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

by Stuart Wexler

  Perhaps more than anything, the arrival of civil rights leaders from around the country, and the leadership of local activists, helped pacify the city. Notably, as he had after the murder of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Birmingham from his home in Atlanta to eulogize the four girls. This was not surprising, as Birmingham had been the major focus of King’s operations for the previous two years. King told the gathering of mourners:

  These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.

  And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity… . They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers… .

  The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city… . Indeed this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience… .

  And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair… . We must not become bitter nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.4

  The riots that initially plagued Birmingham following the bombing could have metastasized into total chaos but for the appeals of level-headed leaders like King, who reminded residents of the city of the power of nonviolence and compassion. These leaders were channeling the spirit of the Sunday school lesson that was never delivered that tragic Sunday morning, designed by a minister with the last name of Cross, about a “A Love That Forgives.”

  For some, the bombing also validated the sentiment, frequently cited by King, that the long “arc of the universe” ultimately “bends toward justice.” It took forty years, but three of the individuals responsible for the bombing went to prison for the crime. It required intense media pressure and dogged Alabama prosecutors to pry incriminating records from a reluctant FBI, but the system ultimately worked.

  Such a sentiment, while reassuring, is misplaced. Records suggest that the FBI is still concealing potentially important evidence in the case. For reasons that are still unclear, the FBI may well have protected the mastermind of the attack, a man deeply steeped in Christian Identity theology until the day he died: Jesse Benjamin Stoner. Such obstruction, however, as much sense as it made in 1963, can no longer be justified.

  The FBI routinely withheld material from local prosecutors in the 1960s, believing that they would compromise Bureau sources and methods for the sake of a state trial that was likely to be sabotaged by a racist police officer, a bigoted juror, or a segregationist judge. The conventional understanding of the FBI’s obstruction in the BAPBOMB case (the FBI’s code name for the bombing) says that, as his men failed to develop a federal case, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover decided that it would be best to maintain these sources—including violent Alabama racists who were turned into informants during the course of the investigation—for other purposes, rather than waste them on a doomed state prosecution. As it turned out, even after the prosecution of one bomber, Robert Chambliss, fifteen years after the fact, the FBI continued to withhold vital informant and wiretap information from Alabama prosecutors. Only in the 1990s was this evidence released, resulting in the convictions, in 2001, of Tommy Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry. Again, the FBI claimed that it was simply protecting living sources.5

  But additional, new information raises a different and more alarming possibility, one that is rare but unfortunately familiar in FBI crime fighting. This new information, developed by historian Gary May, suggests that an FBI informant inside the Alabama KKK, Gary Rowe, a man whose service as a source predated the Sixteenth Street church attack, may have been involved in the actual bombing. Although this obviously would have occurred without the approval of the FBI, it would have placed the Bureau in a position of having to undermine its own informant and expose its own poor judgment for the sake of resolving the BAPBOMB case. Unfortunately, Hoover was known to look past even murders committed by his informants if it meant protecting the image of the FBI.

  Yet another layer of obstruction may not only inhibit our understanding of the BAPBOMB case but also limit how we view the southern backlash against civil rights agitation as a whole. Most Americans are familiar with the types of individuals who were eventually convicted of the Birmingham church bombing—the racist vigilantes who wanted to protect “the southern way of life.” They are the thugs memorialized in pictures and films, beating the Freedom Riders with iron pipes in an Alabama bus station and terrorizing nonviolent college and high school students sitting at the Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. The violence in those cases seemed visceral, sudden, and reactionary. For that reason, the perpetrators were often easy to catch, even if they avoided conviction. The FBI managed to identify these types of individuals and their roles in the church attack within months of the September 15 bombing—although the Bureau withheld that information from local investigators for almost fifteen years.

  Less easy to identify, or certainly to prosecute, was a higher caste of racists, known to historians of “the southern counterrevolution” but less obvious to the layperson. These were the members of “respectable” segregationist groups like the White Citizens Councils, which outwardly sought legal remedies to resist integration. These individuals even avoided the coarse language of the “lower-class” rebels, couching their opposition to legal integration in the language of anticommunism. Yet some of these red-baiters openly associated with the rebels who blew up churches and burned crosses—always taking care to have plausible deniability in the event of a crime. Even with the late-coming FBI information, Attorney General Baxley was able only to cast aspersions on such people in the press. But the best histories of the case, such as Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home,6 routinely question whether these types of individuals knew about or instigated the Birmingham bombing or whether they served as accessories-after-the-fact. New information, developed here, suggests an even more nefarious connection between these individuals and the Birmingham bombing.

  These red-baiters may have been a bridge between the racist rebels and the religious radicals discussed throughout this book. For the men and women in this latter category, the goal of violence went way beyond simply preserving Jim Crow. They were as dedicated in their religious zealotry as any member of Al Qaeda. As the 1960s proceeded, their radical interpretation of Christianity became very influential at the highest levels of a number of major racist organizations, blurring distinctions between the three castes of racists—southern nationalist foot soldiers, “respectable” anticommunist segregationists, and religious radicals—and obscuring the motivations behind some of the more well-known acts of terrorism during the era. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church may have been the first such fatal act of religious terrorism.

  If a group of outside religious radicals or even elite Birmingham racists wanted to instigate or exploit an attack on a major center for civil rights activity, while keeping a safe legal distance between themselves and the bombing, they had their perfect outlet in the collection of rebels who eventually did the deed. The men of Eastview Klavern 13 were violent, reckless, and desperate, a collection of outcasts whose fondness for violence placed them on the fringes of even the United Klans of America (UKA), the nation’s largest KKK organization. Known as the Cahaba River Group or the Cahaba Boys, because they met secretly underneath a bridge near Alabama’s longest free-flowing river, they were still attempting to get an official charter from the UKA as of September 1963. One can easily imagine someone suggesting the Birmingham Baptist church bombing to these ruffians as a ticket to respectability, or a loose-lipped Cahaba Boy boasting of his plans for such an attack to the kind of
men who would want to exploit the information. But if a renewed look at the records suggests that additional individuals expected or condoned the attack on September 15, it does nothing to exonerate the men who committed the actual crime. While overlooked leads point to the possibility that a handful of other individuals, some of whom are still living, may have assisted in the attack, what is astonishingly clear is that the FBI identified the men directly responsible for the bombing fourteen years before any of the conspirators went to prison.

  The first man to eventually go to prison, Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, obtained the dynamite from Leon Negron’s store in Blossburg, Alabama. Negron stocked dynamite and blasting caps for the surrounding mining community, but due to his political views, he was not averse to selling his dynamite for alternative purposes. On September 4, 1963, Chambliss and two fellow Cahaba Boys, Charles Cagle and John Wesley Hall (called Nigger Hall by Eastview Klan members because of his dark complexion), arranged to hide the cache for later purposes. A fifty-nine-year-old truck driver who licked his false teeth clean in public, Chambliss was not the kind of redneck that Blake Shelton celebrates in a country music song or that Jeff Foxworthy jokes about on a comedy record. Birmingham police connected Chambliss to several racial bombings as far back as 1947.7 Days before the crime, Chambliss boasted about an impending attack to a family member, Mary Frances Cunningham, a threat she conveyed to a member of the sheriff’s office. The deputy sheriff later claimed that he withheld the story from law enforcement because he did not want to expose the fact that he was having an affair with Cunningham.

  By then, Levi “Quick Draw” Yarbrough, another Cahaba Boy, had recovered the dynamite stash and brought the explosives to fellow Klansman Troy Ingram. Yarbrough worked as an employee for the state of Alabama. His idea of fun, according to witnesses, included shooting near the feet of black prisoners who labored on state construction projects.

  Questions remain as to whether Ingram or Chambliss constructed the actual dynamite bomb used to destroy the Birmingham Baptist church, supposedly a more sophisticated device than those normally used in similar attacks. Ingram, a forty-nine-year-old automobile mechanic, engaged in a perverse competition with Chambliss over who was the better bomb maker.8

  The FBI considered the possibility that neither man was the bomb maker or that they had help from others with demolitions training. Levi Yarbrough’s brother-in-law received such training in the military, and the FBI considered him a person of interest in several bombings, both before and after September 15. When questioned, the brother-in-law minimized his connections to members of Eastview Klavern 13, such as Charles Cagle, despite testimony suggesting a deeper association.9 His name was listed among the original persons of interest in the BAPBOMB case files. Twenty-two years of age at the time, the brother-in-law was one of the few individuals with connections to the Cahaba Boys who comes close to the age profile of one of two white men, described by witnesses as approximately nineteen years old, seen walking away in the immediate aftermath of the church explosion. When shown photographs, witnesses identified Ingram as resembling the older of the two men. This older man also had a limp, and Ingram recently had been treated for an injured foot.

  Witnesses also identified pictures of other Eastview members, including Chambliss, as resembling white men in suspicious cars with radio antennae flying Confederate flags in the early hours before the bombing. One witness described Chambliss in the backseat of a 1957 blue-on-white Chevy with two other men, parked by a funeral home near the church. This same witness, Kirthus Glenn, positively identified a car in a picture as belonging to Cahaba Boy Tommy Blanton. Here the FBI’s decision to withhold wiretap material from Attorney General Baxley risked becoming a public travesty of justice. Glenn, a major asset in helping prosecutors convict Chambliss in 1977, had died by the time new prosecutors were able to bring Blanton to trial, in 2001. Lucky for the FBI and its reputation, a jury looked past the somewhat ambiguous but incriminating statements recorded by a bug planted under Blanton’s kitchen sink and convicted Blanton without Glenn’s testimony.

  Not all of the suspicious individuals reported by witnesses were directly associated with Eastview Klavern 13. One man identified as being near the scene was Howard Thurston Edwards, a KKK and NSRP member from Irondale, Alabama. Edwards can be seen in photographs of the 1961 attack on Freedom Riders at the Birmingham bus station brandishing a metal pipe, which he used to beat the civil rights activists. In this case, the identification of Edwards is important because the informant knew Edwards from years before and saw him frequently agitating at rallies against integration. The FBI lost interest in Edwards when it could not develop any additional evidence connecting him to the crime or to members of the Cahaba River Group. But as author Diane McWhorter noted, the Birmingham police considered Edwards to be a prime suspect in the crime. In Carry Me Home, McWhorter suggests that the Edwards lead distracted the police, pushing them in the direction of another radical segregationist group, the NSRP, and diverting them from the guilty party, the Cahaba Boys. McWhorter referred to the NSRP lead as a wild goose chase.

  But McWhorter documented a close relationship between key members of Eastview Klavern 13 and the NSRP. Robert Chambliss and Tommy Blanton in particular consistently spent time with NSRP members such as Ed Fields in the months leading up to the September 15 attack. “The Klan wasn’t violent enough for them,” asserted Bob Eddy, Baxley’s chief investigator, referring to the Cahaba Boys. “They were responsible for firebombings, floggings, dynamiting people’s homes.”10 In fact, UKA leader Robert Shelton expelled Blanton and Cherry from the group in part because “he did not like them hanging out so much with the National States Rights Party crowd.”11

  One NSRP member who enjoyed a particularly close relationship with Chambliss was Bob Gafford. Gafford owned a successful automotive repair shop that still exists today, and he later became an Alabama state legislator. Among the elite caste of segregationists in Alabama, Gafford and his wife, Florence, helped form the latest “respectable” pro-segregation group in Alabama, the United Americans for Conservative Government (UACG), in 1963. Couching their opposition to segregation in the language of anticommunism rather than blatant bigotry, the leaders of the UACG grew the organization to include an estimated sixty-three hundred members. But most historians recognize the group for what it was: a front for the KKK.

  Gafford lived next to Chambliss and even employed the violent racist in his auto repair shop from time to time. In an event he never explained, Gafford called both Chambliss and Cherry in the early evening of September 14, 1963—the day before the bombing. Gafford then proceeded with his wife and two married friends, Bill and Mary Lou Holt, to a bowling alley. The Holts were no ordinary choice for a double date. Bill Holt, a second-generation pipe fitter, was viewed as an “elder statesmen” inside the KKK, according to McWhorter, and had served as a leading member of Eastview Klavern 13 until back problems had forced him to lessen his commitment. He also knew Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry. His wife had the type of looks and engaging personality that drew the attention of many men. Because of her charms, the UACG sent Mary Lou to Washington, D.C., to lobby against integration. But she also enjoyed a darker reputation; “her name was often mentioned … as associated with the radical fringe of Birmingham vigilantism.”12

  More relevantly, evidence suggests that Bill Holt was among many members of the KKK who likely had foreknowledge of the church bombing. Historian Gary May notes that many of those with ties to Eastview Klavern 13 managed to have verifiable alibis on the evening of September 14, when, per the official narrative, a handful of Cahaba Boys finalized their plans for the following morning. Neglecting to mention Gafford, May notes how Bob Chambliss, “not a popular fellow with Eastview men … nonetheless received an unusual amount of phone calls” from key figures in the Klan, including Ross Keith, Hubert Page, Gene Reeves, Tommy Blanton, and Frank Cherry. Subsequently, these callers “went out on the town, creating alibis for each other.” A f
ew “drank at a Birmingham bar,” while others found their way to the bowling alley with the Gaffords and the Holts. Exalted Cyclops Robert Thomas and Eastview’s Grand Titan Hubert Page (and his wife) joined the Gaffords and the Holts that night.13

  According to McWhorter, Page (who eventually married Mary Lou Holt after she divorced Bill Holt) expected the bombing to occur between 10 PM and 2 AM that evening and became incensed when the bomb detonated in the morning, killing the four girls. Page later joined Gafford and the head of the UACG, Bill Morgan, at what McWhorter calls “the kiss of death meeting” at the Cahaba River bridge on the Thursday after the church bombing. There, according to an informant, the elder statesmen berated Chambliss and the others for the negative publicity surrounding the accidental murders of the four girls. “If any one of you ever talks, it will be the kiss of death for you,” one of the attendees insisted.14

  One person who talked a lot to authorities about the bombing was Gary Rowe, another member of the Eastview group. The FBI recruited Rowe, a “barroom brawler with a police record” to infiltrate the Alabama KKK in 1960. Rowe, May argues, considered himself to be a “redneck James Bond” and engaged in acts of violence to solidify his bona fides among his fellow KKK members. Rowe joined the attack on the Freedom Riders in 1961. Most famously, in March 1965, the FBI learned that Rowe had ridden in a car with three fellow Klansmen, some of whom had sprayed gunfire into the vehicle of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights activist working on the Selma voting campaign, killing her. Although the FBI warned Rowe against participating in criminal activities, it nonetheless looked the other way at his transgressions, placing more value in the information he could provide than in holding him accountable for his wrongdoings.

  But the information Rowe provided to the FBI about the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing puzzles historians like May and McWhorter. Notably, Rowe implicated those with indirect associations to the crime—those like Holt, Page, and Thomas—early on in the investigation. But Rowe failed to finger those directly involved in the attack (Cherry, Blanton, and Chambliss) until December 1964, long after the FBI had established their culpability.