America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (17 page)

Within two months of the Neshoba killings, America officially entered a conflict against the communist-backed North Vietnamese. By the end of 1964, growing frustration with the pace of political change had created a major schism within the civil rights movement, between those who continued to favor nonviolence and those who favored militancy and black nationalism. Together, these two developments would escalate social upheaval in the United States and around the world, forcing law enforcement to resort to unprecedented tactics in its fight against extremists on both sides, left and right. To those listening to the sermons of Wesley Swift, his message of impending crisis and spiritual renewal was becoming more appealing.

6

THE GRAPES OF WRATH

BLACK MILITANT REACTION
and the
URBAN RIOTS
of
1964–1965

T
he White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi failed to meet their immediate goals with the Neshoba murders. Among other things, they failed to intimidate the thousands of volunteers coming to Mississippi for Freedom Summer—the campaign to register black voters and to educate black children. They even failed to intimidate the large numbers of local black Mississippians who participated in Freedom Summer, housing activists from the COFO, registering to vote, and sending their children to Freedom Schools (organized by activists to teach a civics-heavy, Afrocentric curriculum to black Mississippi students). The public outcry over the Neshoba murders spurred the FBI to launch a massive investigation into the crime, resulting in the creation of an FBI field office in Jackson, Mississippi. Despite the KKK's efforts, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, effectively ending legal discrimination in America. And the murders breathed new life into Johnson's other initiative: to pass comprehensive voting rights legislation.

At first blush, the outcome seemed to undermine the hidden agenda of Sam Bowers as well. After all, Bowers had predicted, to Delmar Dennis, a massive federal intervention creating a cycle of violence between blacks and whites. Neither happened—certainly not to the degree that Bowers wanted. But Sam Bowers and his fellow devotees of radical Christian Identity theology were playing the long game. And in the years that followed the Mississippi Burning murders, Bowers and his fellow religious extremists could only have been pleased with social developments, not only in Mississippi but in America as a whole.

In September 1964, with the help of informant Delmar Dennis, authorities uncovered the bodies of the three slain civil rights activists at Olan Burrage's farm. By December, a U.S. commissioner
from Mississippi had voided the indictments of all nineteen men responsible for the killings. Fed up, thirty-seven teenage activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) met with Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leader Fannie Lou Hamer at Hotel Theresa in New York City to listen to famed Muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X. Urging his young audience to “see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself,” the former spokesman for the militant black separatist group the Nation of Islam (NOI) continued:

If the leaders of the nonviolent movement can go into the white community and teach nonviolence, good. I'd go along with that. But as long as I see them teaching nonviolence only in the black community, we can't go along with that. We believe in equality, and equality means that you have to put the same thing over here that you put over there. And if black people alone are going to be the ones who are nonviolent, then it's not fair. We throw ourselves off guard. In fact, we disarm ourselves and make ourselves defenseless.
¹

Malcolm X had befriended members of SNCC in a chance encounter with SNCC leaders on a tour of Africa. Highlighting the need to link the African American civil rights struggle to similar liberation movements in Africa, the activist asserted, “Whenever anything happens to you in Mississippi, it's not just a case of somebody in Alabama getting indignant, or somebody in New York getting indignant. The same repercussions that you see all over the world when an imperialist or foreign power interferes in some section of Africa—you see repercussions, you see the embassies being bombed and burned and overturned—nowadays, when something happens to black people in Mississippi, you'll see the same repercussions all over the world.”
²

Malcolm X and the group he once served, the NOI, had long argued that violence, especially in retaliation for harassment, was not only acceptable but was politically and morally necessary. Though he had split from the NOI and softened his antagonism toward whites as a race, he still favored fighting fire with fire. He closed his exhortation to his New York City audience by adding,
“You'll get freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom; then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it. When you get that kind of attitude, they'll label you as a ‘crazy Negro,' or they'll call you a ‘crazy nigger'—they don't say Negro. Or they'll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough, and get enough people to be like you, you'll get your freedom.”
³

According to Stokely Carmichael, an SNCC leader in Mississippi at the time, the young activists returned to the Magnolia State very impressed with what Malcolm X had to say. For years, Malcolm X had been the most outspoken voice for armed self-defense in the civil rights struggle. Now, after the killing of Medgar Evers, after the Neshoba murders and the multiple bombings that followed, his message began to have much more resonance.

The debate over armed resistance in nonviolent organizations, such as SNCC and CORE, predated the Neshoba murders. As far back as 1963, members had proposed softening or eliminating written policy banning the use or brandishing of firearms. On the eve of Freedom Summer, in June 1964, the debate reemerged in anticipation of massive violence from Bowers's Klan. The proposals failed, but the reality was that many civil rights activists either quietly flouted the mandate against armed resistance (for example, Medgar Evers had carried a weapon for protection) or relied on others, including the local black farmers who welcomed activists into their homes and communities, to provide armed protection. Many civil rights activists, including Stokely Carmichael, regarded nonviolence simply as a tactic to win public support, not as a philosophy and moral code (à la Martin Luther King Jr.). Others had abandoned the pretense of nonviolence years before; as far back as 1956, Robert Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP, had gathered armed men to confront the KKK. King and others had shown the political value of nonviolence in Alabama and elsewhere, but the Neshoba murders and the wave of bombings that immediately followed went a long way to changing attitudes about armed self-defense. Famously, at the funeral for the three murdered activists, SNCC activist Dave Dennis asserted:

I'm sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men. . . . I've got vengeance in my heart, and I ask you to feel angry with me. . . . If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us . . . if you take it and don't do something about it . . . then God damn your souls!
⁴

Just one month before the thirty-seven students heard Malcolm X speak in New York City, a seemingly minor event in Waveland, Mississippi, foreshadowed this shift in approach. In his book We
Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,
Professor Akinyele Omowale Umoja describes an attack on an SNCC staff retreat that November 1964:

Retreat participants were alerted when they heard a low-flying plane soaring near the facilities. Later that evening, a vehicle drove near the meeting place and threw a Molotov cocktail on a nearby pier. Suddenly, several male members of SNCC ran from the meeting carrying arms, and the nightriders were abducted and released after a warning from the young freedom fighters. Lorne Cress, a Chicago native and SNCC staffer in McComb, was surprised by the armed response from her comrades. Up until that day, she had believed she was a member of a non-violent organization. She turned to Howard Zinn—a college professor, historian, and advisor to SNCC—and stated, “You have just witnessed the end of the non-violent movement.”
⁵

But the nonviolent movement was not quite dead. King and others would score another moral victory with their voting rights protests in Selma, Alabama, the following year. The widely publicized scenes of armed police officers on horseback beating unarmed protestors with batons shocked the nation, giving President Johnson's Voting Rights Act the public support it needed to pass. With its passage, almost every state-level obstacle to constitutionally guaranteed voting rights—notably literacy tests—was removed. But for many in the African American community, the legislation—and the
civil rights act that had preceded it—were not enough to pacify their increasingly growing frustration with the status quo.

More and more, economic concerns joined political concerns for African Americans. In the 1960s, America entered into a period of rapid economic dislocation as countless numbers of factories closed, reopening in cheaper labor markets outside the nation. This foreign outsourcing profoundly affected the African American community in many cities. The types of factory jobs that had lured waves of African American migrants to abandon the life of southern sharecropping and that could, in the post–World War II economic boom, sustain a nuclear family on one income, were disappearing. Even when such jobs were available, discriminatory lending practices and prejudicial housing schemes (called redlining) forced even middle-class blacks into ghettos. These were injustices not addressed in either of the two major pieces of legislation in 1964 and 1965.

In fact, the two laws changed little for black Americans outside the South. Northern and western cities already permitted blacks to vote (and had done so for decades), and blacks there faced little in the way of overt legal discrimination. One rarely saw formally segregated bathrooms, swimming pools, or dining facilities in these regions. But what African Americans there did face was de facto discrimination, which was just as pernicious. One found all-black and all-white schools, not because of the legacy of
Plessy v. Ferguson
but because of historical patterns of housing discrimination and economic prejudice—the kind that allowed blacks to work in factory jobs but refused them entry into many labor unions. And while the attacks on nonviolent protestors in the land of Jim Crow scandalized the rest of the country, the nation all but ignored similar problems elsewhere. America's police departments were among the most racially homogenous labor sectors in the nation—not just in the South but in almost every major city in the country. And urban blacks were all too familiar with the kind of discrimination and harassment that generally accompanied an all-white police force. In northern and western cities, this harassment was among the most serious forms of overt racism they faced. But by 1964, many were no longer prepared to turn the other cheek.

The first major crack in the national nonviolent facade came one month after the Neshoba murders. The Associated Press described events in New York that began on July 19:

Missiles rained from roofs, crowds knocked down barricades, fists and knives flashed in the steady heat, and police guns barked. Harlem was rioting. . . . The initial outburst followed protest rallies over the fatal shooting of a Negro boy by a white policeman. The violence left one man shot to death, 108 arrested and more than 100 injured, including a dozen patrolmen.
⁶

Soon the unrest spread to nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant and then to Brooklyn, continuing for six days and leading to more than 450 arrests. More riots began soon afterward in upstate New York in response to perceived police abuses in Rochester. United Press International described “three successive nights” (July 24 to 27) of “violence and pillage,” including “hurled rocks, bottles and firebombs.” At one point, “three persons were killed when a Civil Defense helicopter . . . crashed into a rooming house turning it into an inferno.” In response to the chaos, the UPI noted, “New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller committed 1,200 to 1,300 National Guardsmen to the riot-torn city.” By the end of the three days, 555 people had been arrested; the “burned buildings and looted stores” resulted in “over one million dollars worth of damages.”
⁷

The rage continued to spread as quickly as a virus. That August, urban race riots flared in Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, again in response to perceived police abuses. Soon the rioting reached Philadelphia, where just the rumor that an African American woman had been killed by police sparked unrest in the area near Temple University. According to Dr. Ellesia Ann Blaque, over two days the area “was battered and looted by thousands of people. When the riot ended, more than 300 people were injured, close to 800 had been arrested, and over 220 stores and businesses were damaged or permanently devastated.”
⁸
Later in August, another riot broke out in Dixmoor, Illinois, just south of Chicago.

All in all, there were eleven urban riots in 1964, with two killed,
996
injured, almost three thousand arrests, and more than 230 acts
of arson. It was the most widespread race-related rioting since the Red Summer of 1919, which saw twenty-six racially motivated riots between April and October. In 1965 matters got notably more intense. For a second year there were eleven riots in the United States, but this time there were thirty-five killed, more than one thousand injured, more than four thousand arrested, and, stunningly, more than three thousand acts of arson.
⁹