No right-thinking person who experienced the riots that followed the murders of little Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, and the other children could expect such an attack to do anything other than incite further violence. Klan terrorists often used conventional dynamite bombs to cause property damage and to scare targeted groups rather than to kill victims. This appears to have been the intended purpose of the bomb that exploded on September 15; an apparent problem with the triggering mechanism delayed the detonation, and thus the four girls died.26
But the shrapnel bombs used on September 25 had only one purpose: to maim and kill. The perpetrators had actually designed one of the two bombs for a delayed explosion. It appears that the bomb makers intended the first device to lure out spectators and law enforcement; the second explosion could then have killed dozens of police officers and citizens. It was a sheer stroke of luck that no one got injured in the Titusville bombing. If, as Phillip Maybry quoted Stoner as saying, the shrapnel bomb was our “baby,” what motive could explain such a brazen act of attempted terrorism?
The issue here again involves the differences between rank-and-file segregationists, even violent KKK members, and the men who believed in radical, Christian Identity theology. To the former, federal intervention was anathema to their customs and traditions going back to the era of Reconstruction. To the radical religious zealots, that same deep-rooted resentment among the general white population was exactly what stoked a violent response from bystanders at the University of Mississippi in 1962. The provocative riots that triggered the federal intervention in the first place—in Alabama and in Mississippi—developed only when the black community boiled over after major, provocative acts of violence. Thus, for the religious zealot, who as Tommy Tarrants revealed wanted to “polarize the races” in hopes of fomenting a race war, the shrapnel bomb, and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church itself, represented the best hope for accelerating the end-times. Wesley Swift pointed to this idea in his sermon “Armageddon: Local and Worldwide” in May 1963, saying:
I tell you that here in America we are on the edge of an unusual chain of events, and it may be that the sudden movement of your enemy may be your salvation. Someone said: “there may not be another election but there is going to be deliverance.” You are in one of the most unusual periods in the history of our nation. You are going to see brush fire wars which can break into the big ones and could start anytime.27
Any Identity believer observing the tinderbox that was Birmingham in 1963 could have guessed what would happen if someone attacked a target as honored in the black community as the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. After several months of bombings and bombing attempts, the city became known as Bombingham and the neighborhood that included the church was known as Dynamite Hill. The bombing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel room, which coincided with the attack on his brother’s home, on May 11, ignited the first major race riot in the history of the city. In early September, after several months of bombings and other acts of racial violence, President John F. Kennedy prepared for an armed intervention in the city. In just the period from September 1 to September 14, there were three bombings in Birmingham. All the ingredients were present for racial violence on a scale that would impress even Wesley Swift.
Yet the weight of the evidence suggests that the bomb that went off on September 15 was not intended to kill anyone. The reaction of the suspects after the fact certainly point to that. Hubert Page was furious that the four girls were killed. Robert Shelton wanted nothing to do with those associated with the bombing and may have used a source, Don Luna, to implicate the men to the FBI. But even if the five Swift followers could not have anticipated the killing of the four girls, they still could have known, through someone like Stoner, about the impending attack on the church. Their hope for racial violence and federal intervention on a grand scale would be in the local reaction to the bombing. In the perverted worldview of religious radicals like Swift, the unintended death of four girls presented a unique opportunity.
The riots that followed the bombing of the church on September 15 could actually have been much worse, with far more violence and casualties. The Reverend Ed King, a white minister who became a leading member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, described the tension in an interview with the author.
He went to Birmingham to help mourn the girls’ deaths and to lead protest marches against the violence. The activist became concerned when he went outside and noticed “whites with machine gun emplacements a block away from the church… . I realized some of them thought there would be a march or a demonstration.” No such event was planned. Then again, no marches had been planned following the funeral for Ed King’s close friend Medgar Evers, but chaos followed in Jackson when local police overreacted to peaceful protests by black Mississippians. In Birmingham, a few months later, thousands of mourners joined the family to pounce. In the marches that followed, Ed King saw moments when misunderstandings could have led to another disaster. In Jackson, “the police panicked … in Birmingham I realized the same thing could happen.” Only in Birmingham the police had “machine guns ready, and we could have a massacre… . All it would have taken was a bottle breaking that sounded like a gun.”28 He approached Diane Nash Bevel, a major civil rights activist, then married to one of Martin Luther King’s top lieutenants, James Bevel, with his fears. She patiently convinced the thousands of mourners to go home.
But if the five Swift followers who had visited Birmingham on the eve of the church bombing had had their way, a bloodbath would have been unavoidable. In his secretly taped conversations with Somersett, Sidney Barnes told the informant that the five men stayed in Birmingham to try to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. after he arrived to deliver the eulogy for the four girls. They followed King in Birmingham—with Noah Carden waiting to shoot the minister with a rifle—but they could not get close enough to take a clear shot.
One can imagine the impact that killing King would have had on a black population already stirring with anger over the murders of September 15. The attitude among America’s black community, according to Ed King, “was ‘there is nothing the white racist will not do.’ There is nothing Washington will do to protect us. They [the white supremacists] have killed these little girls. This wasn’t voter registration.” “If white police had killed more blacks at a funeral” following an uprising over the assassination of Martin Luther King, “I think there would have been riots in Jackson, in Atlanta, in New Orleans.”28
The most obvious interpretation of Barnes’s account is that the Swift followers came to Birmingham with foreknowledge of the church bombing and took advantage of an opportunity to piggyback on the bombing when the unanticipated carnage created horrible riots, bringing Martin Luther King Jr. from his home in Georgia back to Alabama. But it is also the case, as Ed King makes clear, that anyone who followed Martin Luther King’s activities in Birmingham would have anticipated that a bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church would draw him to the city. Either way, whether such an attack resulted in unexpected killings or not, the state of Alabama is very lucky that Barnes’s efforts to kill King failed. Even still, Barnes told Somersett that the assassination plot on King remained active for several more months, but the group never had an opportunity to strike again.
In fact, according to historian Neil Hamilton, killing Martin Luther King had been a major goal of Swift and Gale since they had founded the Christian Defense League in 1960. Multiple attempts on King’s life can be traced to followers of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. Stoner, for instance, offered a bounty on King’s life as early as 1958.
None were more determined to kill King than a new arrival to the white supremacist scene in Mississippi, Samuel Holloway Bowers. Bowers’s tenure as head of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, from 1964 to 1968, places him among the most violent sponsors of domestic terrorism the nation has ever known. Many are familiar with the most public act of violence—the murder
of three civil rights workers in June 1964, known to some as the Neshoba County murders and to others as the Mississippi Burning killings. Few, however, have looked deeply enough at the crime, or more particularly at Bowers, to see that that terrorist act was even darker in its objective than anyone had imagined.
5
THE BLOOD OF MARTYRS
the 1964 (NESHOBA COUNTY) MISSISSIPPI BURNING MURDERS
June 21, 1964. The three civil rights workers traveling the dirt roads in Neshoba County knew the dangers of driving at night—two whites, one black driver—in Sam Bowers’s Mississippi. Just two weeks earlier, at 9 PM on June 8, white vigilantes had forced three New York graduate school students over to the side of the road in nearby McComb County. When the students refused to exit the vehicle at gunpoint, the vigilantes beat the men with brass knuckles after breaking the windows of their car. Many believe the only thing that saved the graduate students’ lives was the likelihood that passing motorists would witness the crime.
When they left the Meridian, Mississippi, office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) on June 20, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white New Yorkers of Jewish descent, and James Chaney, black and Mississippi-born, told Sue Brown, the CORE chapter secretary, to start making calls if the three men did not return by 4 PM. The three men then began their dangerous mission: to investigate the burning of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, which had occurred five days earlier in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
The men reached and inspected the remains of the church. They interviewed three black parishioners who told them a harrowing story. According to the interviewees, on the evening of July 16, as many as thirty men surrounded and confronted several church members leaving Mount Zion. The mob beat several congregants and then set fire to the church. But the parishioners added something that must have greatly disturbed the trio: The mob demanded that the members of Mount Zion provide them with information on “the goatee” or “Jewboy.” The reference would have been clear: The attackers wanted Mickey Schwerner.1
Schwerner had established himself as a man of action since arriving with his wife, Rita, in February 1964. “The first white civil rights worker based outside of the capitol of Jackson,” he had “earned the enmity of the Klan by organizing a black boycott of a white-owned business and aggressively trying to register blacks in and around Meridian to vote,” according to law professor Douglas O. Linder.2 If he did not know earlier, Schwerner knew for certain on June 21, from the congregants at Mount Zion, that he now was a major target for local racists. No one knows if Schwerner realized what many historians now suspect: that the burning of Mount Zion was a trap, set by members and associates of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi with the hopes of luring Schwerner to his death.
What is clear is that the men took the less direct path back to Meridian, bypassing Highway 491, by which they had come to Mount Zion, instead choosing Highway 19, through the county seat of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Linder believes that this was the less dangerous route to the CORE chapter in Meridian, one less open to an ambush. They left at approximately 3 PM.
But the Klan’s plan of attack was unfortunately more elaborate than simply running a few men off the road in the off chance that they happened to pass a posse of Klan members. It is true that the unfortunate events that ended the three men’s lives may well have started as a case of mistaken identity. While passing the trio on the highway, Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price noticed a black man (Chaney) driving the prototypical CORE vehicle, a blue Ford station wagon. Price thought that Chaney was another target of interest, activist George Raymond, and radioed this into his headquarters. Price then gave chase and arrested the men just as they were about to pass Philadelphia’s city limits. Arrested on the trumped-up suspicion of having set the Mount Zion Church fire, the three civil rights workers were taken to the jail in Neshoba County, under the direction of Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, a member of the White Knights. But once it became clear that Schwerner was among the men in custody, the operation to kill him (and the others) went into effect. The accidental arrest by Price likely triggered what many experts believe was a general plan hatched weeks in advance to kill Schwerner.
The sheriff consulted with White Knight Kleagle Edgar Ray Killen and finalized the particulars of a murder conspiracy. According to Horace Doyle Barnett, a racist from Louisiana and an associate of Mississippi KKK members, calls were placed for those in the local area willing to help on “a job.” Barnett claims that he first discovered the particulars when he and his friend Jimmy Arledge visited a trailer park in Meridian. Edgar Ray Killen—known as Preacher Killen because he pastored at a number of small rural churches—told a crew of several men that “these three civil rights workers were going to be released from jail and that we were going to catch them and give them a whipping.”3 Foreshadowing something much more sinister, Killen then made sure that all the men present wore gloves. The men drove to Philadelphia in separate vehicles, arriving at approximately 9:30 PM.
At 10:30 PM Sheriff Rainey released the three civil rights workers. The trio again took Highway 19, but this time Deputy Sheriff Price tracked their movements in his patrol car. Price relayed their bearings to other patrolmen, who in turn told the convoys of Klansmen, two cars’ worth, to hustle after the civil rights workers. Once the bigots caught up in their vehicles, Price forced the blue station wagon to the side of Rock Cut Road. Striking the driver, Chaney, with a blackjack, he then stepped aside as the KKK members finished their operation. While six men, including law enforcement officers like Price, were involved in the ambush, Barnett’s description of the killing focuses on two individuals: Wayne Roberts, a twenty-six-year-old ex-marine and Meridian window salesman with a reputation for being “as mean as a junkyard dog,” and James Jordan, a motel clerk and illegal speakeasy operator.
Before I could get out of the car Wayne ran past my car to Price’s car, opened the left rear door, pulled Schwerner out of the car, spun him around so that Schwerner was standing on the left side of the road, with his back to the ditch and said “Are you that nigger lover” and Schwerner said “Sir, I know just how you feel.” Wayne had a pistol in his right hand, then shot Schwerner. Wayne then went back to Price’s car and got Goodman, took him to the left side of the road with Goodman facing the road, and shot Goodman.
When Wayne shot Schwerner, Wayne had his hand on Schwerner’s shoulder. When Wayne shot Goodman, Wayne was standing within reach of him. Schwerner fell to the left so that he was laying alongside the road. Goodman spun around and fell back toward the bank in back.
At this time Jim Jordan said “save one for me.” He then got out of Price’s car and got Chaney out. I remember Chaney backing up, facing the road, and standing on the bank on the other side of the ditch and Jordan stood in the middle of the road and shot him. I do not remember how many times Jordan shot. Jordan then said, “You didn’t leave me anything but a nigger, but at least I killed me a nigger.” The three civil rights workers were then put into the back of their 1963 Ford wagon.4
The perpetrators left the workers’ vehicle in the woods, singed from blue to black by fire, for other authorities to find. They buried the bodies of the three men in an earthen dam at the estate of Olan Burrage, known as Old Jolly Farm. The disappearance of two northern whites scandalized the nation and resulted in one of the largest federal investigations in history. The FBI would call the crime the Mississippi Burning murders (abbreviated as MIBURN), the name for which it has become famous thanks to a 1988 Hollywood movie of the same name. (We will alternately refer to them as the Neshoba murders.) In the forty-four days it took to finally find the bodies, Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. joined a chorus of segregationists in insisting that the three activists had staged the whole affair for the sake of publicity. But in Oxford, Ohio, where civil rights veterans were training hundreds of volunteers for the Mississippi Freedom Summer, where Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney had in fact been residing in the days before
reports of the Mount Zion Church arson drew them back to Mississippi, longtime activists knew the score right away. “People have been killed,” SNCC leader Bob Moses told the young idealists. “You can decide to go back home, and no one will look down on you for doing it.”5
If, as many believe, the goal of the Mississippi Burning murders was to halt the approach of Freedom Summer, set to begin in a matter of days, it did not work. Many of the volunteers bravely ventured forward to proceed with the plan, conceptualized in October 1963 by leaders of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella civil rights group that included organizations such as CORE, SNCC, and the SCLC. The thrust of Freedom Summer was to publicize the need for voting rights protections in the South and also to educate the people of Mississippi about the power that could come with such rights.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the U.S. Senate on June 19 promised the end of legal discrimination in the South. But President Lyndon Johnson removed voting rights provisions from the bill to guarantee its eventual passage. Although blacks enjoyed the franchise under the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, southern states still determined voting qualifications under the principle of federalism. They enacted a host of measures, from poll taxes to literacy tests, that effectively denied African Americans their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.
Even if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and various Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education, guaranteed some form of equality in theory, the lack of voting power made such prospects hollow. Blacks could not choose local officials to fund mostly black schools or to monitor efforts to integrate schools, hotels, or hospitals; they could not hold officials accountable. A major thrust of Freedom Summer was to make black citizens of Mississippi aware of the potential their votes could have in combination with the protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Veterans of the civil rights movement in COFO enlisted hundreds of volunteers from across the nation, including many middle-class whites like Goodman and Schwerner. If the activists could publicize to the nation that there was widespread demand for the right to vote, even in a state as poor as Mississippi, it would become a major impetus for a voting rights act to join the Civil Rights Act.
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