alabama, to Mexico. Sam Bowers and six others are convicted for their roles in the Mississippi Burning murders; Bowers is sentenced to ten years but is released on appeal bond.

  November 1967James Earl Ray moves from Mexico to Los Angeles, California.

  December 1967James Earl Ray takes a trip to New Orleans, Louisiana, after visiting the California headquarters of segregationist third-party candidate and former Alabama governor George Wallace. Donald Nissen violates his parole and flees Atlanta, Georgia, after being threatened by a stranger for talking to authorities. Sam Bowers and Tommy Tarrants are arrested in Mississippi for reckless driving; Bowers is acquitted and Tarrants avoids trial.

  January 1968James Earl Ray moves to a run-down part of Los Angeles and stays in the St. Francis Hotel.

  February 1968James Earl Ray pursues the possibility of plastic surgery.

  March 1968 According to the St. Francis Hotel manager, Allan O. Thompson, a mysterious visitor named James C. Hardin, who earlier had called James Earl Ray, visits Ray. Ray files a change-of-address card indicating he will move to Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown.

  March 17, 1968Per reporter Jack Nelson, Tommy Tarrants visits the Reverend Wesley Swift in California to get a rifle to kill King; Tarrants denies this in 2007.

  March 18, 1968MLK speaks at a rally for the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike.

  March 22, 1968James Earl Ray shows up in Selma, Alabama, the same day King has a speaking engagement. Thomas Albert Tarrants III, the self-described chief terrorist for the White Knights, jumps bond and goes underground to wage guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government.

  March 24, 1968James Earl Ray arrives in Atlanta and rents a room in a rooming house on Peachtree Street.

  March 28, 1968Ray visits Birmingham, Alabama, and purchases a rifle; on this same day, King arrives to lead the Memphis sanitation workers in a protest march; the march turns violent, and King returns to Atlanta.

  March 29, 1968Rev. King announces he will return to Memphis the following week. Sam Bowers places a phone call to Birmingham, Alabama. In Birmingham, James Earl Ray purchases a .243 rifle.

  March 30, 1968James Earl Ray exchanges the .243 for a better, more expensive gun, the Remington Gamemaster .30-06 at the supposed suggestion of his “brother-in-law.”

  April 1, 1968According to records and testimony, James Earl Ray returns to Atlanta, Georgia; Ray denies this.

  April 2, 1968James Earl Ray drives to Memphis, Tennessee.

  April 3, 1968King returns to Memphis to lead another protest march.

  April 4, 1968At 6:01 p.m., outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, a rifle bullet fatally wounds Martin Luther King Jr.

  notes

  chapter 1: the warning

  1. Donald Nissen, in discussion with authors, November 9, 2009. The authors have had repeated conversations and interviews with Nissen over a period of years.

  2.FBI, “Alleged Offer of $100,000 by White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Jackson, Mississippi, to Anyone Who Kills Martin Luther King.” Main King File, file 100-1006671, section 73, at 207-210. In the authors’ first contact interview, Nissen confirmed every detail in the June 1967 report without access to the document and without prompting by the authors—with one exception. The document claims that Nissen and McManaman were acquainted prior to going to prison. The FBI does not record and transcribe interviews with witnesses and does not directly quote them in reports. Instead, an agent reconstructs the interview from notes. The authors’ experience, after reading thousands of such records in more than one case, is that the majority of details in an FBI report can be corroborated but agents are apt to misreport minor details. Rather than simply take Nissen’s word for it, the authors compared Nissen’s biography and prison/criminal records with McManaman’s. There does not appear to be any overlap in their histories whereby the two could have developed a relationship. On this front, the FBI report appears to be wrong.

  3.FBI, “Airtel from SAC Kansas City to Director, Re: Alleged Offer of $100,000 by White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Jackson, Mississippi, to Anyone Who Kills Martin Luther King; Serial: 157-472” (July 21, 1967). File obtained by the authors via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

  4.FBI, “Airtel from SA Charles Kokes to SAC, Jackson, Re: Threat to Kill Martin Luther King 3/24/65; Serial: 157-2832” (April 6, 1965), and FBI, “Airtel from SAC, Kansas City to SAC, Jackson, Subject: MURKIN; Serial: 44-1917-SUB-E-6711.” Two examples of this are the stories of Jack Maynard Ray and Carlos Lee Billings. In 1965, Ray, a former convict, told the FBI that a member of the Durham Citizens Council in North Carolina, George McLamb, approached him with a $5,000 offer to kill either James Farmer, the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, or Martin Luther King Jr. Ray, who has no relationship to James Earl Ray, said the goal was to kill King in Alabama or Mississippi, where, McLamb asserted, Ray could avoid prosecution. McLamb predictably denied this. Independently, and in that same year, Carlos Lee Billings, another individual with a criminal background, told the FBI that two men involved him in a $50,000 bounty plot to kill King during the Selma voting protests. The purported attempt fell through, and Billings, who reasserted his claims years later, did not know either man’s last name, leaving the FBI with little to work with in confirming the claim. It is of course possible that one or both men made up the story—which is the point: without the ability to corroborate the claims, the FBI could not advance these and similar leads. It is worth noting that both plots, like the Tampa plot discussed later in this chapter, originated in the Southeast.

  5. FBI, “Airmail from SAC Tampa to Director” (July 4, 1974), MURKIN 44-38861, and Janet Upshaw, in discussion with the authors, December 15, 2010.

  6.FBI, “Memo from Rosen to Deloach” (August 23, 1968), King Assassination FBI Central Headquarters File, MURKIN 44-38861-512, section 69, available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, accessed September 15, 2010, www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?mode=search

  Result&absPageId=113185.

  7.FBI, “Airtel from SAC Oklahoma City to Directo
r re: Donald Eugene Sparks . . .” (April 24, 1968), King Assassination FBI Central Headquarters File, MURKIN 44-38861-2926; and FBI, “Airtel from Tampa to Director re: Donald Eugene Sparks . . .” (April 18, 1968), King Assassination FBI Central Headquarters File, MURKIN 44-38861-1331.

  8.Bernie Ward, Kansas Intelligence Report: The Dixie Mafia (Topeka, KS: The Office of Attorney General Vern Miller, 1974).

  9.“Fourth Suspected Robbery Gang Member Held,” Gadsden Times, July 6, 1966.

  10.Dee Cordry, “Dixie Mafia, Part 1,” The State Crime Bureau Journal (blog), October 11, 2009, statecrimebureau.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/dixie-mafia-part-1.

  11.Faith Serafin, Wicked Phenix City (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014), 107, 131.

  12.“Biloxi’s Tale of Murder, Extortion and Racy Photos,” New York Times, December 29, 1991.

  13.Joe Shuras, post #27599 on “Buford Prusser,” Topix, Selmer Forum, December

  20, 2013, www.topix.com/forum/city/selmer-tn/T0CBKHSBE7IASV4NG/p635;

  December 20, 2013, post #27599 by Veteran Cop-Joe Shuras.

  14.Ward, Kansas Intelligence Report.

  15.FBI, “Airtel from SAC Oklahoma City to Director re: Donald Eugene Sparks . . .” (April 24, 1968), King Assassination FBI Central Headquarters File, MURKIN 44-38861-2926; and FBI, “Airtel from Tampa to Director re: Donald Eugene Sparks . . .” (April 18, 1968), King Assassination FBI Central Headquarters File, MURKIN 44-38861-1331.

  16.Michael Newton, The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 199.

  17.Nissen, in discussion with the authors, November 9, 2009.

  18.Paul Hendrickson, “From the Fires of Hate, an Ember of Hope,” Washington Post, July 22, 1998, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/dahmer.htm.