America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (14 page)

The most obvious interpretation of Barnes's account is that the Swift followers came to Birmingham with foreknowledge of the church bombing and took advantage of an opportunity to piggyback on the bombing when the unanticipated carnage created horrible riots, bringing Martin Luther King Jr. from his home in Georgia back to Alabama. But it is also the case, as Ed King makes clear, that anyone who followed Martin Luther King's activities in Birmingham would have anticipated that a bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church would draw him to the city. Either way, whether such an attack resulted in unexpected killings or not, the state of Alabama is very lucky that Barnes's efforts to kill King failed. Even still, Barnes told Somersett that the assassination plot on King remained active for several more months, but the group never had an opportunity to strike again.

In fact, according to historian Neil Hamilton, killing Martin Luther King had been a major goal of Swift and Gale since they had founded the Christian Defense League in 1960. Multiple attempts on King's life can be traced to followers of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. Stoner, for instance, offered a bounty on King's life as early as 1958.

None were more determined to kill King than a new arrival to the white supremacist scene in Mississippi, Samuel Holloway Bowers. Bowers's tenure as head of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, from 1964 to 1968, places him among the most violent sponsors of domestic terrorism the nation has ever known. Many are familiar with the most public act of violence—the murder of three civil rights workers in June 1964, known to some as the Neshoba County murders and to others as the Mississippi Burning killings. Few, however, have looked deeply enough at the crime, or more particularly at Bowers, to see that that terrorist act was even darker in its objective than anyone had imagined.

5

THE BLOOD OF MARTYRS

the
1964 (NESHOBA COUNTY) MISSISSIPPI BURNING MURDERS

J
une 21, 1964.
The three civil rights workers traveling the dirt roads in Neshoba County knew the dangers of driving at night—two whites, one black driver—in Sam Bowers's Mississippi. Just two weeks earlier, at 9
PM
on June 8, white vigilantes had forced three New York graduate school students over to the side of the road in nearby McComb County. When the students refused to exit the vehicle at gunpoint, the vigilantes beat the men with brass knuckles after breaking the windows of their car. Many believe the only thing that saved the graduate students' lives was the likelihood that passing motorists would witness the crime.

When they left the Meridian, Mississippi, office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) on June 20, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white New Yorkers of Jewish descent, and James Chaney, black and Mississippi-born, told Sue Brown, the CORE chapter secretary, to start making calls if the three men did not return by 4
PM
. The three men then began their dangerous mission: to investigate the burning of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, which had occurred five days earlier in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

The men reached and inspected the remains of the church. They interviewed three black parishioners who told them a harrowing story. According to the interviewees, on the evening of July 16, as many as thirty men surrounded and confronted several church members leaving Mount Zion. The mob beat several congregants and then set fire to the church. But the parishioners added something that must have greatly disturbed the trio: The mob demanded that the members of Mount Zion provide them with information on “the goatee” or “Jewboy.” The reference would have been clear: The attackers wanted Mickey Schwerner.
¹

Schwerner had established himself as a man of action since arriving with his wife, Rita, in February 1964. “The first white civil rights worker based outside of the capitol of Jackson,” he had “earned the enmity of the Klan by organizing a black boycott of a white-owned business and aggressively trying to register blacks in and around Meridian to vote,” according to law professor Douglas O. Linder.
²
If he did not know earlier, Schwerner knew for certain on June 21, from the congregants at Mount Zion, that he now was a major target for local racists. No one knows if Schwerner realized what many historians now suspect: that the burning of Mount Zion was a trap, set by members and associates of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi with the hopes of luring Schwerner to his death.

What is clear is that the men took the less direct path back to Meridian, bypassing Highway 491, by which they had come to Mount Zion, instead choosing Highway 19, through the county seat of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Linder believes that this was the less dangerous route to the CORE chapter in Meridian, one less open to an ambush. They left at approximately 3
PM
.

But the Klan's plan of attack was unfortunately more elaborate than simply running a few men off the road in the off chance that they happened to pass a posse of Klan members. It is true that the unfortunate events that ended the three men's lives may well have started as a case of mistaken identity. While passing the trio on the highway, Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price noticed a black man (Chaney) driving the prototypical CORE vehicle, a blue Ford station wagon. Price thought that Chaney was another target of interest, activist George Raymond, and radioed this into his headquarters. Price then gave chase and arrested the men just as they were about to pass Philadelphia's city limits. Arrested on the trumped-up suspicion of having set the Mount Zion Church fire, the three civil rights workers were taken to the jail in Neshoba County, under the direction of Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, a member of the White Knights. But once it became clear that Schwerner was among the men in custody, the operation to kill him (and the others) went into effect. The accidental arrest by Price likely triggered what many experts believe was a general plan hatched weeks in advance to kill Schwerner.

The sheriff consulted with White Knight Kleagle Edgar Ray Killen and finalized the particulars of a murder conspiracy. According to Horace Doyle Barnett, a racist from Louisiana and an associate of Mississippi KKK members, calls were placed for those in the local area willing to help on “a job.” Barnett claims that he first discovered the particulars when he and his friend Jimmy Arledge visited a trailer park in Meridian. Edgar Ray Killen—known as Preacher Killen because he pastored at a number of small rural churches—told a crew of several men that “these three civil rights workers were going to be released from jail and that we were going to catch them and give them a whipping.”
³
Foreshadowing something much more sinister, Killen then made sure that all the men present wore gloves. The men drove to Philadelphia in separate vehicles, arriving at approximately 9:30
PM
.

At 10:30
PM
Sheriff Rainey released the three civil rights workers. The trio again took Highway 19, but this time Deputy Sheriff Price tracked their movements in his patrol car. Price relayed their bearings to other patrolmen, who in turn told the convoys of Klansmen, two cars' worth, to hustle after the civil rights workers. Once the bigots caught up in their vehicles, Price forced the blue station wagon to the side of Rock Cut Road. Striking the driver, Chaney, with a blackjack, he then stepped aside as the KKK members finished their operation. While six men, including law enforcement officers like Price, were involved in the ambush, Barnett's description of the killing focuses on two individuals: Wayne Roberts, a twenty-six-year-old ex-marine and Meridian window salesman with a reputation for being “as mean as a junkyard dog,” and James Jordan, a motel clerk and illegal speakeasy operator.

Before I could get out of the car Wayne ran past my car to Price's car, opened the left rear door, pulled Schwerner out of the car, spun him around so that Schwerner was standing on the left side of the road, with his back to the ditch and said “Are you that nigger lover” and Schwerner said “Sir, I know just how you feel.” Wayne had a pistol in his right hand, then shot Schwerner. Wayne then went back to Price's car and got Goodman, took him to the left side of the road with Goodman facing the road, and shot Goodman.

When Wayne shot Schwerner, Wayne had his hand on Schwerner's shoulder. When Wayne shot Goodman, Wayne was standing within reach of him. Schwerner fell to the left so that he was laying alongside the road. Goodman spun around and fell back toward the bank in back.

At this time Jim Jordan said “save one for me.” He then got out of Price's car and got Chaney out. I remember Chaney backing up, facing the road, and standing on the bank on the other side of the ditch and Jordan stood in the middle of the road and shot him. I do not remember how many times Jordan shot. Jordan then said, “You didn't leave me anything but a nigger, but at least I killed me a nigger.” The three civil rights workers were then put into the back of their 1963 Ford wagon.
⁴

The perpetrators left the workers' vehicle in the woods, singed from blue to black by fire, for other authorities to find. They buried the bodies of the three men in an earthen dam at the estate of Olan Burrage, known as Old Jolly Farm. The disappearance of two northern whites scandalized the nation and resulted in one of the largest federal investigations in history. The FBI would call the crime the Mississippi Burning murders (abbreviated as MIBURN), the name for which it has become famous thanks to a 1988 Hollywood movie of the same name. (We will alternately refer to them as the Neshoba murders.) In the forty-four days it took to finally find the bodies, Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. joined a chorus of segregationists in insisting that the three activists had staged the whole affair for the sake of publicity. But in Oxford, Ohio, where civil rights veterans were training hundreds of volunteers for the Mississippi Freedom Summer, where Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney had in fact been residing in the days before reports of the Mount Zion Church arson drew them back to Mississippi, longtime activists knew the score right away. “People have been killed,” SNCC leader Bob Moses told the young idealists. “You can decide to go back home, and no one will look down on you for doing it.”
⁵

If, as many believe, the goal of the Mississippi Burning murders was to halt the approach of Freedom Summer, set to begin in a matter of days, it did not work. Many of the volunteers bravely ventured
forward to proceed with the plan, conceptualized in October 1963 by leaders of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella civil rights group that included organizations such as CORE, SNCC, and the SCLC. The thrust of Freedom Summer was to publicize the need for voting rights protections in the South and also to educate the people of Mississippi about the power that could come with such rights.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the U.S. Senate on June 19 promised the end of legal discrimination in the South. But President Lyndon Johnson removed voting rights provisions from the bill to guarantee its eventual passage. Although blacks enjoyed the franchise under the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, southern states still determined voting qualifications under the principle of federalism. They enacted a host of measures, from poll taxes to literacy tests, that effectively denied African Americans their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

Even if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and various Supreme Court decisions, such as
Brown v. Board of Education,
guaranteed some form of equality in theory, the lack of voting power made such prospects hollow. Blacks could not choose local officials to fund mostly black schools or to monitor efforts to integrate schools, hotels, or hospitals; they could not hold officials accountable. A major thrust of Freedom Summer was to make black citizens of Mississippi aware of the potential their votes could have in combination with the protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Veterans of the civil rights movement in COFO enlisted hundreds of volunteers from across the nation, including many middle-class whites like Goodman and Schwerner. If the activists could publicize to the nation that there was widespread demand for the right to vote, even in a state as poor as Mississippi, it would become a major impetus for a voting rights act to join the Civil Rights Act.

But the white power structure of the South recognized that black voting rights posed an even greater threat than civil rights to the system of white supremacy. The very officials who benefited from white-only voting in parts of the South that included high concentrations of blacks stood to lose their offices in a fair election. This group included mayors, state legislators, local sheriffs, prosecutors,
and judges. The law enforcement officers had a powerful arrow in their quivers, however: absent access to voter registration, blacks could not serve on juries. Potential jurors are selected from voter rolls. It may not be surprising, then, that in places like Jackson, Mississippi, or Selma, Alabama, the most hostile and violent opposition to voting rights often came not only from the KKK but from law enforcement—people like Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. If the law enforcement officers themselves were not members of the KKK (a phenomenon pervasive in many southern towns), they offered tacit approval for the KKK to victimize anyone of color hoping to vote. Part of Freedom Summer, in fact, would include the Freedom Vote—a voter registration campaign to bypass racist registrars and to create provisional ballots for blacks to cast in upcoming statewide elections. This parallel apparatus attempted to allow Mississippi's black population to vote with less risk of violence and intimidation.