At the same time, FBI records show that Matthews was in and out of his hometown in Mississippi, working on some vague out-of-state project in the month before King’s killing. Records also show that Matthews frequented John’s Restaurant; he might fit the description of one of the suspicious men that Myrtis Hendricks saw interacting with Nix and Bowers.
The possibility also exists that Matthews engaged in such plotting to curry favor with Bowers, with the knowledge of someone inside the FBI. (Informants, especially at that high level, are often kept secret, even from FBI agents in the same field office.) If so, the FBI and Matthews may have found themselves in a complicated but not unfamiliar position as the plot against King unfolded. Their paradoxical challenge was to figure out how to protect an informant while preventing a major act of domestic terrorism. The temptation is to wait until other witnesses and evidence can be used to stop the crime without compromising new sources and methods. Often, even a low-level criminal can become the basis for implicating higher officials in a plot, until ultimately law enforcement rolls up an entire organization. But then timing becomes key. Act too early and the criminal case may not be solid enough to convict senior members of an organization. Act too late and the crime may well come to pass. The latter leaves the government with the unenviable choice between explaining why it did not prevent a major act of terrorism, and covering up its unintentional complicity and never admitting it to the public.
I already suggested something along those lines when discussing the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In Chapter 13 I offer a similar scenario for the 1995 terrorist attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. If the FBI learned of a potential King plot from L.E. Matthews and failed to act in time to prevent the assassination, this would go a long way in explaining the Bureau’s behavior after April 4.
This explanation starts with its handling of Donald Nissen, the fugitive who left his family and a steady job in Atlanta after having been threatened, in December of 1967, for revealing what he knew about a White Knights bounty offer. The FBI’s initial investigation into Nissen’s claims may well reflect genuine limitations in terms of data-mining capabilities. Larry Hancock and I were able to connect the 1967 bounty offer (from McManaman) on King to the 1964 bounty on King (offered to McManaman’s colleague Donald Sparks) only with the help of database technology and the Internet. Similarly, the superficial investigation of Sybil Eure, the woman who appears to have been a cutout for the bounty plot, could easily be attributed to antiquated perceptions about women and violence. But the follow-up investigation into Nissen’s claims, after the FBI realized that he had jumped his parole, is harder to understand and more open to less forgiving explanations.
Upon discovering that Nissen had gone AWOL, the FBI reinvestigated his claims about a White Knights bounty. In May 1968, it returned to Jackson, Mississippi, to interview Sybil Eure, the go-between who received the package containing bounty money from Nissen in the summer of 1967. Eure’s memory improved upon the second visit. Unlike her August 1967 interview with the FBI, Eure now remembered a story about a $100,000 bounty on Martin Luther King’s life. It was all a joke, she claimed. Eure explained that in the spring of 1964, while short on cash and developing a professional relationship with McManaman (whom she identified as a real estate guru), she had seen TV reports linking the Mississippi Burning murders to Neshoba sheriff Lawrence Rainey. She had joked with McManaman that she could get $100,000 from Rainey if they promised to kill Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps, as it had in 1967, the FBI did not think a woman was capable of participating in a Klan-connected murder conspiracy; the agents once again seemed to take Eure at her word.31 But in May of 1968, that decision was harder to justify.
For one thing, Leroy McManaman was already back in Leavenworth Penitentiary in the spring of 1964, when the three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi. Plus, the FBI did not connect Rainey to the Neshoba murders and to the KKK until August of 1964. In other words, Eure could never have been watching TV news reports about the Neshoba murders in April of 1964; she couldn’t have made her supposed joke about a King bounty because she wouldn’t have been in McManaman’s company when the Neshoba murders occurred later that summer. One might be apt to forgive this oversight by the FBI save for one thing: Just a few months before interviewing Eure for a second time, federal prosecutors finally convicted several individuals, including Rainey and Sam Bowers, for plotting the Neshoba murders. The Jackson field office helped lead the effort to ensure the prosecution. It is hard to imagine that the FBI could have failed to see the major problem in the timing of events narrated by Eure.
The FBI missed other problems too. Eure took care to paint her relationship with McManaman as a professional one. But the FBI knew that McManaman identified Eure as the woman he intended to marry when he was released from Leavenworth Penitentiary. Moreover, no one communicated more with McManaman, by way of letters and visits, than Eure. This situation presented the FBI with a logical follow-up question for Eure: Why would McManaman refer Nissen to Eure for something as bold as a bounty offer on Martin Luther King Jr.’s life if it were all a joke? Even if he were simply gullible, McManaman would want to confirm details with Eure, who then would have let him in on the joke. But he instead told another criminal to visit her as part of a plot against King. The FBI never even bothered to find out the details of how and why a career criminal like McManaman was introduced to Eure in the first place. But the FBI did not subject Eure to a thorough interrogation.
Nissen eventually turned himself into the FBI at the end of July 1968. He specifically asked to turn himself into Special Agent Wayne Mack from the FBI field office in Phoenix, Arizona, the state where Nissen spent much of his early adulthood. Mack and Nissen developed a collegial relationship despite being on opposite sides of the law. In St. Louis, where Mack had detoured from a flight for in-service training in Washington, D.C., Nissen reiterated his account of McManaman’s bounty offer to Mack. But he also added details of the threat outside the parole office, and in interviews with me, Nissen insisted that he told Mack about the Floyd Ayers money-package to Jackson. No record of that story exists in FBI files detailing Nissen’s follow-up interview by Mack. Perhaps Nissen’s memory of telling the FBI about Ayers, forty years after the fact, is confused. Perhaps Mack deliberately left those details out of Nissen’s story to protect Nissen from potential charges of complicity in the King murder. Or perhaps the files have been sanitized.
Had the FBI looked deep within its files, it would have learned that Floyd Ayers had also been trying to get its attention too. For reasons that are not clear, in the week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Floyd Ayers infiltrated King’s funeral under false pretenses, attempted an apparent kidnapping of Martin Luther King Sr., and showed up at the White House gates insisting on seeing the president. The Secret Service and the FBI dismissed Ayers as mentally disturbed, and records provide no details of what Ayers told them in interviews.32
Without question, Ayers was at best flamboyant and was possibly mentally impaired. But the FBI knew something else about Ayers. Before he infiltrated King’s funeral, before the FBI even found James Earl Ray’s Mustang in Atlanta, Georgia, police had suggested Ayers as one of their earliest suspects in the King murder. Not only did Ayers work for KKK leader James Venable, but Georgia law enforcement could not account for his whereabouts on April 4. The FBI dismissed Ayers as a suspect because it could not match his fingerprints to prints recovered at the crime scene. But within two weeks of clearing Ayers in April, the FBI received additional reports casting suspicion on the eccentric salesman.33 Two witnesses said that Ayers had been referring to King’s eventual murder in the months leading up to April 4.
If the FBI eliminated mention of the Ayers story from Nissen’s account, this would be consistent with its general apathy toward Nissen’s story as of August 1968. Agents did not even interview Leroy McManaman until September of 1968. At that point, McManaman predictably de
nied any connection to the King murder and denied having any interaction whatsoever with Donald Nissen. The FBI never followed up by confronting McManaman with records showing that the two men had in fact worked together in Leavenworth’s shoe factory. More difficult to understand, the FBI did not bother to ask McManaman how, if Nissen had never known him and never spoken with him, Nissen could provide the FBI with the name of the woman McManaman intended to marry and where she lived and worked in Mississippi. The FBI instead closed the book on Nissen’s case.
In fact, as of August 1968, the FBI had three separate threads of evidence pointing to a White Knights bounty offer as motivating Dr. King’s murder: the Nissen story, which predated the King assassination; the accounts from Capomacchia and Barnes implicating Tarrants; and the reports from Jerry Ray, James’s brother, to informants speaking about a bounty offer. Together these pieces of evidence cried out for a renewed interest in the White Knights and white supremacists as conspirators in the King assassination.
But there are no signs of a renewed investigation after the interview with McManaman in September of 1968. James Earl Ray had been captured and by the spring of 1969 had confessed to a judge and been sent to prison on a ninety-nine-year sentence. But the alarming fact is that when Ray’s later protests of innocence led to a renewed congressional investigation in 1976 (after Christensen’s article raised hackles at the FBI and intrigued investigators for the HSCA), the response by the FBI appears to be a cover-up, including the destruction of files and the use of FBI-legitimated sources to shift blame away from white supremacists. At least one of the sources claimed to Congress that men like Barnes were not dangerous—something contradicted by FBI records—and that the White Knights would never work across state lines—something contradicted by Beckwith’s attempt to blow up Al Binder’s office in New Orleans. Congress relied so heavily on these sources that it did not even bother to interview Sam Bowers, then in prison. The HSCA forced even hardened Mafia dons to testify on the JFK assassination, but it did not demand that Sidney Barnes testify before investigators when the white supremacist refused to cooperate. The FBI did not emphasize Nissen’s story to Congress, and Congress never even approached him.
All of this highlights the alarming possibility that the FBI not only failed to stop King’s murder but also failed to fully resolve it after the fact—even though it had the resources to potentially do both. If the FBI was protecting L.E. Matthews, this would not be the first time that sources and methods, and the desire to protect the Bureau’s reputation, trumped the imperative for justice.
But an additional and just as disquieting possibility emerges from the events surrounding the King assassination and what they mean to the study of America’s domestic, religious terrorism. The uncomfortable reality may be that the very sources (deep-cover informants and constitutionally dubious wiretaps) and methods (including violence) that the FBI used with white supremacists groups, and hid at all costs, prevented a much wider racial conflagration in the months and years following King’s murder. Yet even if the ends somehow justified the means in the short term, the failure by law enforcement to more thoroughly investigate the motives of the groups it had infiltrated allowed said groups, during the lull in religiously motivated terrorism in the 1970s, to evolve in ways that would have enormous implications for homegrown terror by the 1980s.
10
THE END OF AN AGE
the FRAGMENTATION of the RADICAL RIGHT in the 1970S
“Now this is a long fight. It is a hard fight,” said J.B. Stoner in June of 1969 as he addressed the national convention of the National States Rights Party as its newly elected chairman. Ostensibly, he was referring to the campaign for elected offices in the coming years. But Stoner spoke to a much longer struggle as well. “The Jews have been conspiring and carrying on their campaign on top of the world for centuries … and they still don’t have it… . The Lord Jesus Christ himself called the children of the Jews the children of the devil and that is what they are, the children of the devil… . They are Satan’s kids. Now they have been fighting for a long time so we have to fight for quite a while. We can’t expect to win the fight in a few weeks or few months when the Jews have been after it for centuries.”1
In many ways, Stoner’s speech sounded like a rationale as much as a rallying cry. Despite the riots from the previous year, despite the chaos at the Democratic National Convention the previous summer, the race war so many saw as imminent had yet to materialize.
Yet tensions persisted through 1968 and into 1969. The number of urban riots diminished dramatically, but violence spread into other political arenas. A radical offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground became the latest New Left group to embrace violence as a form of political protest. With the ongoing activity of groups like the Minutemen, police estimated that America experienced an average of twenty bombings per week in 1969. So the religious radicals in the NSRP had not yet given up hope.
One speaker at the convention, identified only as Stephens, insisted to the NSRP delegates:
The battle is yet to be won. You and I will wind up being the soldiers that carry the forefront through the line to win the fight. So if we leave this fight out against the Jewish, nigger revolution that we are in, and it is a revolution, they sort of proclaim it to be a revolution, you and I are going to end this revolution. When the battle starts, you and I will be the first ones there. We will be on the front lines, and when this smoke does clear away from this battle, then we should see nothing but white faces left in our nation.2
Stephens’s words echoed the horrific sermon delivered by the Reverend Connie Lynch in Saint Augustine in 1964. “There’s gonna be a bloody race riot all over this country,” Lynch insisted. “The stage is being set for a bloodbath. When the smoke clears, there ain’t gonna be nothing left but white faces.”
Lynch escaped incitement charges in 1964 even though a white mob sent nineteen blacks to local hospitals after his speech. But Stoner’s rabble-rousing friend finally went to prison for instigating racial violence in Baltimore in 1966; he was not at the 1969 convention. In his stead, at the convention and elsewhere, Neuman Britton assumed the role of instigator. Like Lynch, Britton was a Christian Identity minister, and at the convention he echoed the CI preaching of Wesley Swift: “There is nothing left but blood for America over the dead cause I know for a sure thing that there will never be any peace … until we removed from these shores the serpent race and this beastly race that is so prevalent among us.” Speaking of the blood that will flow from the “wine press of wrath,” he asserted, “We have arrived at the apex of this age.”3
In many ways, 1969 represented the apex for the National States Rights Party and for organized violence by adherents of Christian Identity. But despite “favorable” conditions, the “Jewish, nigger revolution” never escalated into a race war.
A reasonable question would be: Why not? Certainly, the idea of a pitched conflict between racial groups, fighting in armies representing their ethnic identities, is hard to fathom, even in an era like the 1960s. But to many Americans, a civil war based in part on race and also on class and political ideology seemed more than possible in 1969. In hindsight, with well-armed elements of the right and the left openly courting such a war, the violence of the late 1960s, as unique as it was in its historical intensity, seems somewhat tame relative to what it could have been. New Left radicals engaged in street battles with law enforcement, and police recovered millions of rounds of ammunition from right-wingers, yet one did not find members of the Minutemen launching mortar shells at machine-gun-wielding members of the Black Panthers. With such willing participants, the lack of open conflict demands an explanation.
A likely answer is one that will unsettle many civil libertarians, who for decades have justifiably highlighted the abuses and dangers associated with programs like COINTELPRO, which surveilled, infiltrated, and provoked dissident groups inside the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union still
speaks ominously about how national law enforcement spied on civil rights organizations and antiwar protest groups. The approach undermined legitimate and peaceful dissident groups and put a chill on political free speech. Liberals bemoan the treatment of groups like the Black Panthers and the KKK, even if they dislike what these groups stood for. Recall that to undermine the Klan in Mississippi, the FBI went so far as to use Mafia members to scare or beat confessions out of Klansmen; by all accounts, the sting operation that wounded Tommy Tarrants was ultimately meant to kill him (and did kill Kathy Ainsworth)—with no arrest or trial needed. When it came to the Black Panthers, the record indicates that the FBI either actively facilitated violence or, at best, passively allowed it to take the lives of several leading members, such as Fred Hampton.
But for those who feel that the ends justify the means, there is little doubt that the no-holds-barred approach by federal law enforcement, however distasteful, undermined violent and radical groups. By the early 1970s, many of the top members of these groups were in prison. Robert DePugh, who for years had deferred the most violent Minutemen activity in favor of a massive attack in the future, was in federal prison when the race riots of the late 1960s presented the best opportunity to put his strike teams into coordinated action. Sam Bowers was finally convicted for his role in the Neshoba murders in 1967, and by 1969 he found himself in prison, in part due to testimony from a deep-cover informant. On the other side, H. Rap Brown—who had an anti-riot act named after him in 1968—faced ongoing arrests and trials from 1967 onward. Black Panther leader Huey Newton served time for manslaughter charges (which were eventually dropped) from 1968 to 1970.
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