America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (23 page)

Two other attempts on King's life in 1965 fit that pattern. In one instance, documented in newspapers as well as in FBI documents,
a member of the Minutemen, Keith Gilbert, stole hundreds of pounds of dynamite as part of a plot to blow up the Hollywood Palladium. The city of Los Angeles had invited King to speak in February 1965 in honor of his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. An anonymous tip allowed the police to apprehend Gilbert and prevent the attack, a disaster that likely would have killed or injured hundreds of people. Though Gilbert went to prison for his offense, Swift ordained him as a minister in the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian shortly thereafter.

A tip from another informant, Delmar Dennis, stopped yet another effort by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi to assassinate King in 1965. The WKKKKOM plot involved a team of shooters, who would open fire on the Reverend King's entourage as he passed through Mississippi on his way to lead voting rights protests in Selma, Alabama. If the shooting team failed, the backup plan involved using explosives to destroy a bridge as King's vehicle crossed it. Dennis's information, along with pressure on federal authorities from President Johnson, combined to thwart the plan. But Sam Bowers was not through yet.

1966: The Ben Chester White Murder

As described in
Chapter 5
, Sam Bowers arranged with three prospective White Knights, Ernest Avants, James Lloyd Jones, and Claude Fuller, to lure Martin Luther King Jr. into a death trap in Natchez, Mississippi. The first phase of the plan succeeded with the murder of black farmer Ben Chester White on June 10, 1966. The men selected White mostly as a target of opportunity, but also because he had no substantive connection to the civil rights movement, so his death would seem more senseless than reactionary. Having convinced White to help them find their lost dog, the men lured the farmer into a pickup truck and brought him to a bridge, where they abruptly stopped. Using FBI records and court transcripts (the three men were convicted of murder in 1998),
Clarion-Ledger
(Jackson, Mississippi) investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell described the scene four decades later:

Claude Fuller got out of the Chevy, grabbed his rifle and loaded it before going around the car and opening the door where White was. Avants stood beside him.

“All right, Pop,” Fuller told him. “Get out.”

Spotting the rifle, White withered in his seat, bowing his head to pray.

“Get out!” Fuller barked.

“Oh, Lord,” White said, “what have I done to deserve this?”

Fuller answered with his automatic rifle, firing two quick bursts that emptied the gun of all 18 shots.

Fuller then turned to Avants and told him to fire, too.
¹⁹

The men heaved White's dead body into the waterway below, and in the days that followed, Sam Bowers waited for the second phase of his plan. White's body was found on June 12. In previous assassination attempts on the civil rights icon, King's movements and decisions had confounded the efforts to kill him. If the murderers could dictate King's movements (rather than the other way around), an ambush would be much more likely to succeed. Anyone studying King's past behavior would be safe in assuming that a murder like White's would elicit some appearance by the SCLC leader. King had attended the funeral of Medgar Evers in Jackson in June 1963; he had visited Birmingham to eulogize the four young murder victims three months later; he had visited Mississippi, more than once, to mourn the Neshoba victims and to raise public awareness about the lack of justice in that case. The gruesome nature of White's death was expected to capture the attention of someone like Dr. King. According to Mitchell:

There were so many injuries that almost any of the bullets could have killed him. Bullets had pulverized his liver and ripped his diaphragm. At least one had carved a gaping hole in the left side of his heart. The aorta, which carried vital blood to the rest of the body, had been torn in many places. There was no question that he bled to death.
²⁰

But Bowers had miscalculated in believing that White's murder would bring King to Natchez. For one thing, another white man had
attempted (but failed) to murder James Meredith on June 6. Meredith, famous for integrating Ole Miss, had begun a one-man 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, early that morning to inspire African Americans to register to vote. But thirty miles into the march, Meredith had sustained serious injuries when Aubrey Norvell, an unemployed hardware store worker, had struck him with three rifle bullets. King joined several others in taking up Meredith's mantle, a three-week trek that did not include a detour to protest White's homicide in Natchez.

The failure to impose some level of external control on King's movements, itself a tactical evolution designed to aid in the murder of a man whose itinerary changed on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour basis, likely shaped the contours of the omega plan in 1967 and 1968. It should have been clear that any conspiracy to murder King had to be ongoing and flexible. Independently of each other, the men in Swift's informal network of radical Identity terrorists tried to kill King on a situational basis, if King happened to come to their local region, and then only if he exposed himself to potential harm. It became obvious that the civil rights leader was a moving target, not a fixed one. Thus a better approach was to maintain an ongoing murder conspiracy that could strike at King regardless of which state or region he visited; if an attempt failed in one city, the conspiracy could adjust and try again in another place. But that required a greater level of cooperation between various segments of the Identity movement, something that became more and more evident as 1967 approached.

The attempts on King highlight that Swift's Identity network included regional hubs: J.B. Stoner and Ed Fields dominated Georgia and Alabama, via the National States Rights Party. Stoner, in turn, could leverage his close association with James Venable to influence events in other states, such as Ohio, through the various state chapters and Klaverns of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Sam Bowers controlled the Mississippi hub by manipulating and exploiting the activities of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. And the most influential hub was in California under the direction of the Reverend Swift and Colonel Gale, through the umbrella of the Christian Defense League. Evidence indicates that beginning in
1967, these hubs increasingly began to tighten their relationships to each other, to strengthen the network.

Prior to 1967, Stoner rarely visited Mississippi; he did not even have NSRP chapters in cities like Meridian and Jackson, two places with relatively high concentrations of violent bigots. But starting in 1967, ostensibly as a legal advisor to the men accused of the Neshoba murders, Stoner made frequent visits to Meridian and Jackson. Senior leaders of the WKKKKOM attempted to form NSRP chapters in both cities and distributed hundreds of copies of
The Thunderbolt.
That same year, James Venable made several visits to California. Notably, he absorbed the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan under the umbrella of the NKKKK; the California Knights were directly run by the Reverend William V. Fowler of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian and were indirectly managed by Swift himself. Venable spoke at the Hollywood Women's Club, a major meeting place for Swift and the CJCC. By 1967 the mouthpiece of the NKKKK, the
Nighthawk,
increasingly printed articles with an anti-Semitic focus, indicating that the vector of the Swift–Venable relationship ran both ways.
²¹
The January 1968 edition of the periodical, for instance, announced its purpose to “expose the anti-Christ and their satanical plans for the destruction of the White Race” and “to expose and destroy the careers of all politicians who willfully or through ignorance of brainwashing, support the Atheistic-Jewish-Communist Conspiracy.”
²²
Another man in Stoner's southeastern orbit, Identity minister Sidney Barnes, established strong ties with members of the WKKKKOM, eventually moving to Jackson in 1968. When members of the White Knights were not listening to Barnes and his wife, Pauline, as they held court in home Bible studies highlighting the Jewish–communist conspiracy, Mississippi's bigots could hear the same message on tapes of Swift's sermons. These recordings became a phenomenon in southern Mississippi, played at so-called Swift parties.

Such sermons, in 1967, increasingly spoke to an imminent racial apocalypse at a time when America experienced its worst episodes of urban rioting. If simply blowing up King's hotel room in May of 1963 triggered the first riot in the history of Birmingham, killing the minister in 1968 could be expected to ignite a nationwide powder
keg of racial tension during an age of social upheaval. In 1963, when King's push for nonviolence had dominated the ethos of the civil rights movement, America had experienced only eleven riots. After 1965, when the civil rights movement was animated by a spirit of anger and frustration more consistent with the bold defiance of the late Malcolm X, racial violence spiked. Just as the Reverend Swift had predicted, the summer of 1967 exposed a nation that was tearing along the seams of race and class. The urban violence thawed, as it always did, in the cool and cold weather of fall and winter. But nothing changed the underlying dynamics of the country's racial climate as 1968 approached. In 1963 it had taken the assassination of Medgar Evers to spark a riot in Jackson; by 1967 mere rumors of police brutality could turn Newark, New Jersey, into a virtual war zone. In such an environment, killing King held the promise of creating utter chaos.

It also, more than ever before, offered the possibility that such chaos would trigger the cycle of violent outrage and retaliation predicted by Sam Bowers. When Bowers told Delmar Dennis about his plans to foment racial conflict by instigating a cycle of recrimination and violence between militant blacks and rank-and-file whites, nonviolence permeated the push for black liberation. King was the most outspoken and well-known of a group of leaders who placed their faith in Gandhi's philosophy and tactics. The group he led, the SCLC, was just one of several grassroots organizations that held training sessions to teach activists how to participate in nonviolent protests. But the situation had changed after the Mississippi Burning murders.

While the prospect of violent resistance had always appealed to pockets of civil rights activists, by 1965 it had moved from the background to the foreground. Militant leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and groups such as the Black Panthers became increasingly popular among liberation activists. Bowers's vision, which he foretold to his audience on the heels of the Neshoba killings, may not have come to pass in the summer of 1964 in Mississippi. Militant, leftist blacks did not attack white “civilians”; whites did not respond with violent retaliation against blacks; the federal government did not declare martial law in Mississippi or anywhere else. But in 1967,
in places like Detroit and cities across the nation, that vision was increasingly becoming a reality.

In that context, King became an even more attractive target to Identity radicals. Of the three men whom the FBI identified as potential “black messiahs,” two—Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad—openly called for violent resistance to racial and economic oppression, for separation rather than integration. Only one of those listed, Martin Luther King Jr., continued to push for nonviolence; only he held out hope for racial harmony, even though, as he realized, the facts on the ground demanded a much bolder approach to socioeconomic justice.

His commitment to nonviolence may have lost him a measure of influence, but King remained a revered figure for much of the African American community, respected even by those who disagreed with nonviolence as a tactic. Anyone who continued to invest in the prospects of “propaganda of the deed” and who wanted to provoke a race war would have seen the potential in King's assassination. In the calculus of men like Swift, eliminating King would not only ignite a race war, but it would also remove the only person capable of pacifying the nation once the race war started.

The idea of an impending Armageddon permeated Swift's sermons, homilies that reached the ears of ardent listeners at Swift parties in Mississippi. Among Swift's most enthusiastic Mississippi listeners was WKKKKOM member Burris Dunn. Dunn forced his wife and children to listen to Swift's tapes. According to his ex-wife, Dunn (one of the most active promoters of Stoner's NSRP outreach in Mississippi) frequently invited his hero, fellow White Knight Sam Bowers, over for dinner, where they discussed Swift's sermons. She recounted that the conversations often developed into hate-filled tirades against Martin Luther King Jr.
²³

No one had tried to kill King more often than Bowers. For Bowers, one historian noted, King became “the ultimate prize.” Perhaps the most tactically sophisticated of America's leading racists, Bowers would be the logical choice to spearhead the final plan to murder King.

Bowers also was famously paranoid about informants—what he and Stoner would call pimps—and with good cause. By 1967
infiltrators and informants were decimating the ranks of the WKKKKOM. If the members of Swift's network compared notes on King assassination plots, it would become obvious that several attempts had been thwarted by insiders like Delmar Dennis. By the summer of 1967, Bowers began turning to outsiders to perpetrate violence through a newly formed clique known as the Swift Underground. But this group, like many who came before it, focused its attention on arson and demolitions. Shootings took the form of drive-bys at relatively close range. The 1963 Birmingham attempt highlighted the difficulty of such a close-range shooting of King, as the minister was frequently surrounded by an entourage.