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

by Stuart Wexler

  King spoke to his predicament, a result of taking bold but unpopular stances, in his sermon at the National Cathedral.

  On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

  There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.11

  Like his reference to God’s judgment, these words had been absent from the 1965 Oberlin commencement speech. In 1968 King knew the price he had paid for challenging “white liberal doctrines.” Indeed, when he preached at the National Cathedral, the potential efficacy of the Poor People’s Campaign looked very much in doubt even as it was set to begin later in April. Financial support remained low, and skepticism persisted about whether or not the march would have the manpower it needed. Dr. King had just visited Mississippi to enlist leaders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the political group that had emerged as a result of Mississippi Freedom Summer’s 1964 voting drive, for help with grassroots mobilization. Some questioned whether or not the Reverend King, with his waning influence, could hold marchers to a standard of disciplined nonviolence. Would the émigrés to the Mall, they wondered, respond to police coercion in the same way that residents of Detroit and Newark had responded?

  In the last week of March 1968, concerns of nonviolence occupied Martin Luther King’s attention above all other matters. At the urging of his friend, the Reverend James Lawson, Dr. King agreed to lend support to the Memphis sanitation workers strike, a labor protest that had been gaining momentum since February. The predominantly black sanitation force in Memphis worked under terrible conditions for low wages. They were expected to dispose of trash in any and all weather conditions. Matters came to a head when two sanitation workers, seeking shelter from the severe weather in their truck, were crushed by its compactor.

  King agreed to lead a protest march in support of the laborers, but snow delayed the demonstration until March 28. Events did not go according to plan. Violence erupted, and shops were looted. Police shot and killed a sixteen-year-old protester. Tennessee governor Buford Ellington ordered National Guardsmen to pacify Memphis, and at the urging of his advisors, the Reverend King was forced to leave Memphis unceremoniously. On his own initiative, Dr. King insisted that he had to return to Memphis to lead a peaceful strike, to calm the nation (and supporters) about the prospects of the forthcoming Poor People’s Campaign, and to convince campaign participants that nonviolence was still feasible and desirable. Not long after speaking at the National Cathedral, King returned to Atlanta. He announced on April 1 his plans to return to Memphis. King made his way by plane to Memphis on April 3, but not before a bomb threat delayed his departure.12

  No one listening in California to the Reverend Wesley Swift’s sermon on March 31 would have detected that he too had plans for Memphis. In his speech “Power in the Word,” Swift simply echoed themes familiar to his Christian Identity flock. The focus was on the sustenance provided by faith. The end-times, as always, became a major motif. Swift asserted:

  We find that in our intelligence and purpose, we have accepted a plan that is in the word of God and we are participating in it. You are not only participating in it, but you accept it and you are working to bring in the kingdom, and these prophecies of God.13

  Cycling through several books of the Bible, Swift ended where King began his March 31 oration, with the book of Revelations:

  This word of God is for your protection in the hour of emergency. The word of God shall see America thru. And not only is this true, but the children of America have the Faith to believe every word that comes out of the mouth of God. And they believe that it will be fulfilled. This does not eliminate you from defending your home and battling the enemy. But it gives you the capacity to know that those of your household with you will come thru this battle… . And we thus understand that the world was made by the Word of God. And we also understand that the new world will also be made by the Words of your mouth. And the children—you and I—shall participate. And we shall have absolute victory.14

  The evidence strongly suggests that when the Reverend Wesley Swift assured his followers that the word of God promised them victory in the upcoming battle with the enemy, he knew about and likely endorsed a conspiracy to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis. In many ways, such a plot was only the final iteration of a much broader effort to murder the civil rights leader, one that persisted, through many failures, for more than a decade.

  From 1958 to 1967, individuals and groups within the Christian Identity social network had plotted and made as many as seven serious attempts on Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. Scholars and congressional investigators have documented most of these attempts on a case-by-case basis, but ignorance about the influence of Christian Identity extremism has blinded them to the common ideological thread connecting each effort: eliminating the most important voice advocating for nonviolence and harmonious relations between the races and in so doing setting the stage for a holy race war. It is very likely that one of the plots, from 1964, evolved into a conspiracy that finally succeeded in killing King on April 4, 1968, in Memphis. Indeed, with each successive attempt, the plotters appeared to have built on tactical elements in earlier plots. This is not surprising, inasmuch as two men, J.B. Stoner and Sam Bowers, likely spearheaded no fewer than six of them. Hence it is valuable to quickly review these seven attempts, with the goal of illuminating the murder on April 4.15

  1958: The Stoner Birmingham Bounty

  As noted in earlier chapters, the first major effort by a Christian Identity zealot to murder Martin Luther King occurred in 1958. J.B. Stoner offered to have his “boys from Atlanta” come to Birmingham and kill King for a “special bargain price”—per Stoner—of $1,500. Stoner proffered this to undercover police informants as part of a wider effort to kill a number of civil rights figures. Lest there be any doubt as to how serious he was, two of Stoner’s Atlanta associates nearly demolished Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church on June 29, 1958, one week after meeting with the informants. A security guard discovered a smoking five-gallon paint can full of explosives and placed it in the middle of the street; “the ensuing explosion broke windows and shook homes for several blocks.” Already the site of a 1956 bombing, the Bethel Baptist Church, referred to by some as the mother of the civil rights movement in Alabama, included the parsonage for the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a major civil rights leader who, with his friend Martin Luther King Jr., was among the list of bounty targets. Stoner soon realized that he had been the victim of a police sting operation, established in part because local authorities hoped to understand, and stop, the recent spate of bombings against Jewish targets (also plotted by Stoner). But authorities never charged Stoner, because they believed that in requesting that Stoner help them eliminate civil rights officials, even if the goal was to develop charges against the violent bigot, a judge would see the effort as entrapment and throw out the charges.

  1963: The Twin Birmingham Attempts

  The next two attempts on King’s life also likely involved Stoner. Both plots developed in Birmingham in 1963. The first, discussed earlier, involved the bombing of Dr. King’s room at the Gaston Motel on May 11, 1963, which coincided with the bombing of the home of the civil rights leader’s brother, A.D. King. Both men were fortunate to have stayed late at a meeting, or they could have been killed or injured. Although no one was ever arrested for the attack on the King brothers, internal records from the FBI and from the Birmingham police, as well as histories by people like Diane McWhorter and Gary May, suggest that individuals associated with Eastview Klavern 13 implemented the attacks. As noted in Chapter 4, members of the Eastview Klavern (aka the Cahaba Boys) were closely associated with the National States Rights Party in 1963. Anyone hoping for a racial conflagration, such as S
toner and Ed Fields, would have been impressed with the aftermath of the May attempts on Dr. King’s life. The May bombing, on the heels of a successful effort led by King and Shuttlesworth to force greater racial integration in Birmingham, caused the first major riot in the history of the Steel City.

  The second major riot occurred in Birmingham after the September 15 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which killed four girls. As noted earlier, several Christian Identity radicals had met in Birmingham the day before the bombing. These same men, including retired colonel William Potter Gale, Sidney Crockett Barnes, retired admiral John Crommelin, and Noah Carden, planned to assassinate Martin Luther King with rifle fire when he came to eulogize the four girls. The chosen sniper, Noah Carden, could not get a clear shot on King, according to Barnes. The Reverend Ed King, a civil rights activist from Mississippi who came to lead protests against the bombing, asserts that any additional violence on the part of rioting blacks would have triggered massive retaliation by Alabama law enforcement. While there is no direct evidence that Stoner took part in the King murder plot, all the Christian Identity figures who came to Birmingham were members of Stoner’s National States Rights Party. Informant reports say that Crommelin even stayed with Stoner on September 14. Barnes insisted that the sniper project to murder Dr. King was ongoing through 1964 and that another attempt failed when King did not visit Barnes’s (and Carden’s) hometown of Mobile, as the minister had originally planned and publicized.

  1964: The Alpha Plot in Mississippi

  If scholars hope to understand the civil rights leader’s murder in 1968, investigating the failed 1964 plot against King is key. We will refer to this plot as the alpha plot, as it becomes the basis for the conspiracy that, evidence suggests, ended with King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. For the sake of clarity, and with a nod to Christian eschatology (the alpha and omega are important symbols for those who believe in an end-times apocalypse), let us refer to the ultimate, successful conspiracy, beginning in 1967, as the omega plot. The alpha plot, described briefly in an earlier chapter, involved an effort by Sam Bowers and the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi to offer another bounty to assassinate King, this time to a professional hit man by the name of Donald Sparks. Due to its significance in the successful assassination of King in 1968 (the omega plot), it is worth exploring in considerable depth.

  A 1970 investigation by the attorney general of Kansas16 (supported by FBI documents) established that Sparks belonged to a subgroup of a wider collection of loosely connected criminals, known to historians of crime and known in popular literature (and movies) as the Dixie Mafia. More of a phenomenon than an organization, the so-called Dixie Mafia was known by law enforcement in its early years as the Crossroaders or the traveling criminals. They formed bonds with other criminals, often across state lines, in America’s federal prisons. With the development of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, and with the growing availability of home phones, it became much easier for criminals with various and complementary skill sets to plot and execute major crimes across state lines. If the prospective monetary haul was sufficiently high, a safecracker, a getaway driver, and a “strong-arm man” who was handy with firearms could help each other score a major robbery. Over time, these men formed loosely knit gangs, concentrated in the Midwest and Southeast. The Dixie Mafia earned a reputation for greed-fueled ruthlessness that surpassed even that of the Sicilian Mafia. By the late 1960s, Mafia dons were outsourcing contract killings to Dixie Mafia hit men like Sparks. According to KKK historian Michael Newton, the “Ku Klux Klan collaborated with the Dixie Mafia on strong-arm work.”17

  No scholar detailed the 1964 bounty offer until 2012, when I (with coauthor Larry Hancock) described it with great detail in The Awful Grace of God, a book on the King murder. The details of the alpha plot emerge in a 1965 FBI memo. In it, a man named Herman Wing informs agents in the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office of a $13,000 bounty offer on MLK’s life. The money was fronted by the White Knights to Donald Sparks in 1964.18

  Sparks told Wing about this bounty after the two completed a robbery spree in Alabama in 1965. Purportedly, Sparks even visited Mississippi and stayed at a hotel in Jackson, waiting for his money before committing the murder. The murder never occurred, Sparks told Wing, because the White Knights failed to raise the contract money in time. The FBI followed Wing’s lead to Mississippi, where they found important pieces of corroboration. The FBI’s Jackson field office found a local law enforcement officer who confirmed having heard of a similar plot in 1964. Agents also discovered that Sparks (a native of Oklahoma who primarily worked with a Tulsa-based gang in the Great Plains) was known to KKK members in Mississippi. A local KKK member knew his nickname, Two Jumps, a reference to Sparks’s dalliance with competitive rodeo. But the FBI dismissed Wing’s claim because Wing also connected Sparks to the murder of the FBI’s most wanted fugitive, John Dillon. The FBI was convinced that Dillon had been killed in Oklahoma, where his body was found.

  Several additional factors cement the 1964 alpha plot as fact. For one thing, a second colleague of Sparks, Kenneth Knight, confirmed the plot independently in 1968. Internal documents from the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation confirm that close associates of Sparks likely did kill Dillon. In fact, one of the last people seen in the company of Dillon was a known associate of Sparks, Leroy McManaman, a native of Kansas. McManaman’s criminal record included arrests and convictions for a multimillion-dollar interstate bootlegging operation, a series of home robberies, and the interstate transportation of stolen cars. McManaman’s activities in the spring of 1964 provide one of the most important sources of corroboration for the alpha plot and, as we shall see, reveal the bridge between the alpha plot and the omega plot.

  Like Sparks, McManaman also suddenly showed up in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964. Like Sparks, McManaman was a member of a Dixie Mafia gang based out of Tulsa. Like Sparks, his criminal record shows little or no association with Mississippi. In fact, McManaman violated a federal appeal bond in traveling to Mississippi in 1964. In 1963 a federal jury in Kansas had convicted McManaman for leading an interstate stolen car ring conspiracy with Rubie Charles Jenkins, Sparks’s closest friend. Out on bond, McManaman risked additional prison time if caught on his jaunt to Mississippi.

  Yet he stayed there for several weeks at the home of Sybil Eure, a real estate broker who ran her own company from her home in Jackson. Eure would later claim to the FBI that friends (whom she never identified) had introduced her to McManaman, that McManaman (a “big time criminal operator” according to FBI reports) was a real estate guru, and that she had hoped to work with him in real estate in the future. It is very likely, as we shall see, that McManaman was in Jackson to help his friend Sparks in any 1964 attempt on King’s life and that Eure, who admitted to being in financial straits in 1964, had some (perhaps unwitting) connection to the plot. But McManaman lost his appeal and returned to Leavenworth Prison in April 1964. The records show that he maintained an ongoing correspondence with Eure, something that will become significant when we discuss the omega plot from 1967 to 1968.

  1965: Attempts in Ohio, Mississippi, and California

  Christian Identity fanatics, including Bowers and Stoner, did not give up on their efforts to kill King. A 1965 FBI report cites informants describing a plot by Stoner and National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan leader James Venable to kill King in 1965. Stoner enjoyed a long relationship with Venable going back several years. Among other things, Stoner had shared a law office with Venable in Atlanta for a spell, and Venable represented members of Stoner’s Confederate Underground when they were indicted for bombing the Temple in Atlanta in 1958.

  The informants did not discuss details of the Stoner–Venable plot in 1965. But other sources, notably a letter and testimony of a young Ohio racist named Daniel Wagner, suggest the outlines of a conspiracy. Ohio police arrested Wagner in 1965 for carrying explosives across state lines. In custody, and later in testimony to
the House Un-American Activities Committee (which from 1965 through 1967 led more than three investigations into KKK terrorism), Wagner described an offer made by Ohio KKK Grand Empress Eloise Witte, who wanted him to kill King. Witte connected her offer to a $25,000 bounty on King offered by James Venable.

  Witte’s Ohio Klan group fell under the umbrella of Venable’s NKKKK, the second largest KKK group in the nation. According to Wagner, the money was supposed to be used to buy the services of some sort of rifle team, who would open fire on King and his entourage when King came to Ohio in the summer of 1965 to offer the commencement address at Antioch College, the alma mater of his wife, Coretta. The plot fell through when Wagner could not assemble a team in time. In testimony to Congress, an Ohio NSRP member and independent witness, Richard Hannah, confirmed overhearing Witte discuss the plot. It is worth noting that the explosives found in Wagner’s car came from a group of men in Georgia with close ties to Venable. The explosives were meant to blow up police barracks and to destroy buildings belonging to the Nation of Islam, the radical black nationalist group led by Elijah Muhammad. The goal of these explosions, according to Wagner, was to ignite a race war.

  The race war agenda suggests the possibility that Venable, like Stoner, had religious allegiances to the Reverend Wesley Swift and the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. This association is far more difficult to pin down for Venable than it is for Stoner. Unlike Stoner, whose close associations with Swift’s ministers stretched for more than a decade and whose rants against Jews included Christian Identity–type exegeses of the book of Genesis and the genealogy of Jesus, Venable was far less open about his anti-Jewish agenda. Yes, he represented the accused in the bombing of the Atlanta Temple, but other, non-Identity Klansmen harbored resentment toward Jews. Without question, internal documents show that Venable had been talking about killing Martin Luther King as far back as 1961, but that by no means puts someone in the Christian Identity camp. Evidence to be discussed shortly shows that by 1967 Venable and close allies within the National Knights had developed strong ties to Swift and had embraced Swift’s thinking on Jews. But even if Venable did not attempt to kill King out of religious animus in 1965, his coconspirator, Stoner, certainly would have been motivated by religious ideology. Hence it is likely that the 1965 Stoner–Venable Ohio attempt against King fits the pattern of Christian Identity violence since 1958.