America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (9 page)

Swift called his sermon of September 30, 1962, “As in the Days of Noah,” a reference to the world on the brink of God's previous great judgment, when he had saved a select few (Noah's family and the animal kingdom) but had brought his wrath, in the form of the Great Flood, to destroy the remaining sinners in the world. Swift may have bemoaned John F. Kennedy's “invasion” of Mississippi, but he also hailed the prospects of God's saving judgment.

It takes too much time to finish a subject like this. But I want you to know that you are in the latter days. “And as it was in the days of Noah” [refers to] a massive program of Satan's kingdom which is to mongrelize your race. They want to implement this program with troops. They want to back it by every conspiratorial measure that Satan can dream up. And some of these brainwashed people lifting up a standard of self-righteousness which is Satan's own lie—behind this shield they march to destroy. . . .

I am going to tell you this. [The Lord] is coming in with a long sword and a sharp sickle. And He is coming in to reap the Grapes of Wrath. And to trample the Wine Press of Judgment. I want you to know tonight, that you are a part of this battle. So don't surrender. Don't give in. If they are going to try to force your Race with violence, then we shall meet them in like token. Let me assure you of this. That in this occupation, have no fear. For He said: “
I
shall be like a wall of fire about you.” “No weapon formed against you shall prosper
.”

Again, I say that we are not alone. As I said this afternoon, He said—“I shall never leave nor forsake you even until the end of the age.”
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In the passage above, Swift highlights a key difference between conventional millennialism and its variation in radical Christian Identity believers, who favor separatism and a wait-and-see approach to the end-times, and those who favor a more proactive approach to eschatology. For Swift and his followers, there is no time during the tribulation when God will remove the “elect” from the world. Instead, as he notes above, the Anglo-Saxons will “meet them”—the forces of Satan—“in like token.” They would fight violence with violence. This is a major reason why so many followers of CI, then and now, stockpile weapons—to wage war during the end-times.
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When Swift himself died, they found a virtual arsenal at his ranch in Lancaster, California.

Ideas like the Jewish–communist conspiracy, the threat of race mixing, the “real story of the book of Genesis,” and the coming Battle of Armageddon were ubiquitous in Swift's sermons and teachings. They were motifs in his ministry years before the Ole Miss riot. What Oxford represented for the likes of Stoner and Potito and Gale, in both a spiritual and a practical sense, was the improving prospects for a holy race war. Swift's end-times theology does not draw any distinctions between members of his Church of Jesus Christ–Christian and the “everyday” Anglo-Saxon Christian. All are supposed to rise up and vanquish the forces of Satan (Jews, racial minorities, and so on). But until the riots at Oxford, there was very little evidence that the wider white race was ready to embrace this kind of fight. There were, without question, open efforts to resist and intimidate civil rights protestors. But almost all the actual violent opposition came from a limited set of individuals in KKK organizations. The Ole Miss riots were the first real instance of serious, widespread violence from rank-and-file whites in the face of integration. Such violence only intensified with the presence of federal marshals. The events suggested that a rabble-rouser such as General Walker could
incite a mob, even composed of laypeople with no direct connection to the KKK. Over time, Identity leaders came to see instigation and provocation as the best hope for encouraging a racial holy war.

Tommy Tarrants, a former Swift follower who was intimately connected to several of the most important leaders in various white supremacist organizations, provided valuable insights into the mind-set and strategy of Christian Identity leaders in his autobiography,
The Conversion of a Klansman
.
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The book documents Tarrant's evolution from an angst-ridden racist teenager in 1963 Alabama, to the chief terrorist for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi in 1968, to an ex-convict–turned–ordained minister working for a mainstream Christian organization, the C.S. Lewis Institute.

Angered as a high school senior about the shift toward integration in his hometown of Mobile, Thomas (Tommy) Albert Tarrants III joined the protests against integration in 1963. Soon he found himself inculcated into Christian Identity theology by Admiral John Crommelin and notorious white supremacist Sidney Crockett Barnes.

Tarrants helped spearhead a wave of anti-Jewish and racist bombings in Mississippi from 1967 to 1968, for which he was later arrested and sentenced to thirty years in the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm). But Tarrants had a major religious conversion while incarcerated, forsaking Identity theology to become a follower of mainline evangelical Christianity, and was released on good behavior in 1975. He became a pastor at an interdenominational church in Washington, D.C., and wrote books and gave speeches repenting for his past. Explaining his thought process while a follower of Identity teachings, Tarrants confessed:

Part of the strategy was to create fear in the black community—but it was more important to produce racial polarization and eventual retaliation. This retaliation would then swell the ranks of whites who would be willing to condone or employ violence as a viable response to the racial problem. . . .
Our hope and dream was that a race war would come
.
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But if fomenting a race war was part of the CI vision, African Americans were not playing along. Time and time again, from the
mid-1950s and the Montgomery Bus Boycott through the Freedom Rides in 1961, white racists attacked and harassed African Americans in the most blatant ways possible. But time and time again, the violence and intimidation failed, not only at deterring the civil rights movement but also at engendering a violent response. However easy it was to inflame a white audience, these supremacists had yet to inflame the black community.

If blacks continued to maintain disciplined nonviolence in the face of ongoing attacks, the hopes of creating a cycle of violence that would escalate into a holy race war would remain empty. Events in the spring and summer of 1963, much like the events at Ole Miss in 1962, may have served as yet another cosmic sign that Armageddon was soon approaching.

On May 5, 1963, Swift delivered another sermon, “Armageddon—Local and Worldwide.” Swift announced:

I want you to know that the battle of Armageddon is a worldwide struggle by the powers to overthrow God's Kingdom. I want you to know that the battle of Armageddon has already been decided although the actual battle has not been launched in its full tempo.
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He echoed all his familiar motifs. For example, the Jewish-led communist conspiracy had led President Kennedy to appease Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev several months before in the Cuban Missile Crisis. What's more, according to Swift, the communists, far from removing their missiles per a secret agreement, were only reinforcing them. Communists were also plotting to hijack America's public education system. A Jewish attorney general in Swift's native state of California, Stanley Mosk, was persecuting Swift's fellow extremists. And with an eye toward recent news, the “gyprocrat” (a Swift term for a Jewish-controlled hypocrite) Martin Luther King Jr. had “stirred up” the people of Alabama.

King probably would not have disputed this charge. Together with other leaders, such as the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, King had launched a major offensive to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama. Weeks of protests received national
attention, especially when King himself was jailed in Birmingham, where he penned his famous letter to sympathetic clergy who were nonetheless critical of the strategy of civil disobedience. He wrote, “I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”
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Until then, local authorities had largely been successful in containing civil rights protests.

Upon King's release that April, his advisors suggested something bold: using middle and high school–aged children to protest discrimination. On May 2, 1963, just three days before Swift's sermon, more than one thousand students cut school and marched from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to the Birmingham Public Library, ostensibly to highlight the library's policies of discrimination. The young protestors were met by law enforcement under the direction of Birmingham's racist police commissioner Bull Connor, whose men proceeded to use hoses, German shepherds, and clubs on the nonviolent students. Local white supremacists were not happy when the negative publicity surrounding the event shamed Birmingham's white establishment into a tentative deal aimed at desegregation.

On May 11, 1963, one day after the deal was made, bombs went off at the A.G. Gaston Motel (where Martin Luther King stayed while organizing the Birmingham protests) and at the Birmingham home of the minister's younger brother, A.D. King (also a major player in civil rights activism). No one was injured, mostly because the targets happened to be late returning from a planning meeting. Still, the bombings triggered the first-ever race riot in the history of Birmingham. Newspapers described a city “under siege.”
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Nearly fifty police officers were injured in a riot that included some twenty-five hundred people. President Kennedy had to amass troops in the surrounding area, but luckily for the president, the situation calmed down in a few days.

No one was ever prosecuted and convicted for the bombing, although police reports seen by the author suggest that the attack was made by Birmingham KKK members with the possible support of the
NSRP. But who plotted the attacks may be less important than what they meant to figures like Wesley Swift, J.B. Stoner, or Sam Bowers. In a May 13, 1963, sermon, Swift directly referenced the riots (conveniently avoiding mention of the bombing that precipitated them). In a speech called “Evidence of Divine Assistance,” Swift began, “As we open this service tonight, the federal government is moving. And on orders from the Kennedy Administration, they started flying in troops into McClelland field next to Montgomery, Alabama.” He continued, “I consider that the President of these United States, at the present time, with his present advisors, and the Attorney General of these United States, are the greatest danger for the destruction of our society as anyone on Mr. Khrushchev's general staff.” Calling the developments in Alabama a communist plot and Martin Luther King Jr. a “fat headed demagogue of the negroes,” Swift also accused King of being a communist tool. Then he asserted,

I am well aware that we are moving into the stages of Armageddon. . . . And I want you to know that being Christian Americans you have the right to defend yourself, your country and your faith. We are the majority, and we are going to keep it that way. . . . Do not ever think that you can save America without direct action. Someone said, “Yes, but Christians do not take direct action.” Don't you believe this. For Christ is stepping into this situation with the Sword of Judgment in HIS hand, and with direct action. And it will continue until the blood flows to the horses' bits. And there may be the greatest deliverance that you ever saw. . . . I point this out to you tonight, that these signs of riots and distress, this racial upheaval, are all signs of the climax of an age. When you see these things come to pass, then look up. Remember the prophet Joel said: “When they call on ME, they shall be delivered.”—Every last one whose name was written in the book, before the foundation of this world. Not taken out of the world, but empowered in it.

Many people are praying to be taken out of the world. Sometimes I wish they would. I think the most dangerous people we have are those who do not want to stand up for victory with God.
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Those who wanted to “stand up for victory with God” presumably included Byron de la Beckwith. Born in California in 1920, Beckwith moved to the Mississippi Delta as a young boy. He grew into an outspoken critic of desegregation during the 1950s and eventually became an investigator for the Mississippi White Citizens Council. With groups in most states, these councils were supposedly white-collar manifestations of southern resistance to the civil rights movement, in contrast to the blue-collar Ku Klux Klan, with the former supposedly shunning violence in favor of legal obstruction. That being said, many scholars now recognize that White Citizens Councils worked behind the scenes with KKK groups to accomplish the same ends. It is difficult to say with whom Beckwith was working in June 1963, as the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, under Bowers's leadership, had yet to fully form.

On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), returned home late from his office in Jackson, Mississippi. Recently Evers had appeared on television to call for greater integration, something that certainly would have enraged white supremacists.

Evers, carrying T-shirts that read “End Jim Crow Now” from his car, moved toward his front door. His wife, Myrlie, was still awake with their young children. She had allowed them stay up to hear President John F. Kennedy deliver a landmark television address, publicly placing the administration squarely behind men like Evers in their push for civil rights. One chronicler, John C. Henegan, described the tragedy that unfolded: