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3

the motive

In the summer of 1967, Sam Bowers routinely met secretly in the woods with Tommy Tarrants. Oftentimes, they met only after Bowers changed vehicles several times. When they communicated in person, Bowers often insisted that they exchange messages on paper rather than verbally, and that the papers then be burnt. Sam Bowers had great plans for Tarrants, plans of which the young radical may not have been fully aware, and Bowers had no intention of letting local or federal law enforcement disrupt his agenda.

In using Tarrants and Ainsworth, Bowers was not using outsiders simply to avoid legal scrutiny and engage in terrorism. Bowers was showing his true colors for the first time since he became the Grand Wizard of the White Knights in 1964. Bowers ran the White Knights with two agendas. One, defending the so-called Southern Way of Life, was obvious both to his members and to the general public. The other, a religious vision of a holy race war, he kept even from his top lieutenants. But not from Tarrants. Sidney Barnes, the Mobile painter who mentored Tarrants and Ainsworth, had already inculcated both of his charges in the same religious worldview as Bowers. All of them—Bowers, Barnes, Tarrants, and Ainsworth—followed the teachings of Wesley Albert Swift. One of the few White Knights who knew about this new, secret cadre of terrorists was Laud E. (L. E.) Matthews. He even referred to the Tarrants/Ainsworth group as Swift’s “underground hit squad.”1

From his pulpit in Southern California, Swift stood, literally and figuratively, as the focal point in a religious movement that wedded together fundamentalist, apocalyptic Christian ideas with white supremacist ideology. Known today as Christian Identity, its roots could be traced to Victorian-era pseudo-anthropology. A small set of amateur anthropologists with theological interest began speculating about the lost tribes of Israel, the subgroups of Hebrews who in Old Testament lore settled the northern half of the Kingdom of Israel in 722 b.c., only to be exiled by an Assyrian king, never to be seen again. These Victorians argued that some of these lost tribes ultimately resettled in Europe, becoming the progenitors of white Europeans. In this telling, white Christian Europeans then had partial claim, alongside Jews, to being God’s chosen people.2

When these ideas spread to the United States, they became popularized by William Cameron, the editor for automobile tycoon Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. Ford and Cameron infamously used their periodical, with a distribution in the hundreds of thousands, to spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories throughout North America and the world (Adolf Hitler had copies). The appeal of the paper dovetailed with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership in the 1920s reached into the millions across the United States. The pro-

Confederacy Lost Cause narrative celebrated in the critically acclaimed film The Birth of a Nation (1915), and the nativist and xenophobic animus directed at the wave of immigrants—Jewish and Catholic—who flooded the United States between 1880 and 1920, helped revitalize the Klan. Thus in the United States, and in North America as a whole, the Anglocentric interpretation of the Lost Tribe narrative became mixed with racism and anti-Semitism. Before long, racist scholars began arguing that white Europeans had exclusive claims as the Chosen People and that those calling themselves Jews in the contemporary world were something akin to imposters. But it took young theologians like Wesley Swift to develop ideas rooted in an idiosyncratic and “creative” reinterpretation of the book of Genesis into a full-fledged school of thought.3

Swift and a handful of other seminarians attending Bible school in Southern California focused their attention on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As World War II raged, their thoughts paralleled the worst racist dogma of Hitler’s Third Reich. According to Swift and his friends, conventional understandings of the story of the forbidden fruit missed a key element. Swift agreed with some conventional religious scholars that the account is a metaphor for a sexual relationship between Adam and Eve; this is the great (original) Sin that leads to the Fall of Man after the serpent, Satan in reptilian form, tempts Eve to disobey God and eat from the Tree of Knowledge. But Christian Identity’s originators believed that the book of Genesis alludes to a second intimate relationship—one between Eve and the serpent/Satan. The first act of intercourse produces one seed-line of humanity, through the person of Seth. This seed-line produces the people who will reach a covenant with God through Abraham, and settle the Kingdom of Israel to fulfil God’s promise to Abraham’s descendants—the “Chosen People.” Consistent with the earlier, if speculative, scholarship, these are the “Chosen People” who are exiled from Israel and migrate to Europe. But the second act of intercourse, between Eve and the serpent, produces a demonic seed-line, through the person of Cain. Cain is the offspring of Satan in this rendering, and “so-called Jews” belong to Cain’s bloodline. So, according to Christian Identity scholars, the people who call themselves Jews today are really imposters, falsely asserting their status as Chosen People while really operating on Satan’s behalf. As for people of color—they are subhuman descendants of the “beasts of the fields” described in Genesis as created before God formed Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib. The essence of Christian Identity theology thus becomes this: the satanic, imposter Jews manipulate people of color in a two-thousand-year cosmic conspiracy against the true Chosen People, white Europeans.4

Embraced at first by a very small group of people, this radical theological interpretation had far-reaching consequences—ultimately producing a unique motive for Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The motive grew out of Christian Identity devotion to their own view of End Times—God’s final judgment on humanity, before the righteous are saved and Jesus returns to earth in a thousand-year reign in a paradise on Earth. Like other fundamentalist Christians, Identity believers look for guidance from the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, to understand what God has in store for the world. They share a belief that the prophecies in the Book of Revelation will signal the pending End Times. Notably, Identity Christians, like many fundamentalist Christians, believe that God will impose a series of enormous calamities on the Earth, during a period known as the Tribulation. A false prophet—the antichrist—will seemingly solve the world’s problems but, in reality, he is Satan’s minion. The forces of Satan will amass an army and terrorize humanity until Jesus, and the army of God, vanquish them at the final battle—the Battle of Armageddon. God will then bless his faithful followers with a thousand-year reign, with Jesus as king.

But Swift and his devout followers interpret the End Times differently than do conventional Christians, differences largely rooted in their reinterpretation of the origins of mankind. The antichrist, in their telling, is not just one man, but the entirety of world Jewry. Moreover, since the birth of Cain, these minions of Satan have been working against mankind. Swift’s sermons frequently asserted that Jews, using international communism as their tool, manipulated everything from the American government to the United Nations to the civil rights movement for satanic ends; he referred to this as “the Beast system,” a description of what other Christian Identity followers (and other fundamentalist Christians) believe is the rule of the antichrist implied in the Book of Revelation. The End Times is simply an accelerated period where their true intentions are exposed, and where God ultimately saves his Chosen People, white Europeans. The foot soldiers for the army of Satan, in this scenario, are the subhuman people of color who operate at the whims of the imposter Jews. And the Battle of Armageddon, in essence, is a holy race war.

Another distinctive feature of Christian Identity theology explains why so many of its members, as it will become clear, engaged in provocative acts of violence to incite this holy race war. A large number of conventional fundamentalists believe that faithful Christians will be spared the Tribulation through something known as the Rapture. Devout Christians will literally vanish before the world experiences plagues, earthquakes, and related horrors. But Christian Identity believers reject the Rapture. To the contrary, they believe that good Christians—for example, white Europeans—will have to fight the forces of Satan during the Tribulation. Christian Identity zealots stockpiled weapons at alarming rates throughout the 1960s (and beyond) in part because of this understanding. And when they began to see signs of End Times, in the social upheaval that marked the mid- to late 1960s, they increasingly became willing to use them.5

And it fell to Swift, from his pulpit at the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, to interpret and convey those beliefs to Christian Identity followers, a group that included some of the most well-known and violent racists in the country, several of whom had already conspired to assassinate King in multiple plots. The charismatic Swift’s influence derived from his radio ministry. Swift began his racist and anti-

Semitic sermons in the 1950s; estimates suggest that by 1967 he reached tens of thousands of listeners on the West Coast. Those who could not get Swift’s signal could hear his sermons on tape, via an informal distribution network that included his most devoted followers. And Swift ordained a number of ministers in his Church of Jesus Christ Christian; they relayed his ideas to audiences across the country while Swift preached to a mostly female audience in Hollywood.6

In his sermons, Swift used a combination of astrology, current events analysis, biblical exegesis, and even ufology to divine evidence that the End Times were approaching. A key moment came in February 1962. An alignment of astrological and real-world international events convinced Swift that the world was entering the “zero hour,” the final period before the onset of the Tribulation. Swift told his parishioners:

Zero hour has come . . . We will watch the signs as they develop and we will watch the measures as they follow in the course of this year.

Do not forget the sign of the “son of man” in the heavens. It will only end when the skies are filled with the crafts of heaven to make your experiments of rocketry look like amateur experiments, when all the hosts of heaven join you in the greatest show of power, of glory in all the earth. When your race shall be elevated to its position with the smiling face of our Father in all His majesty and glory saying—these are my children with whom I am well pleased.7

Events in Mississippi that September convinced Swift his prognostication was accurate. Black air force veteran James Meredith challenged the University of Mississippi’s racial exclusion policy by enrolling in the institution, a court-supported action that nonetheless inflamed the citizens of Mississippi and provoked white supremacists from across the country who flocked to Mississippi to protest. Governor Ross Barnett personally and physically blocked Meredith’s entry into Ole Miss with the help of state troopers, forcing President John F. Kennedy to send National Guard troops to impose the court order and protect Meredith. Havoc ensued. Protestors and college students battled the federal troops, using everything from rocks to rifles. Several participants on both sides sustained injuries; a local man and a foreign reporter died in the melee. Things only settled after JFK sent hundreds of additional troops to Oxford, Mississippi, to impose order.8

The Ole Miss race riot inspired Swift, whose fellow Christian Identity minister, Oren Potito, helped incite the crowds to violence. In the immediate aftermath Swift told his audience:

I want you to know that you are in the latter days. “And as it was in the days of Noah” [refers to] a massive program of Satan’s kingdom which is to mongrelize your race. They want to implement this program with troops. They want to back it by every conspiratorial measure that Satan can dream up. And some of these brainwashed people lifting up a standard of self-

righteousness which is Satan’s own lie—behind this shield they march to destroy . . .

. . . I am going to tell you this. [The Lord] is coming in with a long sword and a sharp sickle. And He is coming in to reap the Grapes of Wrath. And to trample the Wine Press of Judgement. I want you to know tonight, that you are a part of this battle. So don’t surrender. Don’t give in. If they are going to try to force your Race with violence, then we shall meet them in like token. Let me assure you of this. That in this occupation, have no fear. For He said:—“I shall be like a wall of fire about you.” “No weapon formed against you shall prosper.” . . .

Again, I say that we are not alone. As I said this afternoon, He said—“I shall never leave nor forsake you even until the end of the age.”9

Just as importantly, the events at Ole Miss appeared to confirm an important element of the Christian Identity worldview: that rank-and-file whites could be energized into violence against the federal government, whose leaders, as Swift indicated in his sermon, “worked” at the behest of their antichrist Jewish puppet masters. Before 1962, Christian Identity believers found little sympathy, even among aggressive racists, for their vitriolic anti-Jewish message. Raised on a very different version of Christianity from their youth, and focused on resisting integration, most Southern racists could not understand the call for genocidal violence against Jews. The Klan employed anti-

Semitic rhetoric since its second revival in the 1920s, but actual violence against Southern Jews and Jewish targets was rare in part because Southern Jews had largely assimilated into the modern American South.10 But if they could keep their anti-Semitic message to a whisper, Christian Identity ministers could find natural allies in the Jim Crow South among conventional racists looking to preserve the so-called Southern Way of Life. Reverend Potito, a Christian Identity minister, helped rile up the white crowd at Ole Miss into a violent frenzy without mentioning Jews.

Potito belonged to a group whose name deliberately obscured its extremist and Christian Identity disposition: the National States Rights Party (NSRP). The NSRP was formed in 1957 by white supremacists J. B. Stoner, a limp-legged Georgia lawyer, and his friend and fellow Georgian Ed Fields, a chiropractor. The group did run people for elected office, as their name implies, including for president and vice president of the United States in 1960 and 1964.11 But they also were among the most violent white supremacist groups in the country, earning a place on California attorney general Thomas Lynch’s list of the most dangerous terrorist groups in his state by 1965.12 The group’s periodical, The Thunderbolt, did frequently feature blatantly anti-

Semitic articles, but in public, the group chose not to feature the racist elements of its platform. Stoner’s history illustrates why.

Having openly supported the Nazis as a teenager during World War II, Stoner likely became familiar with Identity ideas as early as the late 1940s, as they filtered to Georgia from Western Canada. He soon moved to Tennessee and began to write books that echoed the Christian Identity message that Jesus was not Jewish, that Jews were imposters and literally Satan’s spawn. He also started his white supremacist career by calling for the mass extermination of Jews. Hitler, in Stoner’s view, did not go far enough. His public focus on condemning Jews, even above blacks, led the Tennessee Ku Klux Klan to expel Stoner from their ranks. Other Klan organizations shunned him, forcing Stoner and Fields to form the Christian Anti-Jewish Party in the 1950s, but that group failed to attract enough members.13

Ultimately the two men chose to form the NSRP in large part to disguise their ideological and violent intentions. Stoner attempted to awaken the white masses to his cause by orchestrating a wave of Jewish temple bombings across the country in 1957 and 1958. But this only confirmed his frustrations and those of his followers. White Citizens Councils, which included some Jewish members, condemned the bombings. President Dwight Eisenhower publicly denounced the bombings and formed a task force that helped identify the immediate perpetrators but failed to develop a case against Stoner. To Stoner’s chagrin, although Klan groups deployed anti-Semitic rhetoric, they directed their violence almost exclusively against blacks. Anti-

black violence satisfied only part of the Christian Identity agenda; it struck at the symptoms rather than the disease. For the Christian Identity End Times prophecy to be fulfilled, “everyday” whites would have to join in the holy race war against Jews and people of color. The Ole Miss riots showed this was at least possible.14

The Ole Miss riots helped galvanize racists across the country; thousands joined the KKK and similar organizations to resist federally mandated integration. Others saw the government’s intervention in the South as a sign that they should join militant antigovernment groups, like the Minutemen. This presented opportunities for Christian Identity fanatics but also risks. If the upheaval in the American South illustrated signs of the End Times, then these radicalized whites could become the foot soldiers people like Swift needed to wage war against the Beast system.

But the Christian Identity believer’s concurrent anti-Semitism and advocacy of egregious violence ran the risk of turning off even hardcore Klan sympathizers. Christian Identity believers had to walk a fine line between their religious imperatives and their need for a widespread following. If they did not form their own organizations, followers of Swift assumed roles in the upper echelons of conventional racist groups while hiding their violent, race-war agenda from rank-and-file segregationists until their God “demonstrated” his message. Swift, with his second in charge Lieutenant Colonel William Potter Gale, was no exception to this balancing act. He used the Church of Jesus Christ Christian as the first “front” in a four-front structure later referred to as the Christian Defense League. Researcher David Boylan describes the system:

Faithful members of the CJCC were recruited for the “Second Front” . . . the AWAKE movement. The more militant members were then recruited in to the “Third Front” which was the Christian Knights of the Invisible Empire “which will have the outward impression of a political-religious group not interested in violence.” It was from this group that the most militant members were recruited for the “Inner Den.” These recruits were the ones that committed acts of violence. Gale stated that “leaders in our country might have to be eliminated to further the goals of the CKIE” and that “God will take care of those who must be eliminated.”15

Several Swift devotees assumed key positions in other supremacist groups. Gale, who enjoyed a hot-and-cold relationship with Swift, worked within the California Rangers, an overtly antigovernment and anticommunist group but one, with Gale in charge, that could also serve a religious agenda. The Minutemen were like a national version of the Rangers. Again, under the auspices of antigovernment and anticommunist militancy, the group attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of members across the United States, people who might have been turned off by talk about astrological signs and the two seed-lines of Adam. But several of the most important leaders also were key figures in Swift’s church. Walter Peyson, the right-hand man to Minuteman founder Robert DePugh, was a Christian Identity fanatic.16 Dennis Mower, the West Coast leader of the Minutemen, was Swift’s personal aide;17 Kenneth Goff, leader of the largest Minutemen subgroup out of Colorado, wrote Christian Identity books.18

It was an easy sell for men like Peyson, Mower, and Goff to get rank-and-file Minutemen to prepare as an army in a future civil war, using the fear of communist subversion of the U.S. government as the pretext. Minutemen collected an enormous arsenal of weapons. In the raid of just one Minutemen compound in New York, federal authorities discovered

1,000,000 rounds of rifle and small-arms ammunition, chemicals for preparing bomb detonators, considerable radio equipment—including 30 walkie-talkies and shortwave sets tuned to police bands—125 single-shot and automatic rifles, 10 dynamite bombs, 5 mortars, 12 .30-caliber machine guns, 25 pistols, 240 knives (hunting, throwing, cleaver and machete), 1 bazooka, 3 grenade launchers, 6 hand grenades and 50 80-millimeter mortar shells. For good measure, there was even a crossbow replete with curare-tipped arrows.19

Another raid of one Minuteman’s ranch in California uncovered “eight machine guns, and one hundred rifles, shotguns and pistols. When they searched his barn they found an ammunition dump for heavy caliber rockets, bombs, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.”20

At a secret Minuteman compound, senior Minuteman leader Roy Frankhouser (another Christian Identity follower) showed a reporter thirty four-foot-long rockets he claimed could strike targets several miles away. Of course, such over-the-top weapons hoarding was also consistent with the religious prophecy of Swift, one in which the forces of God must do battle with the antichrist when the Tribulation begins.

As racial unrest intensified in the long hot summers of 1966 and 1967, Swift encouraged his followers to see the prophetic implications. “No wonder there is confusion in the land,” Swift told his audience in the aftermath of the summer’s rioting. “This confusion comes from the mind of Lucifer whom Jesus said was from the Netherworld while the Children of God came down from above. Thus out of the Netherworld comes a constant revolution and ferment into your society, and this continues until it is destroyed.” But to destroy it, white Europeans would have to start their own “great uprising . . . against the evil in [the nation.]”21

The record shows that Swift’s most devout followers did more than sit idly as tensions mounted, waiting passively for God’s plan to unfold. They became provocateurs, using incendiary rhetoric and even violence to drop a match in a lake of gasoline. Rev. Potito, as mentioned earlier, stoked racial resentment at Ole Miss. Christian Identity Minister Connie Lynch toured the country to attend counter-

rallies with his friend J. B. Stoner. Together, the men formed what Klan expert Patty Sims called a “two-man riot squad.” Sims describes their escapades in her book The Klan:

Lynch once told a Baltimore rally crowd: “I represent God, the white race and constitutional government, and everyone who doesn’t like that can go straight to hell. I’m not inciting you to riot—I’m inciting you to victory!” His audience responded by chanting, “Kill the niggers! Kill! Kill!” After the rally, stirred-up white youths headed for the city’s slums, attacking blacks with fists and bottles. At another rally in Berea, Kentucky, Lynch’s diatribe was followed by two fatal shootings. Again, in Anniston, Alabama, he goaded his audience: “If it takes killing to get the Negroes out of the white man’s streets and to protect our constitutional rights, I say, ‘Yes, kill them!’” A carload of men left the rally and gunned down a black man on a stretch of highway.22

The Minutemen planned several acts of violence, including placing poisonous gas in the ventilation system at the United Nations and attacking Jewish summer camps. Only poor planning prevented what could have been highly provocative actions in the cauldron of the 1960s. As one New York investigator noted: “Kooks they are, harmless they are not. . . . It’s only due to their incompetence, and not any lack of motivation, that they haven’t left a trail of corpses in their wake.”23

But the Minutemen did attempt to inflame racial tensions between blacks and whites during the peak of civil disorder in the 1960s. They prepared fake pamphlets, designed to look like black nationalist propaganda, urging blacks to riot. “Kill the white devils and have the women for your pleasure,”24 they read. At one point, Minutemen sped through black neighborhoods tossing these pamphlets out the window.

Swift devotee and Minuteman acolyte Thomas Tarrants described the entire phenomenon thusly: “Part of the strategy was to create fear in the black community—but it was more important to produce racial polarization and eventual retaliation. This retaliation would then swell the ranks of whites who would be willing to condone or employ violence as a viable response to the racial problem . . . Our hope and dream was that a race war would come.”25

Ultimately killing Martin Luther King Jr. came to be seen by Samuel Bowers and certain of his associates as the one act that could indeed foment a national holy race war. For years King had been a target of these radicals; he would become the only target. Nearly every serious attempt to kill King from 1958 to 1967 involved Christian Identity zealots or groups who were led by them.

As early as 1958, Stoner had offered to “bring his boys from Atlanta” to Alabama to kill King for a “discounted rate” of $1,500. Stoner directed the offer to members of the United Klans of America, as part of a larger package of violent activity that included bombings targeting other Alabama civil rights activists. Stoner managed to carry out some of the ancillary attacks, but his more brazen plans were thwarted by authorities who knew about them in advance. Stoner was the target of an operation organized by Alabama law enforcement authorities, including arch-segregationist Bull Connor. Interesting that someone as bigoted and barbaric as Connor—he famously arranged with Klan members to let them violently beat the Freedom Riders at Birmingham bus terminals in 1961—would be far outside the mainstream Stoner when it came to violent extremism. In 1958, Connor arranged with a KKK member to coax Stoner into talking about potential acts of violence in Alabama. Prosecutors believed that the effort came too close to entrapment, and did not prosecute Stoner. Stoner did not get a chance to have “his boys” kill King, but as usual, he did not go to prison for his antics, either.26

In 1963, Alabama was home to two additional murder plots against Dr. King. In the early morning hours of May 12, 1963, in Birmingham, a bomb destroyed King’s room at the A. G. Gaston Motel. This came hours after another bomb detonated at the home of his brother, Rev. A. D. King, the night of May 11. The two men had been working with other civil rights leaders began to secure integrationist concessions from Birmingham’s white elites after weeks of protests. That both men survived the attacks can only be attributed to luck. The motel bombers, as King later noted, “placed [the explosives] as to kill or seriously wound anyone who might have been in Room 30—my room. Evidently the would-be assassins did not know I was in Atlanta that night.”27 No one was ever arrested, but internal police investigations show the FBI strongly suspected members of the NSRP, who had held a segregationist rally that night, of participating in the attack. The timing of the attack suggests an additional motive—inflaming the black community. King himself suggested this. “The bombing had been well-timed,” the civil rights leader asserted. “The bars in the Negro district close at midnight, and the bombs exploded just as some of Birmingham’s Saturday night drinkers came out of the bars. Thousands of Negroes poured into the streets.”28 If this was the goal, it had its intended effect. The coordinated bombings triggered the first major race riot in the history of Birmingham, one that almost forced President John F. Kennedy to use federal troops to quell it.

The second major riot occurred four months later, when members of a Klavern blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. The leaders of the United Klans of America, the nation’s largest Klan group, had recently shunned Eastview Klavern #13 for its connections to the over-the-top-violent NSRP, the church bombers associated with Fields and Stoner.29 No one would have expected King to be in the Birmingham church, but King had used the building as a headquarters for his May protest campaign. Rev. King acted as everyone would have predicted in the wake of the horrifying violence—he returned to Birmingham to deliver the girls’ eulogy. He also came, with other civil rights leaders, to help calm Birmingham as tensions remained high following the bombing and large-scale riots. Birmingham was a city on the brink of horrific urban combat, according to civil rights activist Rev. Ed King (no relation to Martin Luther King), who joined the push for nonviolence following the bombing. Ed King saw law enforcement officers with heavy-

caliber machine guns on the streets. He is convinced, to this day, that any additional rioting would have resulted in a large-scale bloodbath. “All it would have taken was a bottle breaking, sounding like a gun,” he said.30

This is likely what Christian Identity believers had intended when they spent the days following the bombing looking for an opportunity to shoot King with a high-powered rifle. The “honor” fell to Noah Carden, a member of the Mobile White Citizens Council and a Swift devotee who was once discharged from the military on suspicion he was psychotic. According to Sidney Barnes, whose description months later of the assassination plot was surreptitiously recorded by informant Willie Somersett, Carden could never get a clear shot on King, who was constantly surrounded by aides. Barnes also revealed that he, Carden, and three other Christian Identity radicals—William Potter Gale, Admiral John Crommelin, and Bob Smith—all met in Birmingham the day before the bombing of the church.31 None were Birmingham natives, and Gale came hundreds of miles from California. This raises the possibility that these men knew about the church bombing in advance. Many suspected Stoner helped mastermind the bombing; he enjoyed close relationships with all five men. Crommelin ran for political office, including, in 1960, vice president of the United States, under the banner of the NSRP. Had Carden succeeded in assassinating the leader of the civil rights movement on the heels of the murderous bombing, Ed King believes it would have triggered massive riots and violence not only in Birmingham, but across the South.32

Barnes and company continued to plot against Martin Luther King Jr.’s life in 1964, according to information Barnes conveyed to Somersett and recorded on tape without his knowledge. Somersett even provided Barnes with a rifle for the task, one that Miami police had secretly marked. King’s unpredictable changes in itinerary continued to keep him alive.33

Records indicate Stoner joined a close friend of his, James Venable, a fellow attorney from Georgia and longtime leader of the oldest national Klan organization, in an attempt to kill King in 1965, one that also involved the goal of triggering race riots. The plot was exposed when a young radical, Daniel Wagner, got caught transporting explosives from Georgia to Ohio. Wagner told Columbus, Ohio, police—and later Congress—about a King assassination plan revealed to him by a bleach-blonde Klan empress, Eloise Witte, one the few female Klan leaders in the country. Witte, who ran a Midwest chapter of Venable’s National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, told Wagner that the Klan planned to gun down King and his family after King delivered a commencement speech at his wife Coretta’s alma mater, Antioch College in Ohio. The plot failed when Witte could not organize enough men in time to participate in the ambush, despite a $25,000 bounty offered by Venable’s Klan. A second witness, a young member of the NSRP, confirmed this account to Congress even as Witte, predictably, denied it. Such an egregious act of violence certainly would have triggered massive violence in Ohio, and possibly across the country.34 But Wagner added something else—the explosives he brought to Ohio, given to him by Venable’s Klansmen, were to be used to blow up buildings belonging to civil rights groups and to the Nation of Islam, a militant, black separatist group. The goal, Wagner said, was to ignite a race war.35

A second 1965 King assassination plot in Swift’s native state of California would have been just as if not more inflammatory had it succeeded. Police arrested a Swift acolyte, Keith Gilbert, with 1,400 pounds of dynamite; the intended target: the Palladium theater in Los Angeles, as the city honored King for recently winning the Nobel Peace Prize.36 In recent years, Gilbert has opened up about the plot, minimizing his own role (and his connection to Swift) but highlighting the part played by Dennis Mower, Swift’s chauffeur. Gilbert described being pressured into the Palladium bombing plot against his will by Christian Identity fanatic Mower. Gilbert even claims that he gave the anonymous tip to the police that led to his own arrest—a way of avoiding mass murder while also avoiding the wrath of Mower. Either way, killing King and hundreds of his supporters in one blast certainly would have triggered violent outrage.37

Because these plots routinely failed, they generally left little concrete evidence to back a prosecution for potential murder. Only Gilbert, who was caught red-handed with explosives, went to prison for his role in a King plot. The FBI, when it had jurisdiction to investigate these crimes, often risked exposing informants at a potential trial, with little or no guarantee that such a leap of faith would be rewarded with a prosecution. It was hard enough to convict someone in the South for actual acts of racial violence, much less potential acts of violence. In other instances the FBI failed to piece together the contours of the plots, questioning their very existence. This was true, notably, of the original plot involving McManaman and Sparks. More than anything, law enforcement agencies at all levels of government failed to see the ideological framework that connected these plots, the two degrees of separation, so to speak, from every serious MLK murder plot and Wesley Swift’s teachings. Christian Identity did not become a commonly understood phenomenon in counterterrorism circles for at least another decade, in part because Swift’s devotees were so good at blending in with more conventional white supremacist groups. No one was better at this game than Sam Bowers.

Bowers faced the same issues confronting other Christian Identity activists—the lack of enthusiasm from rank-and-file racists for anti-Jewish terrorism, the resistance to excessive violence in general, the lack of openness to Identity teachings. Bowers, like the senior members of the NSRP and the Minutemen, had to hide his extremist religious beliefs from his rank-and-file members. He did a good enough job of this that few scholars recognize the impact of Swift’s teachings on the leader of the White Knights of Mississippi. Bowers self-identified as a “warrior priest” in interviews he gave at the end of his life. He also described a spiritual moment in the 1950s, when, in grave condition from an automobile accident, a heavenly power “visited him” and convinced him to serve God. But Bowers’s idea of serving God may well have been influenced by his time in Southern California studying engineering at USC. Bowers attended the school after serving in the navy in World War II. He would have been in Southern California at exactly the moment that men like Swift began to systematize Christian Identity teachings.38

How he first became acquainted with Christian Identity is unknown. But no close student of Bowers’s career doubts his affinity for Swift by 1967. He discussed Swift’s sermons with newly arrived Tommy Tarrants, who idolized Swift, and with Burris Dunn, one of Bowers’s closest lieutenants. Dunn helped distribute Swift’s taped sermons, and his fanaticism for Swift ultimately drove away his wife and children. What even the most avid scholars of Bowers’s career, such as Charles Marsh, fail to recognize is that the Grand Wizard embraced Swift’s ideas from the moment he assumed leadership of the White Knights, in 1964. Dunn, for instance, was on Swift’s mailing list at least as of 1965, and no one who knew the pair would believe that Bowers followed Dunn’s lead rather than the other way around. Informants describe Bowers trying to convince his other Klan members to be an anti–“Jew Klan” rather than a solely anti–“N***R Klan” in 1964, but with little success. But the most obvious signs of Christian Identity influence come via Bowers’s own writings.

In the October 1964 Klan Ledger, the periodical Bowers wrote for the Ku Klux Klan, Bowers protested against the widespread FBI intrusion into Mississippi to investigate the Mississippi Burning murders. But in the back pages, literally in fine print, Bowers shifted from secular to religious writing. The biblical passages he cited include those that are almost never mentioned outside of Christian Identity polemics, even by conventional pastors who used the Bible to justify segregation. Bowers, predictably, railed against “today’s so-called Jews” who “persecute Christians, seeking to deceive, claiming Judea as their homeland and [that] they are ‘God’s Chosen’ . . . They ‘do Lie,’ for they are not Judeans, but Are the Synagogue of Satan!” He adds: “If a Jew is not capable of functioning as an individual, and must take part in Conspiracies to exist on this earth, that is his problem.” Passages also reference “Jew consulting anti-Christs” and assert that “Satan and the Anti-Christ stalk the land.”39

The early influence of Swift on Bowers helps explain why Bowers became obsessed with killing Mickey Schwerner, the Jewish activist who was among the three activists targeted by Bowers’s goons in Neshoba County. Schwerner’s enthusiasm for civil rights was enough to motivate the men, like Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, who arranged the Mississippi Burning murders. But Bowers chose to highlight something else after the three deaths. It was “the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew,” he gloated.

The Christian Identity component of Bowers’s thinking also explains the grand predictions he made on the eve of the killing and the actions he took immediately after. Recall that in a speech given two weeks before the Neshoba murders, Bowers prognosticated that soon-to-pass events in Mississippi would bring forth martial law, that they would create conditions for an internal rebellion in the state, and a cycle of violence involving white Southerners and black militants. Many see that speech as anticipating the violence that would greet the wave of student activists set to “invade” Mississippi during Freedom Summer. But through the lens of Christian Identity, the warning makes much more sense as a prediction of the beginnings of a race war, one that Bowers hoped to stoke with the Mississippi Burning murders. In killing whites as well as blacks, then carefully hiding their bodies, Bowers invited the very federal interference he railed against in his public speech. This was especially true as Bowers continued to arrange for violent acts for weeks as federal agents searched for the three missing activists. It is important to recognize that Bowers was exploring an assassination attempt on King, using criminals like Donald Sparks, in 1964. He spoke about targeting the leaders of the civil rights movement in the same speech in which he warned of the (supposedly) coming insurrection in Mississippi. Polls show that Bowers almost got his wish, with the majority of the country favoring placing Mississippi under martial law if the violence in Mississippi became more serious in the summer of 1964.40 Had the country witnessed the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., and the rioting it surely would have provoked, that easily would have qualified as “more serious.”

But Bowers could not publicly disclose his true intentions—to provoke federal intervention—to his audience of white Southerners raised for decades to resent federal interference during Reconstruction. Christian Identity beliefs did not hold sway with rank-and-file Klansmen who, if anything, wanted less federal intrusion in their state’s affairs. Bowers’s aide Delmar Dennis in fact described Bowers telling him privately that “the typical Mississippi redneck doesn’t have sense enough to know what he is doing . . . I have to use him for my own cause and direct his every action to fit my plan.”41

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.42

Delmar Dennis specifically tied Bowers’s plan to foment a “race war” to the Grand Wizard’s 1965 assassination plan to murder King when the civil rights leader passed through Mississippi, over a bridge, on his way to protests in Selma, Alabama. As previously discussed, Option A in that plan involved a shooting ambush, while Option B involved blowing up the bridge. Only Dennis’s intervention as an informant averted the plot.

Ben Chester White was murdered on June 10, 1966. Bowers had arranged the murder in hopes of luring King into an ambush zone. Four days earlier, a racist shot and wounded James Meredith during his nonviolent March Against Fear, to encourage Missis-

sippi’s black population to vote. Several civil rights leaders, including King, descended on Mississippi to continue Meredith’s mission. But the schisms over tactics, between King and more militant leaders like newly elected Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman Stokely Carmichael, became obvious and open. In fact, Carmichael used the closing of the march to deliver his famous Black Power speech on June 16. One can imagine what would have happened if Bowers had succeeded in luring King to a more controlled kill zone, just days after an icon like Meredith nearly died from racial violence with Carmichael on hand.

By 1967, Swift’s prophecies about the conditions in America continued to focus on the End Times. The taped sermons Bowers and Tarrants “discussed” in the woods spoke of a nation “in great tribulation. And . . . you will see more of this tribulation. [God said] ‘As you see these things coming to pass, then look up . . . For you are my battle axe and weapons of war. And I am going to stir my people up and I will call for my people to stand upon their feet.’ And eventually the Children of the kingdom, the nations of the kingdom, the powers of God, are going to destroy the powers of the Antichrist.”43

To a Swift devotee, the antichrist was not one man, as mainstream fundamentalist Christians believe, but the entire race of demonic, imposter Jews, as Bowers indicated in his comments after the Neshoba murders. Professor Neil Hamilton, in his study of right-wing terrorist groups, noted that white supremacist groups viewed King as an agent of the Satanic-Jewish conspiracy; killing him became a top priority. King’s successes in pushing for integration in America only reinforced that perception.44 But King became, literally and figuratively, the victim of his own success. By 1967, for reasons that will become clear, he was an even more inviting target for those hoping to ignite a holy race war. To fulfill Christian Identity prophecy, men like Bowers became more determined to kill a prophet.