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The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi formed in the state’s cauldron of anti-integrationist resistance in the early 1960s. No white supremacist group committed more acts of violence in the nation. As one of the few states with a majority nonwhite population, Mississippi’s white establishment vigorously opposed efforts to give equal rights to minorities. Yet some white Mississippians did not feel that the reactionary moves made by the wealthy White Citizens Councils and the government-backed Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission went far enough. To some, even the existing Klan regime in Mississippi was too passive, and they abandoned their county-based subgroups (known as Klaverns) in large numbers, coalescing to form the White Knights, led by the devilishly brilliant Samuel Holloway Bowers and eventually becoming the most successfully violent KKK subgroup in the nation.

Law enforcement estimates connected the group to at least “10 murders; to the burnings of an estimated 75 black churches, to at least 300 assaults and beatings and bombings.”1 The violence included the famous Mississippi Burning (abbreviated as MIBURN by the FBI), murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County. Klansmen firebombed the home of voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer, in Forrest County, Mississippi, nearly killing his wife and children, who luckily survived.2 Dahmer died from burns suffered in the attack. Although the group had not officially formed when Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in June 1963—shot in the back by sniper fire, just yards away from his home and his wife and children—many suspect that a budding version of the White Knights had some role in the attack. The man eventually convicted of the Evers murder, Byron de la Beckwith, became a leading member of the White Knights. Like de la Beckwith, who liked to taunt law enforcement with quasi-confessions of the sniper attack, the White Knights were the boldest of any Klan group in the country, certain that a Mississippi jury would never convict them of a crime. They even put local law enforcement and FBI agents on hit lists.3

But developments in 1967 brought a new wave of hope for law enforcement. Using federal civil rights laws rather than local murder statutes, the Justice Department finally brought nine Klansmen to account for their roles in the murder of civil rights martyrs Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in Neshoba County in 1964. The FBI had devoted a tremendous amount of resources over some three years to establish the facts of the case and, in fact, had developed most of the story by the end of 1964. The sheriff of Neshoba County, Lawrence Rainey, a closet member of the White Knights, arrested the three activists under false pretenses, with the help of his deputy, Cecil Price. While Rainey held the men incommunicado, a posse of Klansmen assembled and traveled to Neshoba, when Rainey obligingly released his prey the evening of June 20. The Klansmen, with Price’s help, followed the activists down a dark highway, forced them off the road and out of their vehicle, and killed them in the nearby woods. White Knights Grand Wizard Sam Bowers had set the outlines of the plan in motion more than a month before, and it worked to perfection.

The disappearance of two white men, Schwerner and Goodman, galvanized the nation in ways that most other racial crimes, directed solely at blacks (like Chaney), did not. At the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, a dogged FBI investigation uncovered the victims’ bodies buried under an earthen dam, but a Southern judge dismissed the murder case against Rainey and Price in 1964. In 1967, the FBI developed a high-level informant, Delmar Dennis, inside the White Knights, and the Department of Justice used civil rights statutes to retry the perpetrators. Prized targets among the accused included the infamous brothers Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts; the latter, according to accounts from those involved in the ambush, shot at least one of the victims. Most importantly, the DOJ set its sights on finally sending the kingpin, Samuel Bowers, to prison.4

Born in 1924 to a wealthy New Orleans family, Bowers grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. He enlisted in the navy in World War II and briefly spent time in California before returning to southern Mississippi. He owned a vending machine company, Sambo Amusement Company, but focused his energy on directing the activities of the White Knights. But Bowers was not a typical “redneck,” as he called his followers. He had studied engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and then at Tulane University in New Orleans. If other Klan leaders played checkers, Bowers played chess, plotting crimes months in advance, using spy-like tradecraft to avoid law enforcement surveillance and always remaining careful—almost paranoid—not to leave his “fingerprints” on his crimes.5 He would plot crimes in new locations to divert FBI resources away from major investigations and even considered framing rival Klan groups for his own offenses.

Bowers alone had the ability to issue a “code four”—White Knights parlance for a bombing or killing. He did so for both the MIBURN killings and the Dahmer firebombing.6 But nothing occupied the attention or energy of Bowers like the prospect of killing Martin Luther King Jr. From 1964 on, Bowers attempted to assassinate Dr. King at least four times.

The first attempt, referenced in Chapter 1, involved outsourcing to Dixie Mafia hitmen. Specifically, the White Knights offered a bounty to a bank robber and highly respected contract killer from Oklahoma, Donald Sparks, to eliminate King if he came to Mississippi, as the minister eventually did in July 1964 in response to the Mississippi Burning murders. Government files describe Billy Buckles, one of Bowers’s senior lieutenants, telling a group of Klansmen at a summer meeting that the White Knights were contracting with criminals to perform an act of violence that would “make the death of Medgar Evers look sick [by comparison].”7 Bowers himself told an FBI informant at the end of 1964 that “two men with high powered rifles were assigned to kill” King when he “last toured the state of Mississippi.” Bowers claimed that the two men continued “working on the matter,” when in reality the White Knights could not raise a sufficient amount of money ($13,000) to satisfy Sparks. But this 1964 plot, which we will refer to from this point forward on as the “Sparks-McManaman plot,” did not die as much as it remained dormant until 1967, when Leroy McManaman presented it to Donald Nissen in Leavenworth Penitentiary.

Perhaps realizing that money could be a problem in luring professional killers to kill King, Bowers changed tactics and relied on his own men. Bowers devised the next plot in 1965, when Dr. King traveled through Mississippi on his way to Alabama, where civil rights activists pushed the case for voting rights in cities like Selma. The primary attack was to be by snipers, with a backup plan of exploding a highway bridge if King escaped the shooting. Advanced word of the attack appears to have come from the deeply placed government informant Delmar Dennis, a minister who had been close to Klan leader Samuel Bowers. Dennis turned on Bowers because he suspected Bowers’s patriotism and had reservations about the White Knights’ excessive violence. The attack did not occur, but only because King’s route was changed, thanks to Dennis’s information, at the last minute.8

By this point, Bowers’s desire to kill King caught the attention of the highest levels of American government. President Lyndon Johnson personally ordered the FBI to provide additional protection to King when he passed through Mississippi in 1964 and 1965.9 On the heels of the MIBURN killings, Johnson worried about civil disorder in Mississippi if the Klan murdered King. Johnson and King worked closely together to push through landmark civil rights legislation, and as the nation waited for Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (in August), their working relationship, while contentious, remained relatively close. But Johnson knew that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed anything but a close relationship with the civil rights leader.

King, in his capacity as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), made the cardinal mistake of publicly criticizing the FBI for its failures to resolve dozens of civil rights murders throughout the South. Hoover, maniacally protective of his agency’s reputation, responded by publicly labeling Dr. King as an enemy of law and order and insinuating that the activist enjoyed close relations with communists. Privately, Hoover pushed his agents to surveil the minister for the purpose of ruining his reputation and even worse. At one point Hoover’s agents sent King a letter with the goal of shaming the minister into committing suicide over his alleged extramarital affairs, a letter that arrived concurrently with a tape—sent to King’s wife, Coretta—purporting to be a recording of an intimate encounter.10 More relevant to King’s safety, from 1965 on Hoover insisted that his agents discontinue the practice of telling King’s advisors about plots against King’s life. Instead, Hoover ordered his subordinates to inform relevant police agencies only—a dangerous policy for King because these groups often included large numbers of KKK members and sympathizers. Hoover knew full well the dangers of this policy from his experience providing protection to King on Johnson’s orders in 1964. When King went to Mississippi in the wake of the MIBURN murders, Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey protested the additional FBI security for King. His own men, Rainey insisted, could protect King. At that very moment, Hoover knew, Rainey and his subordinates were being investigated for their role in facilitating the MIBURN killings.11 Rainey, as noted earlier, belonged to Bowers’s group, and detained the three MIBURN victims in his jail on June 21, 1964.

Bowers remained undeterred in his desire to assassinate King, but by 1966, King’s own prerogatives created problems for any would-be plotters. Having helped undo legal segregation and discrimination in the South, King increasingly focused his political attention on de facto discrimination in the north, in places like Chicago, Illinois, where King temporarily moved with his family in 1966, to highlight problems with poverty and housing. This brought King out of Bowers’s domain. But Bowers crafted an ingenious if unfortunate plan to overcome this logistical problem: he arranged to lure King into an ambush. Bowers approached three men, Ernest Avant, James Lloyd Jones, and Claude Fuller, misfits the White Knights had recently expelled from their ranks, and promised them readmission to the group if they murdered an innocent black man. The first phase of the plan succeeded with the murder of black farmer Ben Chester White in Natchez, Mississippi, on June 10, 1966. The men selected White mostly as a target of opportunity, but also, in part, because he had no substantive connection to the civil rights movement and his death would seem more senseless than politically motivated violence. Having convinced White to help them find their lost dog, the men lured the farmer into their pickup truck and then brought him to a bridge where they abruptly stopped. Using FBI records and court transcripts (the three men were convicted for murder in 1998), Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell described the subsequent scene four decades later:

Claude Fuller got out of the Chevy, grabbed his rifle and loaded it before going around the car and opening the door where White was. Avants stood beside him.

“All right, Pop,” Fuller told him. “Get out.”

Spotting the rifle, White withered in his seat, bowing his head to pray.

“Get out!” Fuller barked.

“Oh, Lord,” White said, “what have I done to deserve this?”

Fuller answered with his automatic rifle, firing two quick bursts that emptied the gun of all 18 shots.

Fuller then turned to Avants and told him to fire, too.12

The men heaved White’s dead body into the waterway below, and in the days that followed, Sam Bowers waited for the second phase of his plan, once White’s body was found on June 12.

King’s decisions and movements had confounded the efforts to kill him. If the murderers could dictate King’s movements (rather than the other way around), then an ambush would be much more likely to succeed. Anyone studying King’s past behavior may have predicted that a murder like White’s would elicit an appearance by the SCLC leader. King attended the funeral of Medgar Evers in Jackson in June of 1963; he visited Birmingham to eulogize the four young girls who died after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church; later, he visited Mississippi, more than once, to mourn the Neshoba victims and raise public awareness about the lack of justice in that case. The gruesome nature of White’s death could be expected to capture the attention of someone like Dr. King. According to Mitchell:

There were so many injuries that almost any of the bullets could have killed him. Bullets had pulverized his liver and ripped his diaphragm. At least one had carved a gaping hole in the left side of his heart. The aorta, which carried vital blood to the rest of the body, had been torn in many places. There was no question that he bled to death.13

But Bowers miscalculated in believing that White’s murder would bring King to Natchez. For one thing, another white man attempted to kill James Meredith on June 6. Meredith, famous for integrating Ole Miss, had begun a one-man 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, early the previous morning, to inspire African Americans to register to vote. But 30 miles into the march, Meredith sustained serious injuries when Aubrey Norvell, an unemployed hardware store worker, struck him with, as Meredith later described it, “over a hundred pellets” from a 16-gauge shotgun that hit him “in the head, neck, back and legs.” King joined several others in taking up Meredith’s mantle, a three-week trek that did not include a detour to protest White’s murder in Natchez.14

This may not have been the first time Bowers considered this kind of a trap. Though more speculative than the White attempt, evidence suggests that Bowers wanted to draw King to Mississippi for the Sparks-McManaman plot. Under this scenario, Bowers had multiple motivations when he ordered a “code four” on James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in the Mississippi Burning murders. Undoubtedly, the most widely accepted interpretation of the crime—that Bowers wanted to use the murders to scare the hundreds of incoming student activists on their way to Mississippi for Freedom Summer in 1964—is true. But the disappearance of two white men alongside a black man in Neshoba County also generated nationwide attention, and revulsion when federal agents discovered the bodies weeks later. Bowers seemed to anticipate the reaction—one of the largest federal investigations in American history—in a speech given only weeks before in a closely guarded meeting of Klan members.

“The enemy will seek their final push for victory here in Mississippi,” he said, referring to the well-publicized Freedom Summer. But he added that open violence between whites and blacks would lead to a “decree from the communist authorities in charge of the national government . . . declaring martial law.”15 The federal intervention in Mississippi did not quite reach the level of martial law, but polls showed that, during the height of the search for the bodies in Mississippi, when Bowers provoked law enforcement by arranging for additional attacks, a large number of Americans favored something like a declaration of martial law if the violence got worse. Such turbulence surely would invite a visit and protests, as it often did, from Dr. King. And this raises questions about something else Bowers told his audience in the speech before the murders. Speaking of guerrilla strike teams who would resist the federal government and respond to outside agitators, Bowers said:

Any personal attacks on the enemy should be carefully planned to include only the leaders and prime white collaborators of the enemy forces. These attacks against these selected individual targets should, of course, be as severe as circumstances and conditions will permit. The leaders . . . should be our prime targets.16

As will become clear in the following chapter, Bowers calibrated major acts of violence for maximum, public effect. It was part of an even larger plan to incite violence across the country, not only in Mississippi—one that he kept even from his closest followers; one that he pursued with a religious devotion.

His failures to kill King from 1964 to 1966 did not deter Bowers. Instead, he appears to have learned from his mistakes and changed his tactics. When he could not pay Dixie Mafia killers, he turned “in house” to fellow Klansmen. When King could no longer be counted on to follow his announced itinerary in 1965, Bowers attempted to dictate the time and place of the murder through a trap (White’s killing) in 1966. Bowers was not alone in plotting King’s assassination; King escaped numerous times through luck. The minister benefitted from advance warning only once, in 1965, because the informant Delmar Dennis had become aware of the plot and because President Johnson took a unique role in protecting King’s life. So, to ultimately succeed in killing King, Bowers relied on a plot that could account for, and even closely track, King’s movements; one that would be flexible, in place to be activated regardless of time or geography, when the opportunity presented itself. He turned to a Dixie Mafia hitman who could follow King, even outside of the domain of Mississippi, and assassinate him using killers for hire.

But in 1967 and 1968, Bowers faced a major obstacle: the non-stop surveillance and scrutiny of federal law enforcement. Agents in the Jackson, Mississippi, field office engaged in what amounted to a virtual war with the Mississippi KKK. Bowers always took extraordinary measures to avoid surveillance. When he gave the aforementioned 1964 speech about the “enemy’s . . . final push for victory” before the MIBURN killings, Bowers did so in a remote building so that Piper airplanes could provide aerial warning of any potential law enforcement observers or raids.17 The audience had been body-searched upon entry. At one point, he proposed firing the entire leadership of the White Knights out of concern that some might be informants. In 1967, with his one-time close aide Delmar Dennis prepared to testify against Bowers and others at trial, Bowers was more cautious than ever. The FBI’s efforts denied him freedom of movement and access to his lieutenants and foot soldiers.

Bowers responded to this in a familiar way: he turned to outsiders to advance his plans to kill King and engage in white supremacist violence. As described in detail in Chapter 1, the White Knights floated a high-money bounty offer to the Dixie Mafia to kill King. In researching Donald Nissen’s claims, something became clear: unbeknownst to Nissen, Leroy McManaman, the hoodlum who offered him the bounty at Leavenworth, very likely participated in the 1964 Sparks-McManaman plot on King. McManaman belonged to the same cadre of Dixie Mafia gangsters as Don Sparks, a group headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. McManaman knew Sparks personally according to Robert “Rubie” Charles Jenkins, a fellow member of the Tulsa gang and Sparks’s closest friend. McMamanan, in turn, partnered with Jenkins in an interstate car-theft ring that landed both men in federal prison in 1964.18 But McManaman, who somehow secured a commutation from the Kansas governor against the wishes of a state prosecutor in 1952,19 also managed to win a rare federal appeals bond in 1964. This allowed McManaman to temporarily leave Leavenworth while he challenged his 1963 conviction in the Tenth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The court’s jurisdiction included Kansas, where McManaman and Jenkins were originally convicted, and five other states.20 But McManaman not only imperiled his appeal, he risked adding years to his prison sentence: he spent weeks outside of Kansas, staying with a married real estate broker, Sybil Eure, in Jackson, Mississippi, in the spring of 1964. Thus McManaman, whose criminal activity rarely included Mississippi, found his way to the Magnolia State at the same time that his friend, hitman Donald Sparks, took refuge at a Jackson motel, waiting for the money to kill King. There’s little doubt he was there to assist Sparks in King’s assassination, but the bounty money never arrived, McManaman’s appeal failed, and he had to return, before Freedom Summer began, to Leavenworth to serve out his sentence.

It is critical to note that Eure is the woman whose name McManaman provided to Donald Nissen as a go-between if Nissen wanted to join the 1967 King murder conspiracy. She was the first person the FBI interviewed to follow up on Nissen’s revelations about the plot in the Sherman, Texas, jail. Eure denied any connection to a King bounty; her explanations for how she knew McManaman defied credulity, including the claim that an unidentified friend recommended McManaman to her as an expert on real estate.21 Putting aside the dubious notion that a middle-class woman in Jackson would share a mutual connection to a hardened career criminal—and that her friend would encourage Eure to shelter that criminal for weeks—McManaman’s only background in real estate was running an illegal gambling operation out of an inn he ran in Colorado. McManaman’s prison records reveal a much deeper relationship than Eure admitted: he hoped to marry her when he got out of Leavenworth, and she was his most frequent visitor while he stayed behind bars.22

The FBI neglected another important revelation by Eure. Asked if she knew anything about the other two go-betweens that McManaman spoke of to Donald Nissen, Eure provided some interesting answers. She told the agents she knew a Floyd—her own brother, Floyd Gardner. This Floyd, however, was not the Floyd referenced by McManaman, as will become clear in Chapter 5, but the FBI did little to investigate. Eure also identified two men she knew who were connected to the federal marshals office in Mississippi: Charlie Sutherland, a cousin, and Robert C. Thomas, an associate. Neither of them, she asserted, would have anything to do with the Klan or a plot on King’s life.

Interviews conducted by the authors with people familiar with Sutherland and with Sutherland himself confirm Eure’s assertions about her cousin. But Robert C. Thomas, as federal authorities would learn soon after the King assassination, did associate with the Ku Klux Klan. Before he began work as a clerk with the southern district court in Mississippi, Thomas was appointed as the chief investigator for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state government agency that spied on civil rights groups in Mississippi as part of the state’s wider effort to resist federally imposed integration. But as a clerk for the federal courts, Thomas illegally rigged juries on behalf of Sam Bowers. Nissen did tell the authors that McManaman specifically noted that the go-between had recently been appointed as a deputy marshal in Mississippi. This would seem to eliminate Thomas as a candidate (he was only a clerk). But at the time that McManaman stayed with Eure, Thomas had been in the news for having been deputized as a marshal temporarily, to help law enforcement as needed, if civil rights protests got out of hand. And, as a clerk in the court, Thomas was in a unique position to cover for McManaman as he violated his appeal bond and visited Mississippi. He could have, for instance, provided false documentation to show that McManaman was in Jackson to provide information to authorities there. No record indicates that the FBI investigated either Sutherland or Thomas as the potential go-between Nissen cited in his July 2 warning about the King plot.

This is because the FBI accepted Eure’s claims of innocence and ignorance without a qualm. They arranged a cursory follow-up investigation at Leavenworth, and did not even bother to interview McManaman until months after the King assassination, even after John May corroborated parts of Donald Nissen’s story. A respectable Southern woman like Eure, they reasoned, would not involve herself in anything like a KKK murder conspiracy. On one level this observation dovetailed with history: women played an important support role for the KKK but they almost never participated in acts of terrorism or assumed positions of leadership. But the FBI, once again, underestimated Sam Bowers. At the very moment the FBI visited Sybil Eure,23 Sam Bowers was planning yet another way around the FBI’s non-stop surveillance, and it included employing a Jackson woman, Kathy Ainsworth, among a team of terrorists.

The choice to use Ainsworth as a terrorist starting in 1967 was a stroke of evil genius. An attractive young elementary schoolteacher, she did not fit any of the stereotypes usually assigned to Klan members, allowing her to keep her terrorist activities hidden even from a vigilant FBI. But Ainsworth embraced racial and ethnic resentment as stridently as anyone who ever burnt down a black church or attacked a civil rights protestor. Raised by a virulently racist single mother, Margaret Capomacchia, Ainsworth was mentored in white supremacy by Sidney Crockett Barnes, a vile bigot who fled Florida to Mobile, Alabama, after a law enforcement crackdown on racial violence. Barnes did not stop his support for terrorism, becoming part of a failed 1963–1964 plot against Martin Luther King Jr.’s life that will be detailed in the next chapter. Both Barnes and Margaret Capomacchia enjoyed close connections to Klansmen in Mississippi, and Barnes sent his daughter to college there, with Kathy as her roommate.24 Kathy later joined the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race in Mississippi, a front group for the Mississippi White Knights, but privately worked closely with both the White Knights and the United Klans of America. She even kept her militant associations secret from her husband, a man Sidney Barnes, the surrogate father who gave her away at her wedding, did not approve of as her spouse. Barnes wished Kathy had married someone else: a like-minded extremist, Thomas Albert Tarrants III.25

Barnes introduced Kathy to Tarrants, a tall, lanky, and bright twenty-year-old, at the Barnes residence in Mobile. He indoctrinated both Tarrants and Ainsworth in a version of racist ideology embraced by Sam Bowers and a network of fanatics that stretched across the United States. Tarrants went searching for Bowers in the summer of 1967, and Bowers would use both him and Ainsworth to launch a series of attacks on black and Jewish targets that bewildered the Jackson office of the FBI for months. But that wave of violence was just a prelude for the grand finale, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.