America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States

by Stuart Wexler

But if fomenting a race war was part of the CI vision, African Americans were not playing along. Time and time again, from the mid-1950s and the Montgomery Bus Boycott through the Freedom Rides in 1961, white racists attacked and harassed African Americans in the most blatant ways possible. But time and time again, the violence and intimidation failed, not only at deterring the civil rights movement but also at engendering a violent response. However easy it was to inflame a white audience, these supremacists had yet to inflame the black community.

  If blacks continued to maintain disciplined nonviolence in the face of ongoing attacks, the hopes of creating a cycle of violence that would escalate into a holy race war would remain empty. Events in the spring and summer of 1963, much like the events at Ole Miss in 1962, may have served as yet another cosmic sign that Armageddon was soon approaching.

  On May 5, 1963, Swift delivered another sermon, “Armageddon—Local and Worldwide.” Swift announced:

  I want you to know that the battle of Armageddon is a worldwide struggle by the powers to overthrow God’s Kingdom. I want you to know that the battle of Armageddon has already been decided although the actual battle has not been launched in its full tempo.14

  He echoed all his familiar motifs. For example, the Jewish-led communist conspiracy had led President Kennedy to appease Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev several months before in the Cuban Missile Crisis. What’s more, according to Swift, the communists, far from removing their missiles per a secret agreement, were only reinforcing them. Communists were also plotting to hijack America’s public education system. A Jewish attorney general in Swift’s native state of California, Stanley Mosk, was persecuting Swift’s fellow extremists. And with an eye toward recent news, the “gyprocrat” (a Swift term for a Jewish-controlled hypocrite) Martin Luther King Jr. had “stirred up” the people of Alabama.

  King probably would not have disputed this charge. Together with other leaders, such as the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, King had launched a major offensive to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama. Weeks of protests received national attention, especially when King himself was jailed in Birmingham, where he penned his famous letter to sympathetic clergy who were nonetheless critical of the strategy of civil disobedience. He wrote, “I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”15 Until then, local authorities had largely been successful in containing civil rights protests.

  Upon King’s release that April, his advisors suggested something bold: using middle and high school–aged children to protest discrimination. On May 2, 1963, just three days before Swift’s sermon, more than one thousand students cut school and marched from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to the Birmingham Public Library, ostensibly to highlight the library’s policies of discrimination. The young protestors were met by law enforcement under the direction of Birmingham’s racist police commissioner Bull Connor, whose men proceeded to use hoses, German shepherds, and clubs on the nonviolent students. Local white supremacists were not happy when the negative publicity surrounding the event shamed Birmingham’s white establishment into a tentative deal aimed at desegregation.

  On May 11, 1963, one day after the deal was made, bombs went off at the A.G. Gaston Motel (where Martin Luther King stayed while organizing the Birmingham protests) and at the Birmingham home of the minister’s younger brother, A.D. King (also a major player in civil rights activism). No one was injured, mostly because the targets happened to be late returning from a planning meeting. Still, the bombings triggered the first-ever race riot in the history of Birmingham. Newspapers described a city “under siege.”16 Nearly fifty police officers were injured in a riot that included some twenty-five hundred people. President Kennedy had to amass troops in the surrounding area, but luckily for the president, the situation calmed down in a few days.

  No one was ever prosecuted and convicted for the bombing, although police reports seen by the author suggest that the attack was made by Birmingham KKK members with the possible support of the NSRP. But who plotted the attacks may be less important than what they meant to figures like Wesley Swift, J.B. Stoner, or Sam Bowers. In a May 13, 1963, sermon, Swift directly referenced the riots (conveniently avoiding mention of the bombing that precipitated them). In a speech called “Evidence of Divine Assistance,” Swift began, “As we open this service tonight, the federal government is moving. And on orders from the Kennedy Administration, they started flying in troops into McClelland field next to Montgomery, Alabama.” He continued, “I consider that the President of these United States, at the present time, with his present advisors, and the Attorney General of these United States, are the greatest danger for the destruction of our society as anyone on Mr. Khrushchev’s general staff.” Calling the developments in Alabama a communist plot and Martin Luther King Jr. a “fat headed demagogue of the negroes,” Swift also accused King of being a communist tool. Then he asserted,

  I am well aware that we are moving into the stages of Armageddon… . And I want you to know that being Christian Americans you have the right to defend yourself, your country and your faith. We are the majority, and we are going to keep it that way… . Do not ever think that you can save America without direct action. Someone said, “Yes, but Christians do not take direct action.” Don’t you believe this. For Christ is stepping into this situation with the Sword of Judgment in HIS hand, and with direct action. And it will continue until the blood flows to the horses’ bits. And there may be the greatest deliverance that you ever saw… . I point this out to you tonight, that these signs of riots and distress, this racial upheaval, are all signs of the climax of an age. When you see these things come to pass, then look up. Remember the prophet Joel said: “When they call on ME, they shall be delivered.”—Every last one whose name was written in the book, before the foundation of this world. Not taken out of the world, but empowered in it.

  Many people are praying to be taken out of the world. Sometimes I wish they would. I think the most dangerous people we have are those who do not want to stand up for victory with God.17

  Those who wanted to “stand up for victory with God” presumably included Byron de la Beckwith. Born in California in 1920, Beckwith moved to the Mississippi Delta as a young boy. He grew into an outspoken critic of desegregation during the 1950s and eventually became an investigator for the Mississippi White Citizens Council. With groups in most states, these councils were supposedly white-collar manifestations of southern resistance to the civil rights movement, in contrast to the blue-collar Ku Klux Klan, with the former supposedly shunning violence in favor of legal obstruction. That being said, many scholars now recognize that White Citizens Councils worked behind the scenes with KKK groups to accomplish the same ends. It is difficult to say with whom Beckwith was working in June 1963, as the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, under Bowers’s leadership, had yet to fully form.

  On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), returned home late from his office in Jackson, Mississippi. Recently Evers had appeared on television to call for greater integration, something that certainly would have enraged white supremacists.

  Evers, carrying T-shirts that read “End Jim Crow Now” from his car, moved toward his front door. His wife, Myrlie, was still awake with their young children. She had allowed them stay up to hear President John F. Kennedy deliver a landmark television address, publicly placing the administration squarely behind men like Evers in their push for civil rights. One chronicler, John C. Henegan, described the tragedy that unfolded:

  A single rifle shot hit Evers in the back. The sniper’s bullet came out Evers’ chest, shattered the living room window and venetian blinds, blasted through the living room wall, and ended its parabola of death in the Evers�
�� kitchen, where the police later recovered the bullet. The full length of Evers’ body fell along the concrete driveway, and he began hemorrhaging massively. His wife … hearing the rifle shot and shattering of glass … came rushing out of the house, kneeling down to comfort him as she cried to the gathering neighbors to call for an ambulance. Evers died shortly after arriving at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. His last words were, “Turn me loose.”18

  As one might expect, major civil rights figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., came to mourn Evers. But even King’s presence, following the funeral, could not contain the anger of black Mississippians. After the funeral and an organized protest march, rioting broke out in downtown Jackson, with throngs of angry black students gathering, throwing rocks at law enforcement, and demanding, “We want the murderer” and “Freedom! Freedom.” Law enforcement gathered in a phalanx to put down the rioters. A courageous Justice Department lawyer, John Doar, moved to the front between both parties. Invoking the memory of Medgar Evers, he managed to get the crowd to disperse, preventing what likely would have been a major calamity.

  It was thirty years before Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of murdering Medgar Evers. He avoided conviction from two all-white juries in the 1960s but did serve time in the early 1970s for a separate offense—an attempt to bomb the offices of a Jewish attorney in New Orleans. Before going to prison for that offense, Beckwith claimed that members of a satanic conspiracy framed him for the bombing attempt. Years later he would formally declare himself to be a member of the Phineas Priesthood, a Christian Identity offshoot movement.

  No one knows what influence Christian Identity ideas had on Beckwith in 1963. But the Reverend Wesley Swift was clearly paying attention to the attack and the subsequent riots. On June 23, in a sermon entitled “The Strategy of the False Prophet,” Swift asserted,

  A Negro by the name of Evers, was shot back in Mississippi and they are searching for the White man who shot him. They are calling for the blood of the White man who shot him… . I do not buy anything that would embrace the administration for it would be covered up. Today, you are faced with the fact that this racial crisis is hanging like a sword over the heads of our people… .

  The anti-Christ has captured the Negroes and are using them, for the powers of World Jewry have enmeshed all of the forces of the world against the White race. But the great judgments of God are going to move against it. And remember that God has an appointment with your race. This, my friends, is one of the most important things that you can know and understand. God calls on you to resist. And I challenge every White Christian man to be prepared to defend White Christian womanhood and to resist the powers of darkness. If there is a riot on one end of town and a fire on the other, then White men better be looking for that block that they are moving on. And when these Negroes move on that block to kill and destroy, don’t spare a one.19

  Throughout 1963, Swift, who was known to reference astrology as well as the Bible, warned his audience that a major crisis was coming. He predicted that the growing domestic unrest would become so serious that the U.S. government, under the influence of “World Jewry,” would use the disorder as a pretense to invite the United Nations into America as some kind of domestic peacekeeping force. Of course, this would really be a plot on behalf of the Antichrist. With the lessons of Oxford, Birmingham, and Jackson fresh in his mind and in the minds of his congregation, Swift was confident enough to offer his followers a clear time period for this upcoming conflagration: September 1963.

  4

  THE DESECRATED SANCTUARY

  the 1963 SIXTEENTH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH BOMBING

  On September 14, 1963, five very dangerous men met in Birmingham, Alabama.

  Traveling farthest was Colonel William Potter Gale, former chief aide and consultant on guerrilla warfare to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines. By 1963 Gale was the paramilitary commander and cofounder of one of the most outspoken white supremacist organizations in his home state of California, the Christian Defense League.

  Joining him was former admiral John Crommelin, a naval hero during World War II, who would soon plot a coup d’état against the American government with fellow senior military veterans. Crommelin, who came to Birmingham from his home near Montgomery, Alabama, by 1963 had already run repeatedly for public office, most recently as a 1962 candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama under the National States Rights Party.

  Three men from Mobile also made the journey. Noah Jefferson (Jeff) Carden, described in military records as having “psychopathic tendencies” and suspected of bombings in his former home state of Florida, joined the two former military officers. So did fellow white supremacist Bob Smith, who was then mentoring a Mobile high school student, Tommy Tarrants, who in a few years would become the chief terrorist for the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. Tarrants did not make the trip, but another one of his mentors became the most important source on the mysterious gathering.

  In interviews with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jack Nelson in 1991, Tarrants described a common house painter and notorious white supremacist named Sidney Crockett Barnes as the most violent person he had ever known. Barnes, like Smith, was in the process of moving from Florida to Alabama, fearful that law enforcement would become aware of his connections to the wave of anti-integration terrorism then plaguing the Sunshine State.

  All five men who met that day in Birmingham—Gale, Crommelin, Carden, Smith, and Barnes—were identified in FBI documents as loyal followers of the Reverend Wesley Swift. All were either on Swift’s mailing list for tapes or were ordained ministers in the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. During Crommelin’s last Senate campaign, Swift himself had joined four other Christian Identity ministers, including Gordon Winrod, the official pastor for the NSRP, in campaigning for the former admiral.

  It is through Barnes, though, that we know the details of the September meeting in Birmingham. In March 1964, Barnes described the gathering to a friend, Willie Somersett, who was secretly taping their conversation as a Miami police informant. Somersett described additional conversations, which were not taped, relating to the outcome of that meeting as well.

  According to Barnes’s taped conversation, Gale had met with segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace in the summer of 1963 with a plan to stymie the increasingly successful movement to integrate Alabama. But Wallace had rejected Gale’s plan as too radical. Everything that had transpired in places like Birmingham since that time had convinced the five men that Wallace—the man who once defiantly proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—was becoming soft. Barnes told Somersett that in response, he and his associates decided to take measures that would both deal a blow to the civil rights movement and embarrass the populist governor. If the following day’s events were connected with the September 14 meeting, the horrible atrocity did more than just deliver a blow to the psyche of Birmingham’s black community; it shocked the conscience of the entire nation.1

  United Press International described the dynamite blast that “ripped” through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the Sunday morning of September 15, 1963, injuring “dozens of persons, and at least 20 were hurt badly enough to have hospital treatment.” In the immediate aftermath, “the survivors, their faces dripping blood from the glass that flew out of the church’s stained glass windows, staggered around the two-story brick and stone building in a cloud of white dust raised by the deafening explosion.”2 Four girls did not survive the attack. The coroner’s report detailed the horror:

  NAME: Addie Mae Collins

  DEATH WAS CAUSED BY: Multiple Fractures, Lacerations of Head and Back (Chest)

  AGE IN YEARS LAST BIRTHDAY: 14

  NAME: Carol Robertson

  DEATH WAS CAUSED BY: Fractured Skull and Concussion

  AGE IN YEARS LAST BIRTHDAY: 14

  NAME: Cynthia Wesley

  DEATH WAS CAUSED BY: Compound Fractures of the Head and Chest

 
; AGE IN YEARS LAST BIRTHDAY: 14

  NAME: Denise McNair

  DEATH WAS CAUSED BY: Fractured Skull and Concussion

  AGE IN YEARS LAST BIRTHDAY: 11

  DESCRIBE HOW INJURIES OCCURRED: Dynamite Blast—Bomb

  The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church remains a metaphor for the tragic sacrifice and principled persistence that marked the entire civil rights movement. That preceding May, children had left the middle-class church and marched onto the streets of Birmingham, eliciting a wave of violent police retaliation that shamed the Magic City into desegregating many of its public and private facilities. Just four months later, the martyrdom of four girls in that same but broken building shamed a lethargic Congress into a renewed focus on legislation that would, over time, desegregate the rest of the nation. But in the immediate wake of the bombing, it seemed at times as if the city itself could come undone.

  UPI described the riots that followed the bombing as a “reign of violence and terror.” It added:

  It took police two hours to disperse the crowd of 2,000 hysterical Negroes who poured out of their homes… . Shootings and stonings broke out spasmodically through the city, continuing through the afternoon and into the night… . At least five fires were reported. Police shot and killed a Negro boy stoning white persons’ cars. A 13-year-old Negro riding a bicycle outside the city was ambushed and killed.3

  Tensions remained high as President John F. Kennedy decided how to handle the trouble. On the one hand, the situation seemed too much for the Birmingham Police Department, the Alabama State Highway Patrol, and the Alabama National Guard to handle. On the other hand, Kennedy feared that federal intervention might inflame the situation further or give Alabama’s racist, rabble-rouser governor, George Wallace, the kind of public attention he coveted. Kennedy sent two personal representatives to the city to negotiate a truce between civil rights leaders and Birmingham’s white establishment.