America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (3 page)

However much he dabbled in the occult, and however much he exploited centuries-old religious prejudices dating back to the times of Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler's anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions were far more secular than religious in their spirit. Hitler's brand of anti-Semitism flowed from scientific racism: a belief in genetic contamination and degeneration popular among followers of the eugenics movement and a misguided understanding of anthropology that viewed white Europeans as a master race.

Little evidence of this kind of thinking can be found in Stoner's writings and speeches. Instead, one finds a devoutly religious motivation for Stoner's extremism. In 1994, reflecting upon his efforts to a meeting of the Aryan Nations, Stoner said:

I've been fighting Jews and niggers all my life. Now I quote from the Bible, I believe in the Bible, I worship my Lord Jesus Christ, but I'm not a preacher. God didn't call me to be a preacher. God
called me to fight Jews and niggers. So I've engaged in that fight, against the Jews and the niggers, because that is the best way to serve and glorify God and to help the white race.
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This religious component to Stoner's hatred traces back fifty years. In 1947 Stoner wrote a treatise called “The Gospel of Jesus Christ vs. the Jews as Explained from the Holy Bible.”
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As early as 1944, Stoner had written to the U.S. Congress, requesting that it “pass a resolution recognizing that Jews are children of the devil and that consequently they pose a grave danger to the United States.”
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The reference to Jews as “children of the devil” becomes important in connecting Stoner to a newly emerging, unorthodox strain of Christian theology that, by the early 1940s, was developing into a fully formed creed. Christian Identity (CI) theology, or simply Identity, has inspired generations of white supremacists, directly and indirectly, to acts of domestic terrorism.

Stoner in some ways was a member of an unholy trinity that also included the head of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, Samuel Holloway Bowers, and Wesley A. Swift, head of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian (CJCC), a Christian Identity congregation based in southern California. In that metaphor, Swift, as will become clear, is the father, the inspiration and guiding force behind waves of violence, whom too few scholars recognize for his active role in domestic terrorism. Bowers, as we will see, is the son, the purist who commands a group of followers as they put the father's plan into earthly action. And Stoner, the Georgian lawyer who became the brains behind the Confederate Underground, is the unholy spirit, linking fellow travelers across time and distance, girding his clients against perceived persecution, and inspiring others to rash acts of mob violence.

Those who isolate Islam as a uniquely violent religion, one more suited to perversion by radicals than other religions, have missed a counter-narrative, one where Christian extremists distorted Jesus's message long before Muslim extremists hijacked Muhammad's teachings. In short, in failing to look deeply at people like Stoner, Bowers, and Swift and at the acts of terrorism they planned and inspired, we have missed an important piece of history that could
provide an extremely useful frame of reference for contemporary America and for the world at large. An extensive look into the web of associations and organizations connected to J.B. Stoner will help bring this insight into sharper focus, revealing the twisted theology at the core of the white supremacy movement in the United States.

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GENESIS

the
CHRISTIAN IDENTITY MOVEMENT

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or all the national outrage stemming from the 1957–1958 wave of anti-Jewish bombings, and despite several arrests, no one went to prison for any crimes. The Confederate Underground, and its informal leader J.B. Stoner, escaped justice.

But the attacks did spark a bout of national soul searching on the issue of anti-Semitic and racial violence in the 1950s. Some legislators openly condemned racial violence in the South, and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which among other things authorized federal agents to investigate the bombing of educational and religious institutions if authorities suspected that the perpetrators had fled across state lines. Congress also began to investigate the acts of violence. In a debate on the Senate floor, Senator Kenneth Keating listed eighty acts of domestic terrorism—many bombings and arson attacks on black targets—from 1955 to 1960. Of the eighty attacks, sixteen could be directly or indirectly traced to one group, the National States Rights Party (NSRP).
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Formed in 1958 by Stoner and Fields, the NSRP became an important focus for law enforcement. In a report, the FBI noted:

The National States Rights Party (NSRP) was created in July, 1958, from remnants of such segregationist and/or anti-Semitic organizations as the United White Party, the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, the Columbians, several Klan groups, and representatives of the States Rights Party. At the time the NSRP was organized, one of its founders, Jesse Stoner, observed: “The name of the National States Rights Party will sound so mild that a man belonging to it will not worry about his job.”
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The NSRP's loci of operation logically paralleled the activities of its pro-integration rivals: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Notably, by the early 1960s, Stoner and Fields had moved their base of operations to Birmingham, Alabama, at that time the site of America's most public civil rights battles.

With the shift in geographic focus, it appeared as if the NSRP had shifted its tactical focus from organized acts of terrorism to political activism. As the civil rights movement picked up nationwide momentum, Stoner and Fields directed their recently formed group toward counter-rallies, protests, and general agitation against groups that advocated for civil rights. But unlike most of its pro-integration rivals, the NSRP was far from Gandhian in its approach to civic participation.

Time and time again, NSRP members responded to nonviolence with violence. When volunteers from CORE launched a series of Freedom Rides to expose the lack of constitutionally mandated integration in America's public bus stations, a mob of racists met participants at their first stop in the Deep South: Anniston, Alabama. Led by local KKK leader Kenneth Adams, the mob surrounded one Freedom Rider bus and slashed its tires. Later the mob forced another bus off the road, firebombed it, and beat the escaping activists.
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Many note Adams's KKK affiliations but fail to note that he was a leading member of the NSRP in a city, Anniston, that was in essence the weapons depot for the national organization. Racists from the NSRP joined other KKK rowdies and met that same group of Freedom Riders when the activists reached their next bus terminal, in Birmingham, Alabama. This mob assaulted and beat the Freedom Riders (some into unconsciousness) with wooden sticks and metal pipes.

As the civil rights movement began to make gains in Alabama through the collective efforts of leaders like the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King Jr., the NSRP increased the intensity of its response. A notable example was the NSRP's reaction, in September 1963, to a court order and local mandates to desegregate Alabama's public schools. Police stopped one car of students
belonging to a caravan of some 150 teenagers on their way to an NSRP-sponsored counter-protest at a Birmingham high school. From this car, police confiscated a pistol, a straight razor, a bailing hook, and a sawed-off shotgun.
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Stoner and Fields increasingly began to see how they could harness the toxic combination of youthful arrogance, neo-Confederate racism, and male testosterone. More than anything, this concept was obvious in Stoner's approach to counter-rallies and counter-protests. Stoner, with his close colleague Charles “Connie” Lynch, toured various cities that were home to civil rights struggles. There the two men became what author Patsy Sims refers to in her book
The Klan
as “a two-man riot squad.” More than anyone, it was Lynch, a southern California native who traveled in a pink Cadillac and wore a jacket of stitched-together Confederate flags, who inflamed audiences, often to actual acts of violence. As Sims describes it:

Lynch once told a Baltimore rally crowd: “I represent God, the white race and constitutional government, and everyone who doesn't like that can go straight to hell. I'm not inciting you to riot—I'm inciting you to victory!” His audience responded by chanting, “Kill the niggers! Kill! Kill!” After the rally, stirred-up white youths headed for the city's slums, attacking blacks with fists and bottles. At another rally in Berea, Kentucky, Lynch's diatribe was followed by two fatal shootings. Again, in Anniston, Alabama, he goaded his audience: “If it takes killing to get the Negroes out of the white's man's streets and to protect our constitutional rights, I say, ‘Yes, kill them!'” A carload of men left the rally and gunned down a black man on a stretch of highway.
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The most notable example of the rabble-rousing incited by Lynch and Stoner came in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. Stoner and Lynch joined regional NSRP leader Oren Potito as he fought efforts to desegregate a city that was on the edge of widespread civil disorder and violence. Lynch especially pushed local segregationists over the edge. Following one Lynch rant, young segregationists attacked a protest march of nearly two hundred blacks. In one diatribe, Lynch specifically called out a local civil rights leader Robert Hayling. “If
you were half the men you claimed to be,” Lynch insisted, “you'd kill him before sunup.” Four men kidnapped Hayling and three colleagues, brought their victims to the rally, proceeded to beat them to unconsciousness and nearly burned them to death. Lynch and Stoner earned a reputation for demagoguery that alarmed even Klan leaders. As Sims notes, during race rioting in Bogalusa, Louisiana, the local Grand Dragon tried to run both men out of town.
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Often Stoner played a secondary role as an agitator but a primary role as a lawyer, defending his friend Lynch against charges of incitement; Connie Lynch spent very little time in jail. Soon Stoner found himself defending fellow racists and NSRP members across the nation. He even extended the group's influence into Canada. While it rarely had more than 150 active members, the NSRP established franchises in more than a dozen states across the union, often run by very young members trained under Fields and Stoner in Birmingham. These members included James P. Thornton, who helped grow the NSRP in California with the assistance of retired colonel William Potter Gale and Neuman Britton, who ran the NSRP offshoot in Arkansas. Another nexus of NSRP leaders came from Florida. They had fled the Sunshine State for other places in the Southeast, in part to escape the scrutiny of local law enforcement after the violence in St. Augustine. One example was Sidney Crockett Barnes, a painter and suspected bomb maker, who fled to Mobile, Alabama, joining a preexisting contingent of NSRP exiles from Florida, including a future member of Mobile's White Citizens Council, Noah Jefferson Carden.
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But Stoner and Fields also parlayed the NSRP's growing membership and influence into more conventional expressions of political dissent. In 1960 the group nominated two candidates for office in the U.S. presidential election: Arkansas governor Orval Faubus at the top of the ticket and Admiral John C. Crommelin, of Montgomery, Alabama, as the vice presidential candidate. Faubus had virtually no connection to the NSRP but had earned a national profile among racists for his open resistance to federally imposed integration efforts. In the unusual role of a write-in nominee, Faubus never agreed to his nomination; nor did he actively campaign for office. But Crommelin was another story. A World War II naval hero from an illustrious family line of naval officers, Crommelin arguably
became the most well-known public anti-Semite in America in the 1950s, meriting the label “most serious threat to Jewish security in the southern states.”
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By 1964 Crommelin had already failed to win the Democratic primary to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate four times and had lost a 1958 bid to be governor of the Yellowhammer State. Referring constantly to a Jewish-led communist conspiracy to subvert the United States, he also echoed the literal party line of the NSRP: that the civil rights movement was part of that conspiracy. Together, Faubus and Crommelin received less than 0.1 percent of the national popular vote. Undeterred, Stoner himself joined a presidential ticket in 1964, as the vice presidential candidate, with his old friend from Tennessee, John Kasper, as the NSRP's presidential hopeful. It would be one among many unsuccessful political bids for Stoner, as the pair earned even fewer votes than the Faubus–Crommelin ticket.
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The NSRP's candidates focused most of their attention on their pro-segregation agenda, perhaps because they saw what impact overt and strident racism and anti-Semitism had on a campaign for national office. Crommelin's 1962 campaign for Alabama Senate had included “5 sound trucks all over the state blasting away the Christian message that Communism is Jewish from start to finish and that racial integration of . . . White people is a Jewish directed scheme to mongrelize the White Race, so that the almighty Jew can sit upon a throne to rule a world populated by a mass of mulatto like zombies.”
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Crommelin lost in landslides in each primary, never coming closer than third place.