Blood and Politics (73 page)

Law enforcement also arrested a gang of family members that called themselves the Aryan People’s Republic. Commanded by twenty-two-year-old
²⁰
Chevie Kehoe, this gang robbed a gun dealer in Arkansas, came back a year later and murdered him and his wife and little girl, kidnapped others, killed an erstwhile comrade, and shot it out with the police. The stolen weapons and loot were initially stored at Elohim City before being transported back to the Spokane, Washington, area. Some of the guns were later used by Peter Langan’s Aryan Republican Army. The crime spree ended after Chevie’s brother and coconspirator Cheyne turned himself in and informed the cops where his brother was hiding out.
²¹

Nailed earlier in this extended crackdown was a group calling itself the Phineas Priesthood. It committed its first robbery in Spokane, Washington, in April 1996, while the Freemen siege was still under way. It set a pipe bomb at the local newspaper,
The Spokesman Review
, as a diversion, and robbed an area bank. During a second robbery of the same bank that July, it bombed a local Planned Parenthood clinic. On October 8, just six months after its first known robbery, FBI agents arrested three of its central figures: Charles Barbee, Robert Berry, and Verne Jay Merrell.

All three were socially stable, with long-term employment and marriage résumés without the kinds of abuses exhibited by the Kehoe men. Berry, age forty-two, ran an auto repair shop and had been married for eighteen years. Barbee, aged forty-four, had worked for twenty-two years at AT&T and been married for fifteen years with two young children. Verne Jay Merrell, age fifty, was neither blue collar nor economically distressed. Born into an upper-middle-class family in 1945, and raised in a Philadelphia suburb, he joined the navy in 1963 and spent twelve years working on nuclear submarines. After discharge he worked in private industry at four nuclear power plants. Merrell joined the Arizona Patriots in the early 1980s and left the power plant world behind. He resettled in Idaho in 1988, at a time when Aryan Nations and others were promoting a Northwest Republic. All three lived in northern Idaho’s Panhandle and attended a Christian Identity church in the Sandpoint, Idaho, area.
²²
They were so thoroughly ensconced in their local communities that one jury found them difficult to convict. Only with a second trial, in 1997, did government prosecutors send the trio to jail. It wasn’t their personalities or crimes that made this gang particularly noteworthy, however. Rather it was their invocation of a biblical character named Phineas that was most significant and requires some additional explanation.

The story of the so-called Phineas Priesthood had been popularized by the Christian Identity writer Richard Kelly Hoskins in a 1990 self-published book titled
Vigilantes of Christendom: The Story of the Phineas Priesthood.
Hoskins even developed a symbol for Phineas, an elongated capital letter
P
with a crossbar just under the semicircle. In 1996 the bank robbers left a note behind with the symbol on it and in another declared that “the high priests of Yahweh” were at work.
²³
This small group was thus dubbed the Phineas Priesthood.

The Phineas story appears in
Chapter 25
of the Book of Numbers, and occurs during a period where the twelve tribes are still wandering in the desert. According to the Hebrew Bible (in which the name is spelled with an additional
h
, Phinehas), unfaithful Israelite men had developed sexual unions with the women of neighboring tribes and had taken up the practices of Baal worship. As a result, the ancient Israelites suffered God’s wrath and a plague. In order to expiate them of these sins, God commanded Moses to publicly execute the apostate ringleaders. Before Moses could carry out the command, however, Phinehas, a descendant of the priestly lineage through Aaron, noticed a prominent Israelite, Zimri, duck into an alcove to have sex with a Midianite princess named Cozbi. Phinehas grabbed his spear and stabbed them both to death while they were in the act. The plague against Israel was lifted. And Phinehas became a high priest. Rabbinical commentaries on this text in the millennia since have not treated Phinehas kindly, explicitly concerned that “he set a dangerous precedent by taking the law into his own hands.”
²⁴

It was precisely this vigilante aspect of the story that attracted a stratum of the Christian Identity faithful. By Hoskins’s telling, Phineas justifiably killed two people because they were engaged in “interracial” sex. (Actually, there are no “races” in the Hebrew Bible, and the differences between Israelites and Midianites are significant because of the Baal worship of the latter tribe. Moses of course most famously married a Midianite woman, Zipporah.)

In his book, Hoskins used the Phineas story to emphasize the theological justification for current-day violence. The title “priest” was an honorific earned in the defense of God’s Law (as Christian Identity adherents understood it). These so-called priests “believe that their God
has called them to their dangerous work,” Hoskins wrote. “Anyone they consider to have violated any of the laws written in the Bible may become their quarry.” The usual list of violations included interracial marriage (or sex), homosexuality, abortion, and usury, and the “dangerous work” to which Hoskins alluded involved the crimes of murder, bank robbery, and bombing clinics. He took his book on the road, selling it at Christian Identity meetings from Virginia to Idaho over the next few years.

The idea—and it was a concept rather than an organizational name at that point—found supporters.
²⁵
Some movement activists wore the symbol as a belt buckle. A Posse Comitatus group in Ohio declared that a former White Patriot Party cadre was reputed to be a Phineas priest, without actually mentioning a name or the murderous act.
²⁶
One Klan newsletter, published during the early 1990s, described the initial formation of the Klan after the Civil War as the surfacing of a Phineas Priesthood.
²⁷
Further popularizing the story, a Pennsylvania skinhead group published a short-lived newsletter entitled
Phineas.

Despite this spate of activity promoting vigilante murder, an October 1991
New York Times
article noted that the Phineas Priesthood had “gone unnoticed by those who track white supremacist groups.” Further, “among those contacted who said they knew little or nothing of the group were Klanwatch, the Department of Justice and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.”
²⁸
Until the 1996 Spokane robberies the Phineas name had not registered with the FBI either.

The anonymity of the Phineas Priesthood concept, however shortlived, underlined the complexity and contradictions of the situation after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. Despite the heinous nature of the crimes in Oklahoma City, similarly focused vanguardist bands had multiplied, as if robbing banks were the same thing as picketing a shoe store. The Freemen had bilked their neighbors even as they claimed to build a white republic, separating themselves off from the surrounding community in the name of mass resistance. In the past, periods of heightened vanguardist activity such as this had pushed mainstreamers to the side, and vice versa. Not during the mid-1990s, however, as the usual lines demarcating the differences between the two strategic tendencies became blurred. While violence and mayhem abounded, the electioneering side of the movement grew also. This time it ensconced itself in the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party and developed an increased vibrancy represented best by the rebirth of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

July 22, 1995.
The FBI was still searching for John Doe Two when twelve hundred people gathered in the hamlet of Black Hawk, Mississippi, for an old-fashioned barbecue picnic and political rally. They listened to a seven-piece band playing country and gospel music, ate chicken, and heard from a list of almost three dozen politicians who ranged from state representatives to Governor Kirk Fordice. The event was sponsored by a bus company and the Carroll County chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an unabashedly white nationalist organization with roots stretching back to the battles against desegregation in the 1950s. Carroll County had been one of its strongholds from the beginning. Located in north-central Mississippi, about 100 miles due south of Memphis, the county contained fewer than ten thousand people, and almost half, 45 percent, were black. White political hegemony had long rested on the disenfranchisement of black people. The county had more registered voters than residents in 1990, according to a report in
The Clarion-Ledger
(Jackson).
¹
In this relatively poor and rural county, only 40 percent of the adult population had graduated from high school at the time data were collected for the U.S. Commerce Department’s 1983
Statistical Abstract
. Many of the county’s white children attended private schools.
²
Preeminent among these was the Carroll Academy in Carrollton, established largely through the effort of the local chapter of the Citizens Councils of America, the precursor to the Council of Conservative Citizens sponsoring the picnic that day. From its inception as a regular event, the Black Hawk rally had been associated with that school and known as a gathering spot for segregationists and white supremacists. At this affair, Senator Trent Lott was the special guest speaker, introduced by the council’s field organizer, Bill Lord, Jr.
³

Elected to Congress in 1972 as a Republican, Lott was one of the first southern white politicians to have permanently left the state Democratic Party. He routinely voted against measures associated with civil rights, including reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act and recognition of Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday. He also repeatedly identified himself (and the contemporary Republican Party) with the Confederate cause. In one interview, Lott claimed “the fundamental principles” that Confederate President “Jefferson Davis believed in . . . apply to the Republican Party.”
⁴
He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1988.

Lott had spoken at several council fests in the past. In May 1982, while still a congressman and serving as House minority whip, he had urged 200 banquet guests at the Carroll Academy to “fight for the principles of the Citizens Council program.”
⁵
On April 11, 1992, Lott had once again graced the head table at a formal Council of Conservative Citizens dinner in Greenwood.
⁶
Standing alongside Bill Lord before a large
COUNCIL OF CONSERVATIVE CITIZENS
banner, Lott told the assembled diners: “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy.” For that occasion, Lott was introduced from the dais by his uncle, the Mississippi state senator Arnie Watson, who also served as a local Citizens Councils officer.
⁷
Arnie Watson was a brother to Trent Lott’s mother, Ione Watson Lott, and he considered himself the U.S. senator’s favorite uncle. “Trent is an honorary member” of the council, Watson told
The New York Times
in 1999. Lott’s support for old-fashioned segregationist politics and his standing relationship with the councils later became points of public controversy. In 1982, 1992, and 1995, however, standing up for the Confederate battle flag and private white schools and the glories of Jim Crow segregation just seemed like the right thing to do.

The Citizens Councils of America was founded after the Supreme Court’s
Brown
decision in 1954, and it became known as the white citizens’ councils and the downtown Klan to civil rights activists. In several southern states, where they were intertwined with local businesses, state government, and law enforcement, the councils led the resistance to desegregation. The man credited with starting the “council” movement, Mississippi State Circuit Judge Tom Brady, wrote a manifesto supporting white supremacy and promising massive resistance to integration in the South.
⁸
Brady was a onetime delegate to the Democratic Party’s National Convention, like many other southern segregationists during the Jim Crow era, and later became a state supreme court judge.
⁹
At the Citizens Councils of America’s height it claimed sixty thousand members, according to Neil McMillen in
The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Willis Carto made repeated overtures to the organization and its leaders. He spoke at its meetings, won its formal approval when first starting Liberty Lobby, and put Judge Brady on an early advisory board. Carto also developed an independent correspondence and working relationship with Brady. The councils eschewed Carto’s explicitly anti-Semitic rhetoric, however, and a few Jewish businessmen joined its ranks. The pages of its bulletin,
The Citizen
, continued to expound white supremacist theories until it closed down. Once the battle to defend state-sponsored segregation was decisively defeated, however, the organization’s founders exhibited little more than regret for the lost past and little vision of a post–civil rights era future. And so it began a long slow decline during the 1970s.

During the Carter administration, when other elements of the white supremacist movement began to surge again, the Citizens Councils continued to shrink. The remaining centers of activity in Carroll County, Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, and Memphis, Tennessee, acted as hubs for other local chapters. Political and social activism, rather than propaganda or pure ideology, kept these groups alive. Besides electing their own officers, members continued fighting against school busing. They built support for private (all-white) academies. They campaigned for candidates for office—from school boards to county commissions to U.S. Congress. They held picnics and other social affairs, and one chapter even had its own women’s bowling team. At the same time, these relatively innocuous activities continued to come wrapped in an undiluted rationale for the supremacy of those who deemed themselves white.