chapter 2: the sponsors
1.Hendrickson, “From the Fires of Hate.”
2.Jack Nelson, Terror in the Night: The Klan’s Campaign against the Jews (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 53–54, 103–104, 123.
3.Douglas O. Linder, “Mississippi Burning Trial (1967).” Famous Trials, accessed July 30, 2017, famous-trials.com/mississippi-burningtrial.
4.Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 50–53.
5.Hendrickson, “From the Fires of Hate.”
6.Activities of the Ku Klux Klan Organizations in the United States: Hearings Before the Comm. on Un-American Activities, 89th Cong. 2936 (February 1 and 7–11, 1966), available online at the Internet Archive, www.archive.org/stream
/activitiesofkukl05unit/activitiesofkukl05unit_djvu.txt.
7.Buckles made this claim while attempting to collect money to pay the ex-
convict, who we believe to be Sparks. He told the audience that the “job would cost $1,200 with $400 upfront and $800 when the job was completed.” One might assume that this is a different plot from the Sparks bounty because the dollar amounts are different. But it may be that they were attempting to raise part of the bounty when the rest of the money may have been coming from other sources, including the treasury of the group. An amount of $13,000 would be awfully high to Klan members when the White Knights had yet to prove themselves in any act of major violence. The Evers murder occurred before the group officially formed, and the Mississippi Burning murders were still two weeks away from the time of Buckles statement. The references to the Evers assassination and to the ex-
convict are too reminiscent of the Sparks bounty to dismiss as a coincidence.
8.William H. McIlhany, Klandestine: The Untold Story of Delmar Dennis and His Role in the FBI’s War against the Ku Klux Klan (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975), 54.
9.Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 414, 498.
10.Gerald McKnight, The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 93.
11.Branch, Pillar of Fire, 414.
12.Jerry Mitchell, “KKK Killed Ben Chester White, Hoping to Lure and Kill MLK,” Clarion-Ledger, June 10, 2014, www.clarionledger.com/story/journeyto
justice/2014/06/10/ben-chester-white-kkk-mlk/102775517.
13.Ibid.
14.Stuart Wexler, America’s Secret Jihad (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2015), 143-45. This section, from “Bowers remained . . .” to “. . . White’s homicide in Natchez” is taken almost verbatim, from Wexler’s book.
15.Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 64–66.
16.Ibid.
17.Ibid.
18.Rubie Jenkins, in discussion with the authors, March 18, 2010. Jenkins was elderly at the time of our conversation, but he was sharp. Jenkins was able, without prompting, to identify McManaman as a “redneck from Kansas.” He acknowledged that McManaman was “in our gang,” referring to his group with Sparks. He denied knowing anything about the King assassination. We do not have any reason to believe Jenkins was ever in the loop from the available evidence.
19.“Pardon Recalls Famed Case Here,” Great Bend Daily Tribune, August 23, 1957.
20.Leroy B. McManaman, Appellant, v. United States of America. 327 F.2d 21 (10th Cir. January 28, 1964).
21.FBI, “Re: Alleged Offer of $100,000 by the WKKKKOM to Anyone Who Kills Martin Luther King Jr. . . .” (July 24, 1967), Jackson Field Office File 157-7990. We obtained these files via the FOIA. They contain a number of key reports, including the prison records on Nissen and McManaman. These records confirm they worked at the same shoe factory. They confirm McManaman’s desire to marry Sybil Eure. They also include a handful of informant reports, in which the FBI asked informants about a $100,000 bounty offer. These are notable for a few reasons. For one thing, they asked only a handful of informants, when the record indicates that they had dozens of them. Secondly, while none of the informants directly heard of a bounty, one informant said he heard that the White Knights were considering putting out flyers offering a $100,000 bounty on King’s life. There is no evidence that any such flyers were ever printed. But this suggests that the White Knights had an expectation of having a large sum of money even when they supposedly were losing funds paying for legal defenses.
22.Ibid.
23.Ibid.
24.Nelson, Terror in the Night, 143–45.
25.FBI, “Sidney Crockette Barnes” (November 30, 1971), summary file, at 13. File obtained by the authors via FOIA.
chapter 3: the motive
1.FBI, “Summary Report of SA Samuel Jennings, White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” FBI Jackson Field Office File 157-63, bureau file 157-1552, (February 24, 1969). Danny Joe Hawkins is also described as being a member of an “underground hit squad.”
2.Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 48–55.
3.Ibid., 23–28.
4.Ibid., 171–77.
5.Ibid., 104–11, 240.
6.Chester Quarles, Christian Identity: The Aryan American Bloodline Religion (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004), 180.
7.Wesley Swift, “Zero Hour, 2-4-62” (sermon), February 4, 1962, Dr. Wesley Swift Library, transcript, swift.christogenea.org/articles/ws1962.
8.Wright Thompson, “The Ghosts of Mississippi,” ESPN: Outside the Lines, accessed April 16, 2015, sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=mississippi62.
9.Wesley Swift, “As in the Days of Noah, 9-30-62” (sermon), September 30, 1962, Dr. Wesley Swift Library, transcript, swift.christogenea.org/articles/days-
noah-9-30-62.
10.Nelson, Terror in the Night.
11.“States Rights,” OurCampaigns.com, accessed July 28, 2017, www.ourcam
paigns.com/PartyDetail.html?PartyID=45.
12.Comm. on Un-American Activities, Para-Military Organizations in California White Extremist Organizations, Part II: National States’ Rights Party The Present-Day Ku Klux Klan Movement, H.R. Rep., 90th Cong. 1st Sess. 63 (December 11, 1967).
13.Patsy Sims, The Klan, 2nd ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 104.
14.Wexler, America’s Secret Jihad, 1–13.
15.David Boylan, “A League of Their Own: A Look Inside the Christian Defense League,” Cuban Information Archives, last modified March 17, 2006, accessed September 12, 2010, cuban-exile.com/doc_026-050/doc0046.html.
16.J. Harry Jones, The Minutemen (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 191.
17.James Aho, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 57.
18.Wikipedia, s.v. “Kenneth Goff,” accessed August 3, 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki
/Kenneth_Goff.
19.Eric Norden, “The Paramilitary Right,” Playboy 16, no. 6 (1969), available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, accessed April 16, 2015, jfk
.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/M%20Disk
/Minutemen/Item%20006.pdf.
20.Boylan, “A League of Their Own.”
21.Wesley Swift, “Confusion Throughout the Land (10-9-67)” (sermon), October 9, 1967, Dr. Wesley Swift Library, transcript, swift.christogenea.org/articles
/confusion-throughout-land-10-9-67.
22.Sims, The Klan, 135.
23.Norden, “The Paramilitary Right.”
24.Ibid.
25.Thomas A. Tarrants, The Conversion of a Klansman: The Story of a Former Ku Klux Klan Terrorist (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 50.
26.Diane McWhorter, Carry Me
Home: Birmingham, Alabama; The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 114–15.
27.Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Penguin, 2000), 96.
28.Ibid.
29.McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 341, 484, 495.
30.Ed King, in discussion with Stuart Wexler, September 25, 2014.
31.FBI, “Airtel from SAC Miami to FBI Director re: BAPBOMB, Sidney Crockette Barnes a.k.a. Racial Matters” (March 12, 1964), FBI file. The file contains two FBI follow-up interviews with Barnes pertaining to the 1963–64 reports. Barnes told the agents that he felt the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing had been done by “niggers,” and that he had no personal knowledge of it, although if he had, he would never give it to government agents. He stated he had been playing golf at a local resort, with one of the other suspects (Noah Carden), on the date of the bombing. A separate report, from an FBI informant, reveals the informant’s conversations with Barnes after the FBI interviews in which Barnes discussed how he had misdirected the FBI and his concern that the FBI apparently had identified or would shortly identify the men behind the bombing because they already knew that Gale and Carden had been in Birmingham. Barnes also noted that when Carden was arrested on bootlegging charges, one of a number of weapons taken into custody actually belonged to William Potter Gale of California; Carden was holding it for him at his home in Alabama. Carden’s name will come up again in this book, associated with the Swift network and its members in North Carolina.
The informant reports also note a discussion in which Barnes states that because the primary target (designated as “Coon”) had not shown up in Mobile, the point man from Alabama was unable to execute the plan. Barnes also stated that the FBI had way too much information about their plans for targeted Negro leaders and they were going to have to alter their plans.
32.Ed King, in discussion with Stuart Wexler, September 25, 2014.
33.FBI, “Airtel from SAC Miami to FBI Director re: BAPBOMB, Sidney Crockette Barnes a.k.a. Racial Matters” (March 12, 1964), FBI file.
34.Activities of the Ku Klux Klan Organizations in the United States: Hearings Before the Comm. on Un-American Activities, 89th Cong. 3428, 3441–42 (February 1, 7–11, 1966) (testimony of Daniel Wagner), available online at the Internet Archive, www.archive.org/stream/activitiesofkukl04unit/activitiesofkukl04unit_djvu
.txt. While on the surface the purported assassination scheme seems fanciful—involving the murder of not only Dr. King but also the president of the United States and others—it does seem clear that at least Wagner was serious about the effort. Making the matter more confusing, and perhaps even more bizarre, is that the scheme included, among Witte’s intended victims, her husband and NKKKK higher-up William Hugh Morris. Witte apparently wanted to shift allegiances to the Dixie Knights of the KKK and take the rest of the Ohio Klans (from the NKKKK) with her; killing Morris was part of this plan.
35.Ibid.
36.“The News of the Day,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1964.
37.Keith Gilbert, email to authors, June 4, 2016.
38.Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 54–66.
39.“The Klan Ledger,” Candy Brown Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society: Freedom Summer Digital Collection, accessed April 16, 2015, cdm15932.contentdm
.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2 /id/34854.
40.Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 72.
41.McIlhany, Klandestine, 54.
42.Ibid.
43.Wesley Swift, “Confirmed of God In Christ, 2-6-67” (sermon), transcript, Dr. Wesley Swift Library, February 6, 1967, swift.christogenea.org/articles
/confirmed-god-christ-2-6-67.
44.Neil Hamilton, Militias in America: A Reference Book (Santa Barbara: ABCCliO, 1996), 63.
chapter 4: the target
1.Large portions of this the text in this chapter and in the book as a whole have been taken verbatim from Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, The Awful Grace of God (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2013) and Stuart Wexler, America’s Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2015). The former is the original source for Killing King and the latter includes several chapters devoted to the relevant topic.
2.Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream Speech” (speech), August 28, 1963, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., transcript, www.americanrhetoric.com
/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.
3.Frank Newport, “Martin Luther King Jr.: Revered More After Death Than Before,” Gallup, January 16, 2006, www.gallup.com/poll/20920/martin-luther-king-jr-revered-more-after-death-than-before.aspx.
4.David Bernstein, “The Longest March,” Chicago Magazine, July 25, 2016, www
.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2016/Martin-Luther-King-
Chicago-Freedom-Movement.
5.Martin Luther King Jr., “Nobel Lecture: The Quest for Peace and Justice” (speech), December 11, 1964, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, transcript and Adobe Flash audio, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964
/king-lecture.html.
6.Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots” (speech), November 10, 1963, King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan, Michigan, teachingamerican
history.org/library/document/message-to-grassroots.
7.“1964: Harlem Riots Flare Anew; 2 Negroes Shot,” New York Herald Tribune (European Edition), July 21, 1964, iht-retrospective.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07
/20/1964-harlem-riots-flare-anew-2-negroes-shot.
8.“WSB-TV newsfilm clip of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking about recent race riots in New York State as well as the 1964 presidential election, New York, New York, 1964 July 27,” WSB-TV newsfilm collection, reel 1188, 00:00/05:28, Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, the University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, as presented in the Digital Library of Georgia, available online at the Civil Rights Digital Library, crdl.usg.edu
/export/html/ugabma/wsbn/crdl_ugabma_wsbn_46952.html?Welcome.
9.Mitchell Lansberg and Valery Reitman, “From the Archives: Watts Riots, 40 Years Later,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2005, www.latimes.com/local/la-me-watts-riots-40-years-later-20050811-htmlstory.html.
10.Martin Luther King Jr., “MLK Speaking to the People of Watts” (speech), August 19, 1965, Los Angeles, transcript, www.thekingcenter.org/archive
/document/mlk-speaks-people-watts#.
11.Ibid.
12.Jim Vertuno, “LBJ Tapes Show MLK Feared ‘Full Scale’ Race War,” Associated Press, April 11, 2002, www.myplainview.com/news/article/LBJ-tapes-show-MLK-feared-full-scale-race-war-8891725.php.
13.William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo, “The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots in American Cities: Evidence from Property Values,” National Bureau of Economic Research 10493 (May 2004); 22, Table 1.
14.Black Panther Party, “The Ten-Point Program,” October 15, 1966, available online at the Marxist History Archive: History, www.marxists.org/history/usa
/workers/black-panthers/1966/10/15.htm.
15.William M. King, “What Do We Want?” Vietnam Generation Journal, 4, no. 3–4 (November 1992), availabe online at The Sixties Project, accessed June 11, 2017, www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Narrative/King_What_
We_Want.html.
16.“Meet the Press: Civil Rights Special Featuring Black Leaders,” Meet the Press, New York, NY: NBC Universal, August 21, 1966, transcript available online at NBC Learn, archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/flatview?cuecard=48789.
17.Steve Chapman, “Political Violence Is as American as Apple Pie,” Chicago Tribune, June 16, 2017, www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-
political-violence-america-history-perspec-chapman-20170616-column.html.
18.Martin Luther King Jr.
, “It Is Not Enough to Condemn Black Power . . .” October 1966, available online at the King Center, accessed June 11, 2017, www
.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/it-not-enough-condemn-black-power#.
19.Allen D. Grimshaw, A Social History of Racial Violence (New Brunswick, NJ: 1969), 318, note 3. This poll focused on major cities. Polls of the entire country suggested less support for riots and violence in general.
20.Adam Fletcher Sasse, “A History of the North Omaha Riots,” North Omaha History, accessed June 11, 2017, northomahahistory.com/2013/07/19/a-history-of-the-north-omaha-riots. Sasse includes a picture of a newspaper from the time period and this is the source for the direct quote. He does not provide a full enough picture to identify the original newspaper.
21.“Civil Disorder Chronology,” s.v. “1967.” In CQ Almanac 2010, 66th ed., edited by Jan Austin. Washington, D.C.: CQ-Roll Call Group, 2011. library.cqpress
.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal67-1312893#H2_7.
22.Kirsten West Savali, “Martin Luther King Jr.: ‘My Dream Has Turned into a Nightmare,’” The Root, January 16, 2017, www.theroot.com/dr-martin-luther-
king-jr-my-dream-has-turned-into-a-1791257458.
23.“Civil Disorder Chronology.”
24.Max Herman, “Newark (New Jersey) Riot of 1967.” In The Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, vol. 2 edited by Walter C. Rucker and James N. Upton (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), 452.
25.Sandra West, “Negro Reporter Tells Detroit Riot Story,” The Times-News, July 24, 1967, news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19670724&id=T59
PAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ayQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6942,1623294&hl=en. The passages from “In Newark . . .” to “. . . merchandise” were taken verbatim from Wexler, America’s Secret Jihad, 131–32.
26.Collins and Margo, “The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots.”
27.Marquis Childs, “Guns Sales Mount as Tension Grows in This Strange Moment in History,” The Morning Record, August 15, 1967, news.google.com
/newspapers?nid=2512&dat=19670815&id=WiVIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Xg
ANAAAAIBAJ&pg=775,5019331&hl=en.
28.Martin Luther King Jr., “The Other America” (speech), March 14, 1968, Grosse Pointe High School, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, transcript, www
Killing King Page 27