Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  Delmar Dennis specifically tied Bowers’s plan to foment a “race war” to the Grand Wizard’s 1965 assassination plan to murder King when the civil rights leader passed through Mississippi, over a bridge, on his way to protests in Selma, Alabama. As previously discussed, Option A in that plan involved a shooting ambush, while Option B involved blowing up the bridge. Only Dennis’s intervention as an informant averted the plot.

  Ben Chester White was murdered on June 10, 1966. Bowers had arranged the murder in hopes of luring King into an ambush zone. Four days earlier, a racist shot and wounded James Meredith during his nonviolent March Against Fear, to encourage Missis-

  sippi’s black population to vote. Several civil rights leaders, including King, descended on Mississippi to continue Meredith’s mission. But the schisms over tactics, between King and more militant leaders like newly elected Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman Stokely Carmichael, became obvious and open. In fact, Carmichael used the closing of the march to deliver his famous Black Power speech on June 16. One can imagine what would have happened if Bowers had succeeded in luring King to a more controlled kill zone, just days after an icon like Meredith nearly died from racial violence with Carmichael on hand.

  By 1967, Swift’s prophecies about the conditions in America continued to focus on the End Times. The taped sermons Bowers and Tarrants “discussed” in the woods spoke of a nation “in great tribulation. And . . . you will see more of this tribulation. [God said] ‘As you see these things coming to pass, then look up . . . For you are my battle axe and weapons of war. And I am going to stir my people up and I will call for my people to stand upon their feet.’ And eventually the Children of the kingdom, the nations of the kingdom, the powers of God, are going to destroy the powers of the Antichrist.”43

  To a Swift devotee, the antichrist was not one man, as mainstream fundamentalist Christians believe, but the entire race of demonic, imposter Jews, as Bowers indicated in his comments after the Neshoba murders. Professor Neil Hamilton, in his study of right-wing terrorist groups, noted that white supremacist groups viewed King as an agent of the Satanic-Jewish conspiracy; killing him became a top priority. King’s successes in pushing for integration in America only reinforced that perception.44 But King became, literally and figuratively, the victim of his own success. By 1967, for reasons that will become clear, he was an even more inviting target for those hoping to ignite a holy race war. To fulfill Christian Identity prophecy, men like Bowers became more determined to kill a prophet.

  4

  the target

  More than just basic racism and money motivated the people trying to kill Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime.1 Prophecy also played an important role—prophecy in both senses of the term. Laymen hear the word prophecy and imagine a religious visionary channeling a higher power to predict the future. King’s antagonists, a network of racial terrorists, were convinced they could accelerate God’s final days of judgment on Earth as predicted in the Book of Revelation. Inciting a holy race war became their chief objective, and murdering Martin Luther King Jr. became the linchpin in that strategy. This is because of the unique role King played in American society in the changing social contours of the 1960s. King exemplified a different, far less supernatural, understanding of the concept of prophecy. Some biblical prophets are tasked by God to warn a wayward community of believers that they are deviating from God’s expectations, to remind them of the noble calling from which they strayed, lest they receive God’s wrath. But as Jesus told his congregants at Nazareth, “No prophet is accepted in his own country.” If he did not realize this before 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. certainly came to understand it firsthand as his mission began to evolve in the years immediately preceding his death.

  No one represented the prophetic tradition, in the American context, better than Martin Luther King Jr. Fusing ideas of salvation with concepts like liberty and equality, King called on America to repent from the sins of segregation and Jim Crow, and, as he famously told a crowd in Washington, D.C.: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice . . . Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”2

  His efforts, combined with sacrifices and grassroots political activity from thousands of others, helped push forth the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing legal discrimination, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, tearing down most conventional barriers to the franchise for black Americans. The country inched its way toward King’s dream of an egalitarian nation and King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and a place among Gallup’s most admired Americans.3

  But by 1967, King’s optimism for America’s future began to temper. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act represented major blows to legal racism, but the impact was limited largely to the American South. Since World War I, millions of blacks had migrated out of the South to America’s urban areas in the North and on the West Coast. Jim Crow and poll taxes did not limit their opportunities. Simple but profound prejudice, manifested in limited social mobility, economic and housing discrimination, concentrated poverty, and police brutality, posed the biggest obstacles to blacks outside Dixie. King did not rest on his laurels as of 1965; he simply shifted his priorities to issues of social and economic justice that had always animated part of his mission. And he began to shift his geographic attention as well, to northern cities. In 1966 he uprooted his family from their middle-class Atlanta existence to live, for six months, in a Chicago ghetto, to highlight patterns of housing discrimination and poverty.4

  But northern racial prejudice proved to be a daunting challenge for King, and the people he championed became increasingly frustrated, throughout the country, with the lack of justice and opportunity in their everyday lives. The beginnings of capital flight and deindustrialization only exasperated people of color even more. Higher-paying jobs in unskilled factory labor, often the best and only chance for a middle-class lifestyle for blacks denied widespread access to higher education, slowly began to disappear. As the black community’s hope for King’s vision began to waver, so too did its faith in his approach of nonviolent resistance.

  King viewed nonviolent resistance as a philosophical idea informed by Jesus Christ as much as Mahatma Gandhi. “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it,” King argued in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.5 But to others, nonviolence was simply a means to an end: at best a strategy, and otherwise simply a tactic to be used for black liberation. So long as it helped publicize the civil rights conflict to indifferent audiences in Montana and North Dakota, and even to the unaligned world in the midst of a cold war, many activists could turn the other cheek. But as many contemporary historians pointed out, even at the peak of King’s influence not everyone embraced nonviolence. In 1963, Malcolm X, the spokesman for the Nation of Islam, comparing his religion’s ideas of violence to King’s, said, “Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”6

  Malcolm X referred specifically to acts of violent unrest earlier that year as signs of growing frustration within the black community. The murder of Medgar Evers in June 1963 and the bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church in September of the same year, ignited riots in Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, respectively. That said, each of these uprisings occurred in response to acts of outrageous violence. The May 1963 riots followed a failed attempt to kill King and his brother, A.D.

  Another act of racial violence triggered a major urban riot in Harlem in July 1964, after a controversial police shooting resulted in the death of fifteen-year-old James Powell. “Bottles, rocks and Molotov cocktails rained down from tenement rooftops and smashed in the littered streets,” the International Herald Tribune reported.7 It went on
to note 116 civilian injuries (revised by historians to 118) and at least forty-five stores “broken into . . . looted or damaged.” The Harlem riot triggered a wave of similar uprisings in American cities over the next few weeks: first in Brooklyn, New York, then Rochester, New York, then several cities in New Jersey, and finally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That these events occurred after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in northern cities, foreshadowed the dynamic that would plague the country in the years that followed: incidents of police or even suspected police abuse sparking powder kegs of socioeconomic frustrations, first in one city, then in adjacent cities. Rev. King, commenting on the Harlem riots, spoke of the need to eliminate “conditions of injustice that still pervade our nation and all of the other things which can only deepen the racial crisis.”8

  Yet another wave of riots struck in 1965, the most notable coming after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Another incident of police misconduct unleashed literal and figurative fires in one of the worst urban riots in American history. Over six days of violence, thirty-four people died, more than one thousand people were injured, and over six hundred buildings were damaged. “People said that we burned down our community,” Tommy Jacquette, then a twenty-one-year-old resident of South Central Los Angeles, recalled. “No, we didn’t. We had a revolt in our community against those people who were in here trying to exploit and oppress us.”9 King faced a difficult audience in young men like Jacquette when the reverend visited Watts, hoping to negotiate a “peace” between the residents and local leaders. At one point he addressed a crowd:

  However much we don’t like to hear it, and I must tell the truth. I’m known to tell the truth. While we have legitimate gripes, while we have legitimate discontent, we must not hate all white people, because I know white people now . . . Don’t forget that when we marched from Selma to Montgomery, it was a white woman who died on that highway 80, Viola Liuzzo. We want to know what we can do to create right here in Los Angeles a better city, and a beloved community. So speak out of your hearts and speak frankly.10

  The response Dr. King received symbolized what would become a growing schism within the civil rights movement. An unidentified attendee from the crowd insisted:

  The only way we can ever get anybody to listen to us is to start a riot. We got sense enough to know that this is not the final answer, but it’s a beginning. We know it has to stop, we know it’s going to stop. We don’t want any more of our people killed, but how many have been killed for nothing? At least those who died died doing something. No, I’m not for a riot. But who wants to lay down while somebody kicks em to death? As long as we lay down we know we’re gonna get kicked. It’s a beginning; it may be the wrong beginning but at least we got em listening. And they know that if they start killing us off, it’s not gonna be a riot it’s gonna be a war.11

  Dr. King did not see this warning as hyperbole. Having received a less-than-warm response in his Watts visit, and having failed to negotiate a truce between local black leaders and the white political establishment in Los Angeles, King briefed his political ally President Lyndon B. Johnson about the situation on the ground. In a private conversation, the Reverend King worried, “Now what is frightening is to hear all of these tones of violence from people in the Watts area and the minute that happens, there will be retaliation from the white community.” He added, ominously, “People have bought up guns so that I am fearful that if something isn’t done to give a new sense of hope to people in that area, that a full-scale race war can develop.”12

  King said this in 1965, a year that saw only eleven urban riots. The Watts eruption accounted for the vast majority of the injuries, deaths, and arrests that year. In 1966, the number of riots shot up to fifty-three. None came close to matching the intensity of Watts, but Americans spent five times as many days rebelling against oppressive conditions.13 By 1966, King’s one-time supporters increasingly began to support Black Nationalist and militant groups, such as the Black Panthers. Dedicating a good deal of their activities to community uplift programs, such as free breakfasts, the Panthers’ ten-point platform appropriated the language of the late Malcolm X (assassinated in 1965), saying, “We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.” They asserted their constitutionally protected Second Amendment rights and urged “all Black people . . . [to] arm themselves for self-defense.”14 One-time pacifist groups such as the SNCC, who previously enjoyed close if sometimes rocky relationships with King, placed violent resistance into their charters. Rejecting the practice of civil disobedience King popularized, SNCC spokesperson Stokely Carmichael asserted, in June 1966: “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power.”15 Carmichael clarified his position later: “When you talk about black power you talk about bringing this country to its knees any time it messes with the black man . . . any white man in this country knows about power. He knows what white power is and he ought to know what black power is.”16 H. Rap Brown, the leader of SNCC, famously asserted that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”17

  Martin Luther King Jr. increasingly had to gear his prophetic mission toward calling his own community back to nonviolence. Black power, as defined by activists like Carmichael, he argued, implied something too exclusionary and too threatening. “Black supremacy or aggressive black violence is as invested with evil as white supremacy or white violence,” Rev. King asserted in October 1966. But he ultimately placed the blame for the growing stridency among his flock on a “new mood” rooted in “real, not imaginary causes.” He added:

  The mood expresses angry frustration which is not limited to the few who use it to justify violence. Millions of Negroes are frustrated and angered because extravagant promises made less than a year ago are a shattered mockery today . . . In the northern ghettos, unemployment, housing discrimination and slum schools constituted a towering torture chamber to mock the Negro who tries to hope . . . Many Negroes have given up faith in the white majority because “white power” with total control has left them empty handed.18

  King’s willingness to speak truth to power, and to challenge a national, rather than strictly Southern, audience, hurt his esteem among white audiences. He fell off Gallup’s list of America’s most admired people, and a poll showed his disapproval ratings among white Americans increasing from 46 percent in 1963 to 68 percent by 1966. He remained enormously popular with black Americans, but polls also began to highlight the schism among black Americans about how to best achieve social justice. Fifteen percent of black Americans told pollsters in 1966 that they would be willing to join a riot. Another poll reported that twice as many blacks said the recent riots improved their political position as said the riots undermined it.19

  The factionalism and violence grew much deeper in 1967. It started that April in North Omaha, Nebraska. “Police in Omaha, Nebraska, said they could not pinpoint what started the trouble. But bottles and rocks were flying once again in the same part of town, mainly Negro, where 2 riots broke out last summer,” one Omaha newspaper reported. “An estimated 200 people took part—pelting cars, smashing windows, and looting stores.”20 The paper wondered “whether we’re facing another ‘long hot summer’ of racial violence—the 4th one in a row.” Many cities would, indeed, experience another year of social upheaval, and many more would experience it for the first time. The Congressional Quarterly composed a list of instances of civil unrest for 1967:

  Nashville, Tenn., April 8–10—Several hundred Negro students from Fisk University and Tennessee A. and I. State University rioted on three nights after a Negro student at Fisk was arrested by a white policeman; at least 17 persons were injured and 94 arrested; the disturbance started a few hours after Stokely Carmichael spoke to Vanderbilt University students; two of his aides were arrested.

  Cleveland, Ohio,
April 16—Violence erupted in the predominantly Negro Hough area, with rock throwing, window breaking and looting.

  Louisville, Ky., April 20—Police fired tear gas into a crowd of more than 1,000 whites taunting open housing demonstrators; the mob threw bricks and bottles.21

  On May 8, in a public and honest moment, Dr. King told the journalist Sander Vanocur:

  I must confess that that dream that I had that day has in many points turned into a nightmare. Now I’m not one to lose hope. I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years and I would say over the last few months.

  I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments. And I’ve come to see that we have many more difficulties ahead and some of the old optimism was a little superficial and now it must be tempered with a solid realism. And I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go . . .

  But King would not abandon the cause of nonviolence. He ended by telling Vanocur:

  I feel that nonviolence is really the only way that we can follow, cause violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the Negro community than it solves. You can through violence burn down a building, but you can’t establish justice. You can murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. And what we’re trying to get rid of is hate and injustice and all of these other things that continue the long night of man’s inhumanity to man.22

  King’s deepest convictions could not contain the unrest and discord.