America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (10 page)

A single rifle shot hit Evers in the back. The sniper's bullet came out Evers' chest, shattered the living room window and venetian blinds, blasted through the living room wall, and ended its parabola of death in the Evers' kitchen, where the police later recovered the bullet. The full length of Evers' body fell along the concrete driveway, and he began hemorrhaging massively. His wife . . . hearing the rifle shot and shattering of glass . . . came rushing out of the house, kneeling down to comfort him as she cried to the gathering neighbors to call for an ambulance. Evers
died shortly after arriving at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. His last words were, “Turn me loose.”
¹⁸

As one might expect, major civil rights figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., came to mourn Evers. But even King's presence, following the funeral, could not contain the anger of black Mississippians. After the funeral and an organized protest march, rioting broke out in downtown Jackson, with throngs of angry black students gathering, throwing rocks at law enforcement, and demanding, “We want the murderer” and “Freedom! Freedom.” Law enforcement gathered in a phalanx to put down the rioters. A courageous Justice Department lawyer, John Doar, moved to the front between both parties. Invoking the memory of Medgar Evers, he managed to get the crowd to disperse, preventing what likely would have been a major calamity.

It was thirty years before Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of murdering Medgar Evers. He avoided conviction from two all-white juries in the 1960s but did serve time in the early 1970s for a separate offense—an attempt to bomb the offices of a Jewish attorney in New Orleans. Before going to prison for that offense, Beckwith claimed that members of a satanic conspiracy framed him for the bombing attempt. Years later he would formally declare himself to be a member of the Phineas Priesthood, a Christian Identity offshoot movement.

No one knows what influence Christian Identity ideas had on Beckwith in 1963. But the Reverend Wesley Swift was clearly paying attention to the attack and the subsequent riots. On June 23, in a sermon entitled “The Strategy of the False Prophet,” Swift asserted,

A Negro by the name of Evers, was shot back in Mississippi and they are searching for the White man who shot him. They are calling for the blood of the White man who shot him. . . . I do not buy anything that would embrace the administration for it would be covered up. Today, you are faced with the fact that this racial crisis is hanging like a sword over the heads of our people. . . .

The anti-Christ has captured the Negroes and are using them,
for the powers of World Jewry have enmeshed all of the forces of the world against the White race. But the great judgments of God are going to move against it. And remember that God has an appointment with your race. This, my friends, is one of the most important things that you can know and understand. God calls on you to resist. And I challenge every White Christian man to be prepared to defend White Christian womanhood and to resist the powers of darkness. If there is a riot on one end of town and a fire on the other, then White men better be looking for that block that they are moving on. And when these Negroes move on that block to kill and destroy, don't spare a one.
¹⁹

Throughout 1963, Swift, who was known to reference astrology as well as the Bible, warned his audience that a major crisis was coming. He predicted that the growing domestic unrest would become so serious that the U.S. government, under the influence of “World Jewry,” would use the disorder as a pretense to invite the United Nations into America as some kind of domestic peacekeeping force. Of course, this would really be a plot on behalf of the Antichrist. With the lessons of Oxford, Birmingham, and Jackson fresh in his mind and in the minds of his congregation, Swift was confident enough to offer his followers a clear time period for this upcoming conflagration: September 1963.

4

THE DESECRATED SANCTUARY

the
1963 SIXTEENTH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH BOMBING

O
n September 14, 1963, five very dangerous men met in Birmingham, Alabama.

Traveling farthest was Colonel William Potter Gale, former chief aide and consultant on guerrilla warfare to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines. By 1963 Gale was the paramilitary commander and cofounder of one of the most outspoken white supremacist organizations in his home state of California, the Christian Defense League.

Joining him was former admiral John Crommelin, a naval hero during World War II, who would soon plot a coup d'état against the American government with fellow senior military veterans. Crommelin, who came to Birmingham from his home near Montgomery, Alabama, by 1963 had already run repeatedly for public office, most recently as a 1962 candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama under the National States Rights Party.

Three men from Mobile also made the journey. Noah Jefferson (Jeff) Carden, described in military records as having “psychopathic tendencies” and suspected of bombings in his former home state of Florida, joined the two former military officers. So did fellow white supremacist Bob Smith, who was then mentoring a Mobile high school student, Tommy Tarrants, who in a few years would become the chief terrorist for the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. Tarrants did not make the trip, but another one of his mentors became the most important source on the mysterious gathering.

In interviews with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jack Nelson in 1991, Tarrants described a common house painter and notorious white supremacist named Sidney Crockett Barnes as the most violent person he had ever known. Barnes, like Smith, was in the process of moving from Florida to Alabama, fearful that law enforcement
would become aware of his connections to the wave of anti-integration terrorism then plaguing the Sunshine State.

All five men who met that day in Birmingham—Gale, Crommelin, Carden, Smith, and Barnes—were identified in FBI documents as loyal followers of the Reverend Wesley Swift. All were either on Swift's mailing list for tapes or were ordained ministers in the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. During Crommelin's last Senate campaign, Swift himself had joined four other Christian Identity ministers, including Gordon Winrod, the official pastor for the NSRP, in campaigning for the former admiral.

It is through Barnes, though, that we know the details of the September meeting in Birmingham. In March 1964, Barnes described the gathering to a friend, Willie Somersett, who was secretly taping their conversation as a Miami police informant. Somersett described additional conversations, which were not taped, relating to the outcome of that meeting as well.

According to Barnes's taped conversation, Gale had met with segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace in the summer of 1963 with a plan to stymie the increasingly successful movement to integrate Alabama. But Wallace had rejected Gale's plan as too radical. Everything that had transpired in places like Birmingham since that time had convinced the five men that Wallace—the man who once defiantly proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—was becoming soft. Barnes told Somersett that in response, he and his associates decided to take measures that would both deal a blow to the civil rights movement
and
embarrass the populist governor. If the following day's events were connected with the September 14 meeting, the horrible atrocity did more than just deliver a blow to the psyche of Birmingham's black community; it shocked the conscience of the entire nation.
¹

United Press International described the dynamite blast that “ripped” through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the Sunday morning of September 15, 1963, injuring “dozens of persons, and at least 20 were hurt badly enough to have hospital treatment.” In the immediate aftermath, “the survivors, their faces dripping blood from the glass that flew out of the church's stained glass windows,
staggered around the two-story brick and stone building in a cloud of white dust raised by the deafening explosion.”
²
Four girls did not survive the attack. The coroner's report detailed the horror:

              
NAME:
Addie Mae Collins

              
DEATH WAS CAUSED BY:
Multiple Fractures, Lacerations of Head and Back (Chest)

              
AGE IN YEARS LAST BIRTHDAY
:
14

              
NAME:
Carol Robertson

              
DEATH WAS CAUSED BY:
Fractured Skull and Concussion

              
AGE IN YEARS LAST BIRTHDAY
:
14

              
NAME
:
Cynthia Wesley

              
DEATH WAS CAUSED BY:
Compound Fractures of the Head and Chest

              
AGE IN YEARS LAST BIRTHDAY
:
14

              
NAME
:
Denise McNair

              
DEATH WAS CAUSED BY:
Fractured Skull and Concussion

              
AGE IN YEARS LAST BIRTHDAY
:
11

              
DESCRIBE HOW INJURIES OCCURRED:
Dynamite Blast
—
Bomb

The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church remains a metaphor for the tragic sacrifice and principled persistence that marked the entire civil rights movement. That preceding May, children had left the middle-class church and marched onto the streets of Birmingham, eliciting a wave of violent police retaliation that shamed the Magic City into desegregating many of its public and private facilities. Just four months later, the martyrdom of four girls in that same but broken building shamed a lethargic Congress into a renewed focus on legislation that would, over time, desegregate
the rest of the nation. But in the immediate wake of the bombing, it seemed at times as if the city itself could come undone.

UPI described the riots that followed the bombing as a “reign of violence and terror.” It added:

It took police two hours to disperse the crowd of 2,000 hysterical Negroes who poured out of their homes. . . . Shootings and stonings broke out spasmodically through the city, continuing through the afternoon and into the night. . . . At least five fires were reported. Police shot and killed a Negro boy stoning white persons' cars. A 13-year-old Negro riding a bicycle outside the city was ambushed and killed.
³

Tensions remained high as President John F. Kennedy decided how to handle the trouble. On the one hand, the situation seemed too much for the Birmingham Police Department, the Alabama State Highway Patrol, and the Alabama National Guard to handle. On the other hand, Kennedy feared that federal intervention might inflame the situation further or give Alabama's racist, rabble-rouser governor, George Wallace, the kind of public attention he coveted. Kennedy sent two personal representatives to the city to negotiate a truce between civil rights leaders and Birmingham's white establishment.

Perhaps more than anything, the arrival of civil rights leaders from around the country, and the leadership of local activists, helped pacify the city. Notably, as he had after the murder of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Birmingham from his home in Atlanta to eulogize the four girls. This was not surprising, as Birmingham had been the major focus of King's operations for the previous two years. King told the gathering of mourners:

These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.

And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. . . . They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them,
but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. . . .

The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city. . . . Indeed this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience. . . .

And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair. . . . We must not become bitter nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.
⁴

The riots that initially plagued Birmingham following the bombing could have metastasized into total chaos but for the appeals of level-headed leaders like King, who reminded residents of the city of the power of nonviolence and compassion. These leaders were channeling the spirit of the Sunday school lesson that was never delivered that tragic Sunday morning, designed by a minister with the last name of Cross, about a “A Love That Forgives.”

For some, the bombing also validated the sentiment, frequently cited by King, that the long “arc of the universe” ultimately “bends toward justice.” It took forty years, but three of the individuals responsible for the bombing went to prison for the crime. It required intense media pressure and dogged Alabama prosecutors to pry incriminating records from a reluctant FBI, but the system ultimately worked.