America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (57 page)

Colonel William Potter Gale:
Gale was a chief aide to General Douglas MacArthur before returning to the United States and becoming one of the leading white supremacists in the country. He was a minister in the Church of Jesus Christ Christian and formed his own paramilitary group, the California Rangers. In the 1970s, Gale was investigated by Congress as a suspect in the King murder. Congress specifically connected Gale to a King murder plot involving Admiral John Crommelin, Noah Jefferson Carden, and Sidney Crockett Barnes.

Admiral John Crommelin:
A WWII naval hero before entering civilian life and becoming one of the major voices of white supremacy in the nation, he was a leading member of the National States' Rights Party and ran on the party's ticket for vice president of the United States of America in 1960. He was also a devoted follower of Wesley Swift. He helped indoctrinate Thomas Tarrants into Swift's worldview. He was also investigated by Congress as a suspect in the King assassination in the late 1970s; he cooperated but denied he had any involvement.

Noah Jefferson Carden:
A member of the White Citizens' Council of Mobile, Alabama, a group that led “formal” opposition to the civil rights movement in that city. He was close to Sidney Barnes and also knew Thomas Tarrants. He was investigated by Congress as a suspect in the King assassination.

Sidney Crockett Barnes:
A white supremacist from Florida who was forced to flee to Mobile, Alabama, in the early 1960s because he was “too hot” for authorities, Barnes would later become a minister in Wesley Swift's church. He played tapes of Swift for anyone who would listen, and helped indoctrinate many into Swift's cause, including a young Thomas Albert Tarrants III and Kathy Ainsworth. Swift was investigated by Congress as a suspect in the King assassination in the late 1970s (see above). He openly refused to cooperate with the investigation. In 1968, he moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where he was closely associated with a number of men in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, including Danny Joe Hawkins.

Danny Joe Hawkins:
A militant member of the White Knights of Mississippi, Hawkins's entire family, especially his father, Joe Denver Hawkins, were known for their extreme hatred of blacks and Jews. Hawkins, along with Tommy Tarrants and Kathy Ainsworth, participated in a series of bombings from 1967 to 1968. On April 4, 1968, the day MLK died, Hawkins was arrested going the wrong way on a one-way street after attending J. B. Stoner's rally in the WKKKK stronghold of Meridian, Mississippi.

Kathy Ainsworth:
A young Mississippi schoolteacher who led a double life as one of the chief terrorists of the WKKKK in 1967–68, Ainsworth was raised by her white supremacist mother, Margaret Capomacchia, to hate Jews and blacks, She was very close to Sidney Crockett Barnes, who gave her away at her wedding. Ainsworth joined Danny Joe Hawkins and Tommy Tarrants in a string of attacks against black and Jewish targets in 1967–1968. In one of those attacks, in Meridian, Mississippi, in June 1968, she replaced Danny Joe Hawkins as Tarrants's partner-in-crime, only to be shot and killed in a sting operation. Her mother would later relay supposed inside information to FBI informant Willie Somersett, information related to the King murder that implicated Tommy Tarrants.

Thomas Albert Tarrants III, a.k.a. “Tommy” or “The Man”:
Tarrants was the self-described chief terrorist for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi in 1967–1968. Only in his twenties at the time, Tarrants was already closely affiliated with a number of white supremacist leaders, notably John Crommelin and Sidney Barnes. Having engaged in “petty” acts of racism from his high school days in 1963–66, Tarrants moved to Laurel, Mississippi, in 1967 and convinced Sam Bowers
to use him in violent bombing operations directed at black and Jewish targets. He joined forces with Kathy Ainsworth and Danny Joe Hawkins. His participation was unknown to the FBI until late May 1968. In the week prior to King's murder, Tarrants went “underground” to launch a guerilla campaign against the U.S. government. The reporter Jack Nelson includes references that suggest Tarrants may have been considering assassinating MLK, and he was a person-of-interest to the FBI in the immediate wake of King's murder. Tarrants was wounded in the June 1968 sting operation that killed Ainsworth. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison, but was released early after he made a conversion to mainstream Christianity. He is now an active evangelical minister who has renounced his past views and ways. He denies any involvement in the King murder, and the authors believe efforts were made to frame him for the crime.

Donald Eugene Sparks:
A major criminal in the 1960s, he was known for burglaries but was also a contract killer. His exploits eventually earned him a place on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. He was part of a gang of traveling criminals known as the new James gang, after its informal leader, Jerry Ray James. The group was concentrated in Oklahoma and included his close associate Rubie Charles Jenkins, among others. Law enforcement would later consider the Jerry Ray James gang, and many others like it, as a major criminal threat, and label it the “Dixie Mafia,” even though these groups lacked the organization of the Sicilian Mafia and were not all concentrated in the Southeast. The so-called “Dixie Mafia” may have, however, been responsible for more killings than other organized crime groups in the 1970s. Separate reports say that Sparks was approached with an offer to kill Martin Luther King Jr. by the WKKKK in 1964.

LeRoy McManaman:
Described by the FBI as a “big time criminal operator,” McManaman was a career miscreant who was known for organizing a string of home burglaries in Kansas and for running an interstate car-theft ring with Rubie Charles Jenkins. Jenkins said that McManaman, who spent considerable time in Oklahoma, was a part of a gang with Jenkins and Sparks. McManaman is alleged to have approached a fellow, soon-to-be-released inmate, Donald Nissen, with a $100,000 bounty offer on MLK's life in 1967. Nissen reported that plot to the FBI, who superficially dismissed it.

GROUPS

The Church of Jesus Christ Christian (CJCC):
This is the ministry formed by Wesley Swift in 1946 that preached an extreme and violent form of Christian Identity beliefs. These included the ideas that Jews were the offspring of Satan and that other minorities were subhuman. A major tenet for the church was the idea that a race war would purify the world, especially of Jews. This ideology continues to have a powerful influence over white supremacists and racist groups to this day.

The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi (WKKKK):
The most violent Klan group in America, led by Samuel H. Bowers, its Imperial Wizard, the WKKKK was formed in December 1963 with members from the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (out of Louisiana) and others in Mississippi. These men were disaffected with the lackluster response to integration in the South, and pushed for greater and bolder acts of violence. At its peak from 1964 to 1965, the White Knights membership may have had reached ten thousand, though by 1968 membership was less than a few hundred. The FBI credits the group with over three hundred separate acts of violence; most notably, the White Knights are credited with killing three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi (the Mississippi Burning murders); killing voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer in 1966; and a wave of bombings against black and Jewish targets from the fall of 1967 on through the summer of 1968. Its most notable members, beyond Bowers, included Danny Joe and Joe Denver Hawkins, Burris Dunn, Julius Harper, Alton Wayne and Raymond Roberts, Byron de la Beckwith, Deavours Nix, and L. E. Matthews. Kathy Ainsworth and Thomas Tarrants may have been “informal” members of the group, as some documents describe them as members of the “Swift Underground” who performed terrorist acts on behalf of the WKKKK.

The National States' Rights Party (NSRP):
The NSPR was the overt, political face of white supremacy in the 1960s, even as it covertly recruited and inspired groups and individuals to perform acts of extreme violence. Formed by J. B. Stoner and Edward Fields in 1958, the group ran candidates for office, including vicepresident of the United States, although they never received even a small fraction of the national vote. On the other hand, the NSRP was actively involved in some of the most violent acts of resistance to integration in America, acts so extreme that they even offended local Klan groups, such as the United Klans of America in Alabama. The NSRP had its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and then in Birmingham, Alabama, and it focused its activities in the Southeast. Its major publication,
The Thunderbolt,
was a major source of information for racists across the nation.

The National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (NKKKK):
This was, in the 1960s, the second-largest Klan organization in the United States, after the United Klans of America (UKA), in terms of membership. Headquartered in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the NKKKK was led by Imperial Wizard James Venable. The NKKKK had affiliated groups and Klaverns across the country, including in Ohio and California. Notably, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (CKKKK), formed in 1966 and led by Wesley Swift minister William V. Fowler, were an offshoot of the NKKKK. James Venable spoke to the CKKKK on several occasions in 1967.

The “traveling criminals” or “Crossroaders” or “Dixie Mafia”:
These were loosely knit groups of outlaws willing to commit crimes, especially robbery and theft, across long distances. More of a phenomenon than an official organization, career criminals would join forces in decentralized gangs and work across state lines for major “jobs.” Primarily engaged in bootlegging across state lines as some states remained “dry” after Prohibition was repealed in 1934, these criminals expanded their activities in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. This became more and more common as increasingly available phone communication and interstate travel, by plane or over the new interstate highway system, made cross-state activity more possible. The “traveling criminals” were especially active in two regions: the Southeast (stretching from the Mississippi Delta to Florida) and the Great Plains. Not to be confused with the Sicilian Mafia, these criminals lacked a hierarchy and were far less structured than conventional, organized crime syndicates. They were often, at the same time, more bold than the Sicilian Mafia, targeting even law enforcement officials (famously Sheriff Buford Pusser in Tennessee) and federal judges. By the 1970s, this loose-knit coalition was one of the major forces for criminal activity in the United States, with some crediting its members as having committed more actual killings than the Sicilian Mafia. In the late '60s and early '70s, in response to this growing criminal gang, law enforcement began using the shorthand “Dixie Mafia,” even though both terms are misnomers.

White Citizens Councils:
These groups were formed, major city by major city, in the 1950s after the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision by the U.S. Supreme Court set the stage for ending segregation; their goal was to “formally” undermine integration. Often comprised of prominent business and civic leaders, they used their influence and resources to outwardly oppose the civil rights movement in a more “respectable” and legal way than that of the Ku Klux Klan. However, many White Citizens' Council members were directly and indirectly tied to more violent groups, such as the NSRP and the KKK, even if those connections were often informal and covert. Joseph Milteer claimed to be an “informal” member of the Atlanta White Citizens' Council, and Noah Jefferson Carden was a member of the Mobile White Citizens' Council. Both men were connected with purported plots to kill Martin Luther King Jr.

Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR):
Formed in the mid-1960s in Mississippi, this group was similar to the White Citizens Councils, in providing an outwardly “civil” response when undermining integration efforts. The group would, for instance, raise money for the defense funds for racists accused of hate crimes or publish newsletters opposing the integration of schools. However, the FBI recognized the APWR as a front for the WKKKK, and its most prominent members and leaders were almost all, to a person, followers of Sam Bowers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If this book forces a new dialogue about terrorism and fosters a deeper understanding of the nature of religious violence in American history, as I hope it will, it does so only because of the help of many people. The first iteration of my thesis was explored in a cowritten book,
The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King Jr.,
in 2012. The more developed argument in
America's Secret Jihad
would not have been possible without the insights of my
Awful Grace of God
coauthor, Larry Hancock. Publisher Charlie Winton and the staff at Counterpoint have shown great patience and enthusiasm for my research, despite the controversial nature of the thesis. A very special thanks must go to developmental editor Eric Brandt for his input and care in preparing the manuscript. I am grateful to my students,—April Nicklaus, Swetha Subramaniam, Rithesh Neelamagam and Niranjan Shankar—for helping with the editing process. Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson (Mississippi)
Clarion-Ledger,
has been an inspiration and a resource for my investigation of civil rights cold cases. Charles Faulkner provided important information for my work on the King assassination. Researcher Ernie Lazar donated a treasure trove of FBI and other material—a lifetime of work—which is now available to researchers and historians for free in a fully text-searchable format online; the late Harold Weisberg
did the same through the archives at Hood College; programmer and historian Rex Bradford did the same (albeit through a paid service) for The Mary Ferrell Foundation. This material, coupled with documents available at the National Archives and Research Administration in Maryland, whose staff is always helpful, was fundamental to my research. The FBI's Freedom of Information Act staff was likewise very helpful and responsive to my requests for new documents. Several witnesses, among them Donald Nissen, Scott Shepherd, Bob Eddy, and former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, also provided key insights for a number of chapters. Finally, my family and friends—my parents especially—have done nothing but encourage my efforts, on this and everything else I do. This book is dedicated to them.