America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (18 page)

The bulk of this staggering increase (thirty-four of the thirty-five killed and more than nine hundred of the one thousand injured) came from a single event: the August 1965 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Following the arrest of a black driver by a white police officer on suspicion of drunk driving, a crowd of blacks pelted the police with rocks and bottles. The tension escalated, and the riot—the most destructive in U.S. history to that point—raged for six days.
Time
magazine called the rioting an “Arson and Street War” on one cover, and
Life
magazine printed the cover headline “Out of a Cauldron of Hate.” The latter featured a “menacing image of an angry black youth. The underlying caption read, ‘Get Whitey!'”
¹⁰

Martin Luther King Jr., a recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, visited Watts in an attempt to promote calm. At one point he addressed a crowd:

However much we don't like to hear it, and I must tell the truth. I'm known to tell the truth. While we have legitimate gripes, while we have legitimate discontent, we must not hate all white people, because I know white people now. . . . Don't forget that when we marched from Selma to Montgomery, it was a white woman who died on that highway 80, Viola Liuzzo. We want to know what we can do to create right here in Los Angeles a better city, and a beloved community. So speak out of your hearts and speak frankly.
¹¹

The response Dr. King received symbolized what would become a growing schism within the civil rights movement. An unidentified attendee from the crowd insisted:

The only way we can ever get anybody to listen to us is to start a riot. We got sense enough to know that this is not the final answer,
but it's a beginning. We know it has to stop, we know it's going to stop. We don't want any more of our people killed, but how many have been killed for nothing? At least those who died died doing something. No, I'm not for a riot. But who wants to lay down while somebody kicks em to death? As long as we lay down we know we're gonna get kicked. It's a beginning; it may be the wrong beginning but at least we got em listening. And they know that if they start killing us off, it's not gonna be a riot it's gonna be a war.
¹²

Dr. King did not see this warning as hyperbole. Having received a less-than-warm response in his Watts visit, and having failed to negotiate a truce between local black leaders and the white political establishment in Los Angeles, King briefed his political ally President Lyndon B. Johnson about the situation on the ground. In a private conversation, the Reverend King worried, “Now what is frightening is to hear all of these tones of violence from people in the Watts area and the minute that happens, there will be retaliation from the white community.” He added, ominously, “People have bought up guns so that I am fearful that if something isn't done to give a new sense of hope to people in that area, that a full-scale race war can develop.”
¹³

Another minister, whose base of operations near Hollywood was not far from the riots, welcomed the prospects of just such a war. The Reverend Wesley Swift, in a sermon titled “Power for You Today,” directly referenced the recent violence.

Don't let Watts suppress your souls, it's just, my friends, a demonstration of the animal nature of A SATANIC CONTROLLED SOCIETY IN UPROAR AGAINST GOD, AGAINST LAW, AGAINST RIGHTEOUSNESS, IT'S A PART OF A DESIGN TO INTIMIDATE YOU WITH THE FEAR OF THE BEAST, but I want you to know that with all these patterns, we are prepared to do the work of the Kingdom, to defend ourselves against any area of catastrophe, to defend ourselves against the Beast invasion, to participate in all the events that relate to the status of this day and TO FULFILL IT AS SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE PURPOSE OF GOD'S PLAN.

This doesn't mean acquiescence to evil, it doesn't mean that we buy off evil, it doesn't mean we bribe people not to do the things which the enemy or the Kingdom would like to do. The way to handle some of these situations today is to meet them with power. The way, my friends, to put down an uprising is to march in the Police Force and the troops and then let it sit there afterwards and don't, my friends, reward people for their evil. Don't make people think by violence and uproar against the Kingdom of God that they are going to gain greater power and more expansive ends. Just remember that you are in a day WHEN IT'S THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD WHO SHALL WAKE UP AND SHALL DETERMINE THE COURSE AND THE DESTINY OF AMERICA AND EVERY OTHER CHRISTIAN NATION AND EVENTUALLY THE WHOLE WORLD SHALL COME UNDER THE ADMINISTRATION OF GOD'S KINGDOM [emphasis in original].
¹⁴

He returned to the subject of the riots shortly afterward:

You know why this is an important week? Because by its measures since they always start with the following cycles of the moon that three and a half years from that time was going to start THE JUDGMENTS IN THE HOUSE OF GOD UPON THE ENEMIES OF GOD'S KINGDOM AND THOSE THAT RISE UP TO DESTROY. Do you realize that would make the beginning of that period by its farthest perimeters this September which we're almost in and, of course, if you go back to the measure of when it happened, why, these riots were going on right in the beginning of that judgment time and I'm going to tell you something. It wasn't 35 that were killed, there were hundreds of them killed and hundreds of them that brought it on themselves. There are over a thousand bodies in those ruins right now. You say, how do you know? Because Guardsmen reported what happened when they were fired on, some of them had to kill 20 or 30 of them themselves for protection. Bodies were dumped back into burning stores because they were moving down the way. I know at this moment that there are a thousand dead minimum in that crisis.
¹⁵

One cannot know if the Reverend Swift was deliberately exaggerating the casualties from the riots to manipulate his audience or if he, for some reason, believed his own propaganda. But he clearly saw the riots as a major sign that “we are in a climactic time.” The minister continued:

Someone said, oh, if we could only push these things off. I don't want to push it off, if I could bring it all in the next 24 hours, I'd precipitate it because I know GOD WOULD BE HERE BEFORE THE 24 HOURS WAS OVER. . . . WE ARE IN THE DAY, WE ARE IN THE CLIMAX, WE ARE IN THE EXPERIENCE OF WATCHING ONE AGE FOLD UP AND A NEW ONE COME IN, ONLY IT'S GOD'S DAY THIS TIME.
¹⁶

Events of the next year only reinforced Swift's enthusiasm for an approaching Armageddon. The eleven riots in 1965 grew to fifty-three by the end of 1966. While there were fewer people killed and injured than in 1965, more rioters were arrested than in the previous year, because the nation had experienced 109 total days of urban rioting compared to just 20 in 1965. After occurring again in Los Angeles, riots broke out in Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. They even spread to unexpected cities such as Omaha, Nebraska, and Des Moines, Iowa.
¹⁷

As Martin Luther King Jr. shifted his focus to de facto racism and economic issues in northern cities, he became increasingly frustrated by the growing tendency toward violence by both blacks and working-class whites. This trend became abundantly clear in Chicago, where King moved his movement and his family, famously living in a public housing tenement to highlight the poverty inherent in the city's racially tinged housing policies. Even after King managed to negotiate a ten-point deal with the city's political leadership, skeptical members of CORE launched a protest march in violation of King's agreement. Marching in all-white Cicero, Illinois—the site of a racial conflagration in 1951—250 protestors “were met by several hundred hecklers who hurled, rocks, eggs, and small explosives.”
¹⁸
But this was an extremist group of CORE activists. Rather than turn the other cheek, they picked up the bottles and bricks and
threw them back at the hecklers. In the end, the National Guard was needed to bring order to the city.

By 1966, to the dismay of Gandhian leaders like the Reverend Ed King and Martin Luther King, groups like CORE and SNCC openly embraced armed resistance in their charters. Borrowing from the late Malcolm X's famous phrase, they contended that liberation should be obtained by “any means necessary.” But SNCC and CORE were relatively tame compared to other groups that rose to prominence in the mid-1960s. Most notable among these was the Black Panther Party, which formed in Oakland, California, in October 1966. As a sign of the growing shift in the disposition of civil rights activists toward violent resistance, the Panthers got the inspiration for their name from outspoken SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael, who in 1966 told an audience:

In Lowndes County, we developed something called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. It is a political party. The Alabama law says that if you have a Party you must have an emblem. We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he's back so far into the wall, he's got nothing to do but spring out. Yeah. And when he springs he does not stop.
¹⁹

The Panthers also borrowed from Carmichael the much-misunderstood phrase that came to symbolize the growing schism between integrationists and black nationalists: “Black Power.” Ostensibly a slogan of racial pride, self-determination, and equality, “Black Power” represented a “menace to peace and prosperity” to more conservative civil rights groups like the NAACP. Martin Luther King Jr., who valued the concept of black self-empowerment even as he demanded legal and socioeconomic recognition from the American government, argued that the concept was “unfortunate because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism . . . black supremacy would be as evil as white supremacy.”
²⁰
In the perception of the white political establishment, which was manifested in the
media, “Black Power” became associated with separatism, violence, and militancy due its association with the Black Panther Party.

Making no effort to hide their revolutionary Marxism, the Panthers favored the violent overthrow of what they saw as America's imperialist and capitalist society, as a means to racial and economic liberation. While providing social services in the communities where they resided, the Panthers also responded to allegations of police brutality by brandishing shotguns, dressing in “radical chic” black clothing, and at times ambushing or engaging in pitched street battles with law enforcement officers.

The rise of the Panthers, the radicalization of once nonviolent groups like SNCC and CORE, the growing number of urban race riots—all of these affirmed the aspirations of those Swift devotees, like Sam Bowers, who hoped that conflicts between leftists in the black community and conservative whites would invite federal military intervention and escalate into a holy race war. Bowers privately told Delmar Dennis that he wanted to instigate such a conflict. And he continued to do his part, leading a group that from 1964 to 1968 would commit 300 of the estimated 538 acts of anti-black violence occurring since the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision in 1954. Joining Bowers in his effort to stoke the flames of white resentment were fellow CI devotees like the Reverend Connie Lynch, who in 1966 visited scenes of racial tension and urban riots, inciting white-on-black violence with his bombastic and virulently racist speeches. In Baltimore Lynch delivered what the UPI called the “To Hell with Niggers” rally, where Lynch “called for war against the city's Negroes. . . . After the rally broke up, gangs of white youths charged into a predominantly Negro area, throwing bottles at Negroes and attacking those they could lay their hands on with their fists.”
²¹

Clearly, as in the past, the CI radicals were not content to passively wait for Armageddon. Swift had insisted that they were already in the end-times and that his followers must actively participate in the events. Foreign affairs, notably the rapidly escalating war in Vietnam, which was exacerbating social divisions within the United States, reinforced Swift's notion that the world was “on the edge of terrific events.”

But for all of the racial unrest in America after 1964, the prospects for white supremacist groups to actively accelerate Armageddon seemed dim—at least on the surface. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did little to address the immediate socioeconomic concerns of the wider African American community, the two laws represented a double-fisted blow to overt white supremacist groups. Membership in racist groups across the country declined dramatically, and outside support fell as well. Congress and law enforcement began to openly turn against the KKK. Once southern nationalists lost the fight to save segregation and Jim Crow, the costs of staying in the organization greatly outweighed the benefits. The remaining members and leaders, who included several hard-core CI followers, appear to have faced a conundrum. Before 1965, when their organizations' memberships were at their highest, CI followers like Bowers had to work toward their hidden religious objectives by manipulating their fellow members. Now, in 1966, when conditions in the country finally seemed to conform to their religious worldview, these organizations seemingly lacked the membership to wage the prophesied race war.

But a deeper analysis suggests that the CI terrorists were far more dangerous in the late 1960s than people realize. The Minutemen, who were radical anti-communists, hid their white supremacist bona fides behind a veneer of pro-American militancy and were positioned to take advantage of the situation on the ground during the 1960s era of social upheaval. J. Edgar Hoover viewed the Minutemen as mildly dangerous due to their fondness for violence and their disregard for federal firearms regulations. But the FBI director did not consider the group nearly as threatening as the communist Black Panther Party, which he dubbed public enemy number one. As with other segregationist groups, CI leaders were found in the highest ranks of the Minutemen—a group perhaps better situated than any organization before or since to become foot soldiers in a national race war. But for the activity of an increasingly engaged law enforcement community in its cities and states (and eventually the federal government), America may have experienced the worst wave of terrorism in its history.