But the white power structure of the South recognized that black voting rights posed an even greater threat than civil rights to the system of white supremacy. The very officials who benefited from white-only voting in parts of the South that included high concentrations of blacks stood to lose their offices in a fair election. This group included mayors, state legislators, local sheriffs, prosecutors, and judges. The law enforcement officers had a powerful arrow in their quivers, however: absent access to voter registration, blacks could not serve on juries. Potential jurors are selected from voter rolls. It may not be surprising, then, that in places like Jackson, Mississippi, or Selma, Alabama, the most hostile and violent opposition to voting rights often came not only from the KKK but from law enforcement—people like Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. If the law enforcement officers themselves were not members of the KKK (a phenomenon pervasive in many southern towns), they offered tacit approval for the KKK to victimize anyone of color hoping to vote. Part of Freedom Summer, in fact, would include the Freedom Vote—a voter registration campaign to bypass racist registrars and to create provisional ballots for blacks to cast in upcoming statewide elections. This parallel apparatus attempted to allow Mississippi’s black population to vote with less risk of violence and intimidation.
Basic opposition to voting rights for blacks and to what southern nationalists referred to as “outside agitation” by northerners likely motivated the men who arrested, followed, and ambushed the three civil rights workers. Nothing in the public record suggests that men like Rainey, Price, Roberts, or Jordan had any connections to, much less awareness of, Christian Identity theology. Yet nothing suggests that the men who bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church the year before were anything other than southern nationalists and bigots either. But the men who killed Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney did not do so impulsively. They were under orders. And to understand just how insidious the ideology of Christian Identity is, to see how it likely tainted some of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in American history, one must go beyond the men who follow orders to those who instigate and exploit these events. One must look at people like Samuel Holloway Bowers.
Bowers, the first Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi (WKKKKOM) and the mastermind behind the murder of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, fifty years ago, did not fit the caricature of a backward racist. Educated as an engineer at the University of Southern California and at Tulane University (he did not complete the degree), he was described by associates as an ideologically driven strategist.
“He is very intelligent. I have no question about that,” Thomas Tarrants, once the self-described chief terrorist for Bowers, told journalist Patsy Sims for her book The Klan. “And I believe he was like I was, indoctrinated, brainwashed… . Absorbed into an ideology that took on the awe of a holy cause and blinded his mind to everything else. I think Sam believes what he is doing is right and has the sanction of God.”6
Tarrants later renounced racism and is currently an ordained evangelical minister. But at one time he saw himself as occupying the same unique space as Bowers in the counterrevolution against integration and desegregation: that of a holy warrior. As Bowers described it to theologian Charles Marsh in 1994:
There are two really powerful figures in the world: the priest and the preacher. I think I came here as a priest, though not a preacher. A priest is interested in visible, public power relations; this is what makes him powerful as a warrior. A preacher is an evangelist; he will tell people what to do. But the priest will arrange the means and operations to implement this into concrete action. When the priest sees the heretic, he can do only one thing: he eliminates him.7
Scholars have been confused by Bowers’s protestations that religion drove his activities. Religion, to many historians, was simply a cover for white supremacists of all stripes to retroactively justify their racial animus—epitomized by the ritual burning of the cross. Despite this mind-set, Marsh chose to view Bowers through the prism of mainstream Christianity. Marsh recognized religion as a motivating force behind Bowers’s activities. For Bowers, anyone who accepted communism—which for him included almost anyone in the civil rights movement—had embraced a godless ideology and relinquished God’s grace. Consequently, Bowers used creative interpretations and rationalizations of the Bible to justify his militant actions. In this rendering, Bowers is still a reactionary, vigilante racist, but one who attempts to sincerely reconcile his actions with his conventional Christian faith.
But new research suggests that religion not only drove Bowers’s violent activities but also influenced his tactics in ways that were opaque not simply to outside observers but even to rank-and-file members within the WKKKKOM, the group Bowers led from 1964 through 1968. Bowers made a point of hiding his true motivations, according to Delmar Dennis, a high-ranking WKKKKOM member who became the FBI’s most important informant inside the group. “The typical Mississippi redneck doesn’t have sense enough to know what he is doing,” Dennis described Bowers as saying to him privately. “I have to use him for my own cause and direct his every action to fit my plan.”8
The historical record now makes it clear that Bowers’s goal was to incite a holy race war. Marsh and other experts on Bowers recognize that as of 1967, Bowers had embraced the radical interpretation of Christianity espoused by the Christian Identity movement, which devalued people of color as subhuman and saw Jews as satanic conspirators against Anglo-Saxon whites. What many have failed to see was that, in the hands of a militant like Bowers, this theology became the driving force behind his violent strategy and tactics. The record indicates that Bowers likely embraced this theology early in his tenure as the head of the WKKKKOM, possibly before he became its leader. Evidence suggests that Bowers likely planned the Neshoba County murders with this religious worldview as his guide. Viewed through the lens of religious terrorism, the murders on the night of June 21, 1964, of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney become even more dark and twisted than they appeared at the time. Rather than simply trying to thwart the Freedom Summer set to begin shortly after the three civil rights activists disappeared, Bowers’s plans appear to have been more ominous and far reaching.
There is little doubt that the religious dimensions to Bowers’s racism began before he became a Grand Wizard. Born in New Orleans in 1924, Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr. told Marsh that he developed his interest in religion during World War II. But it was in 1955, when he was disillusioned to the point of near suicide, that Bowers experienced a life-changing spiritual event. According to Marsh:
On a drive along a two-lane highway on a late summer afternoon in south Mississippi, contemplating suicide and equipped for the task, Bowers felt suddenly transported by a power greater than he had ever before experienced. In a moment of mystical intensity, God spoke to him… . “The living God made himself real to me even when I did not deserve it.”9
This religious impulse would manifest itself in the way Bowers ran the WKKKKOM. He opened every meeting with a prayer and was always seen with a Bible. Even as the group he commanded engaged in a bonanza of violence—including, per Marsh, “nine murders, seventy-five bombings of black churches, and three hundred assaults, bombings, and beatings”—Bowers believed that “a Solemn, determined Spirit of Christian Reverence must be stimulated in all members” of the WKKKKOM. When he was finally convicted, three decades late, for the murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer, Bowers’s defense lawyers relied on witnesses who pointed to Bowers’s service as a Sunday school teacher in the 1990s in hopes of bolstering Bowers’s character in the opinion of the jury. And there were a lot of “character flaws” to overcome. In 1966 Bowers arranged for Dahmer’s home to be firebombed, almost killing Dahmer’s wife and children; the voting rights activist died from smoke inhalation and burns he incurred while laying down cover fire as his family escaped the residence.
But what seems like a fundamental contradiction to anyone famil
iar with the nonviolent teachings of Jesus in the New Testament was, to Bowers, something consistent with the worldview of a rapidly growing and militant Christian sect: the Christian Identity movement. It now appears likely that this radical offshoot of Christianity may have gained purchase with Bowers by 1964, the year he took command of the newly formed WKKKKOM, and that it likely played a key role in motivating and shaping the contours of the Mississippi Burning killings.
Specifically, Bowers likely planned the Mississippi Burning killings with the same theological motivation described by Tommy Tarrants. It was the same mind-set that likely motivated Noah Carden and his fellow Identity followers to attempt to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham: to further provoke already boiling racial tensions in hopes that such killings would trigger a holy race war.
Mississippi, a state with the most serious history of racial violence in the nation, would be a perfect place to start such a conflagration. Mississippi had one of the largest concentrations of people of color in the entire South. This not only included African Americans but Chinese Americans (present since the construction of railroads) and Native Americans. Together, these groups represented a near majority of the state’s population, and in certain areas of Mississippi a clear majority. The civil rights movement threatened the social and political fabric of Mississippi, undergirded by white supremacy, like no other state in the South. Something as simple as a lunch counter sit-in, which in states like Tennessee broke segregated dining places with little or no retaliation, elicited horrific violence in a city like Jackson, Mississippi. Such hostility, much like the 1962 Ole Miss race riots, came from people with no obvious KKK affiliations; it was spontaneous mob violence. If he looked to the black community, Bowers saw civil rights groups committed to a policy of nonviolence but that, as in Birmingham in May and September of 1963, could tip into violence under the right circumstances. The murder of Medgar Evers broke a period of relative calm in June 1963 and nearly caused a major race riot in Jackson. Mississippi held the promise, to someone immersed in Christian Identity eschatology, of white-versus-black violence.
With the newly formed White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, five thousand strong according to some estimates, Bowers had the vehicle to initiate this strategy. No state had more racial lynchings in its history than the Magnolia State, yet violence before 1963 did not stop the Civil Rights Act. By the end of 1963, hardcore racists in Mississippi believed that their local White Citizens Councils, more actively pro-segregation than most similar groups throughout the nation, were too passive. Even other active Ku Klux Klan groups, such as the United Klans of America, appeared too weak to a sizable subset of Mississippi racists. Bowers and others formed the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi from the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a reactionary group with membership in northern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. The WKKKKOM quickly grew its membership to an estimated five thousand people. But these were southern nationalists, not Christian Identity radicals. Bowers told Delmar Dennis that he had to manipulate these “rednecks” to fit his plan. He also described that plan to Dennis:
Bowers outlined on a blackboard the overall strategy of which the White Knights were merely a part. He said he was trying to create a race war, and open violence on the part of white Mississippians against native Negro citizens and civil rights agitators. He predicted that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would be required to send troops into Mississippi to restore order. Martial law would be declared and the state would be under full dictatorial control from Washington. The excuse for the control would be the race war he was helping to create by engendering hatred among whites in the same manner as it was being fomented by leftist radicals among blacks.10
Unfortunately, Dennis is not clear on the timing of this revelation, although the context suggests it was in 1964. That Bowers shared the same vision as Tarrants and his Identity mentors is likely not an accident. Bowers could have been influenced by the same kind of ideology at roughly the same impressionable age Tarrants was when he became enthralled by Swift. In 1947, sixteen years before Tarrants had dropped out of high school to become a true believer in the white supremacist cause, Bowers was an engineering student at the University of Southern California. This was the same time that people like Bertrand Comparet, San Jacinto Capt, and Wesley Swift were formulating and propagating two-seedline Christian Identity. There is no direct evidence that Bowers was exposed to Swift’s message when Swift was beginning his ministry. But, according to Marsh, in the late 1940s, after his stay in California, Bowers returned home to Mississippi and began studying religion alongside Nazi ideology.
What is without question is that within twenty years, Bowers, like a number of bigots in Mississippi, was undoubtedly under the sway of Wesley Swift and the Christian Identity movement. FBI documents show that in 1967, when Bowers set up a covert hit team led by Tarrants, WKKKKOM leaders referred to it as the Swift Underground. Investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell describes Bowers and Tarrants enthusiastically discussing Swift’s latest taped sermons. Even experts on Christian Identity, such as the late Ole Miss professor Chester Quarles, believed that Bowers joined the Christian Identity movement no later than 1967. The key question, when it comes to the motive for the Mississippi Burning murders, is whether or not Bowers fell under the influence of Swift as early as the summer of 1964. Some might argue that his lack of attention to targeting Jewish institutions and individuals in 1964 (in contrast to the wave of anti-Jewish attacks he ordered in 1967) suggests that Bowers was not yet under Swift’s influence.
But it appears as though Bowers tried to get the WKKKKOM to target Jews but failed. FBI informant reports show Bowers attempting to convince the WKKKKOM to move in an anti-Jewish direction as early as 1965. According to informants, Bowers told the group that there are two kinds of KKK groups: those that target “niggers” and those that target Jews. He hoped the WKKKKOM would focus on the latter, as Jews, in Bowers’s estimation, were the root of the racial problems in the South. But Bowers could not convince his rank-and-file members to target Jews. To the average racist, blacks, outside agitators, and the federal government were the obvious threats to white supremacy, not southern Jews. It was only after the success of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when his membership had diminished to a few hundred hardcore followers, that Bowers could redirect his efforts against Jews, and then only with a closely controlled group of Swift followers who, like Tarrants, shared Bowers’s anti-Semitic sensibilities.
For Bowers to target Jews in 1964, he had to align his anti-Semitic worldview within the broader framework of violent resistance to integration. Just as he had told Delmar Dennis, Bowers had to manipulate his rank-and-file members without their knowledge. He could not explicitly attack Jews unless Jews were directly involved in promoting civil rights. The evidence suggests that the murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney provided Bowers with just such an opportunity.
To say that the murder of the three civil rights workers in the Mississippi Burning murders was an act of religious terrorism is not the same thing as saying that anti-Semitic animus played a role in the murder of the two Jewish men. AntiSemitism had a long history within the Ku Klux Klan going back to the 1920s, when a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, directed in large part at Jews and Catholics, helped fuel a resurgence of the KKK, with membership growing into the millions. When the KKK revived from its post–Great Depression dormancy in the 1950s in response to the civil rights movement, anti-Jewish rhetoric was still a feature of Klan literature. What distinguished ideological (Christian Identity) terrorist groups like the NSRP from conventional racist organizations like the United Klans of America was their willingness to both violently attack Jewish targets and use extreme, provocative violence even when it was certain to invite a federal response. The goal for the religious terrorist is to create a new world order, and for the Swift follower in the 1960s, this meant eliciting a holy race war. Three lines of evidence sug
gest that, while the actual perpetrators of the awful crimes of June 21, 1964, were not religious terrorists, the attack itself was shaped by Sam Bowers’s religious worldview (likely without the actual perpetrators’ knowledge).
One line of evidence relates to Sam Bowers’s own rhetoric, which is both cryptic and suggestive. Many scholars have pointed to the comment by Bowers that the attack on the three civil rights workers was “the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew.”11 This is in keeping with the prevailing view of the crime, that its chief target was Schwerner, who had worked in the WKKKKOM stronghold of Meridian on behalf of CORE for weeks before Freedom Summer. The more telling rhetoric, however, comes from the earliest pieces of propaganda produced by the White Knights in the wake of Freedom Summer. In the fall of 1964, several weeks after law enforcement found the bodies of the three men in an earthen dam at Olan Burrage’s property, Bowers produced a new edition of the Klan Ledger, a periodical, much like the NSRP’s The Thunderbolt, that spread racist propaganda. “The ‘long, hot summer,’ has passed,” the periodical read. Referring to the civil rights activists who worked to register black voters during Freedom Summer, Bowers claimed they had “no laurels to their credit, and the general public of Mississippi has had a fill of their very existence… . For the success of our struggle against this scum, we offer our thanks to Almighty God, our Creator and Saviour.”12 What followed was an extended rant, theological and political, directed at civil rights sympathizers and the federal government, but primarily at Jews. It is here that the early Identity influence on Bowers becomes evident.
America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States Page 11