What the Academics Have Missed:
Religious Terrorism
If the HSCA missed the religious component of a King plot, modern scholars, with their post-9/11 focus on religious terrorism, could help investigators understand the dynamic that may have led to King’s murder. Reanalyzing elements of the white supremacist movement in the 1960s in the context of religious terrorism would represent a significant shift for some in the field of terrorism studies, but it might provide valuable insights—not only into the violence surrounding the civil rights movement but also possibly into the modern evolution of current religious terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda. Decades later, Osama bin Laden, through the power of his religious vision, managed to inspire individuals and groups from America to travel and train in Afghanistan and then wage jihad in Somalia.
Such a change would not require any kind of revisionist history but a reapplication and reconsideration of what is already known about the origins of certain domestic terrorist groups, what is known about religious terrorism as a concept, and what is already documented concerning the acts of violence in the 1960s. Recent scholarship, for instance, has already called attention to the underlying religious motivations of domestic terrorist groups such as the Order and the Aryan Nations who terrorized America in the 1980s and 1990s. They may be seen as extreme outgrowths of the Christian Identity message,23 but their religious denominations were formed by devotees of Wesley Swift and were modeled on Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which was created in 1946.
In making such comparisons, one must be careful, as the Swift network in the 1960s was layered on top of, and their goals hidden from, the rank-and-file members of organizations such as the White Knights. But given this limitation, one can still see these groups loosely following the kind of template described by terrorism scholar Dr. Bruce Hoffman in his analysis of religious extremists for the RAND Corporation.24
According to Hoffman, religious terrorists are more willing to resort to “indiscriminate violence” than are secular terrorists, for such acts are not only sanctioned in their religious worldview but also necessary “for the attainment of their goals.” The White Knights and National States Rights Party were so violent that even other Klan groups, notably the United Klans of America, sought to distinguish themselves from Bowers’s and Stoner’s organizations.25
Hoffman adds that religious terrorists are less concerned in obtaining the sympathy of outsiders as they are with satisfying the religious imperatives of their current membership. On this front, the evidence is mixed. Stoner, from the start, attacked Jewish synagogues when this was generally frowned upon by everyday Southern reactionaries. Bowers had repeatedly attempted to push the White Knights in an anti-Semitic direction in 1964 and 1965 but with no success. It was not until law enforcement pressure drained the White Knights of most of its rank-and-file membership that Bowers was able to use his inner-circle operatives, some of whom shared the same enthusiasm for Swift’s theology, to focus their violent attention on Jews more than on blacks. It is important to note that for a member of the Christian Identity denomination, all Christian Anglo-Saxon whites are, in essence, their followers. The everyday white is still a “true” Israelite but with a false consciousness; once the race war comes, all these people will “wise up” and battle the forces of Satan.
Thus Bowers and his ilk, while more extreme than any other group at the time, could not, as Hoffman articulates about other religious terrorists, resort to “almost limitless violence against a virtually open-ended category of targets—that is, anyone who is not a member of the terrorists’ religion or religious sect.”26 If he killed white Christians, Bowers would not only limit his power and influence over his remaining flock but also literally eliminate potential soldiers in the End Times race war to come.
Finally, and most relevant to a discussion of the King assassination, Hoffman notes that, in contrast to secular terrorists who “regard violence as a way of instigating the correction of a flaw in a system that is basically good or as a means to foment the creation of a new system,” religious terrorists instead “seek vast changes in the existing order.” We discussed earlier how this connects to a strategy of propaganda of the deed. A thorough analysis shows that the violent activities Bowers sponsored—as well as those Stoner and his followers committed—do not make sense as mere acts of reactionary racism or vigilante terrorism. It doesn’t require much prescience to predict that killing four young girls in a church in Birmingham or killing a conservative civil rights figure like Medgar Evers in front of his family would foment strong reactions like a race riot. Such riots would represent the best hope of drawing federal troops into the state and escalating the violence. But federal intervention in state affairs ran counter to the very currents of southern culture. Only diabolical men such as Bowers would want intervention, because it could provoke a race war, the one Wesley Swift prophesied.
The Arc of the Universe
To a follower of Swift at the beginning of 1968, such a prophecy must have seemed almost at hand. The racial tensions spotlighted during the nonviolent period of the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1965 did not disappear with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. As global economic forces began to take working-class jobs overseas and out of America’s ghettos and inner cities, blacks were left with new political rights but even fewer economic opportunities. Frustrations began to fester, and even as Dr. King shifted his focus from political justice to socioeconomic justice, more and more blacks began to gravitate from his larger message of nonviolence to the more militant message of someone like Stokely Carmichael, who famously coined the term Black Power. It was Carmichael who once said, “Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt and the mess.”27 To Sam Bowers, who hoped that provocations in Mississippi would erupt in federal intervention, and then reprisals from black militants, Carmichael’s words must have been music to his ears. And while blacks did not burn down the courthouses of Mississippi, by 1968 violence was becoming the outlet of choice for many victims of de facto racism.
In 1965 the race riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, started a trend that would plague America throughout the decade. The next few years saw riots in Chicago, Illinois; Newark, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; and dozens of other cities across the country. Some estimates say that in the “long, hot summer” of 1967 alone, there were more than 150 race riots across the country. The civil disorder had changed the entire national security posture of the United States, involving the United States military in domestic intelligence gathering in unprecedented fashion. No longer was the national security infrastructure concerned about communists in Martin Luther King Jr.’s organization; they were focused on identifying black militants.
By 1968 America was a racial powder keg ready to explode, and the fuse of King’s assassination pushed the country closer to Swift’s dark dream than anything else in the nation’s history. It created the waves of violence and rioting that the national security establishment so feared and Sam Bowers and J. B. Stoner so desired. The military and National Guard were deployed in America’s cities in ways not seen since the Civil War. As much as structural flaws and philosophical limitations impeded law enforcement’s investigation of the King assassination, it must be remembered that the tension in the nation also circumscribed their efforts.
But in the end, just as Senator Bobby Kennedy pacified a crowd on the evening of April 4 in Indianapolis, Indiana, by appealing to King’s vision of mutual understanding and racial harmony, it was Martin Luther King Jr. who triumphed, even in death. The riots calmed. Sam Bowers and his ilk largely faded into the background, and the Klan has never approached its level of influence and violence since King’s death, although recent events, like the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, seem ominous and remind us that King’s admirers must stay vigilant.
King, whose shift to socioeconomic is
sues had cost him popularity with white America before his death, has become an icon of righteous citizenship and racial harmony. Few historical figures are as respected across America’s increasingly polarized, ideological spectrum. His ideas have been adopted by President Barack Obama, who kept King’s picture in the Oval Office, and by Glenn Beck, who held a major event in King’s honor. This reverence has even made some of King’s contemporaries uneasy, as some commentators have sought to remind Americans that King died on his way to the Poor People’s Campaign, after marching in solidarity with union workers.
But if King’s ideas about racial justice are celebrated, if his views on economic justice are debated, one of his core goals, legal justice, has until recently largely been ignored. Time and time again, King marched in memory of or eulogized those whose murders shocked the nation into guilt over its larger inequities. King demanded justice for the victims, even as racists plotted to kill the minister on such visits. The names of those victims join King’s on the civil rights memorial outside the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama in honor of those who lost their lives in the civil rights struggle, but also as a sad reminder that so many of their homicides have gone unsolved.
Starting in the 1990s, cultural and structural changes in the South allowed some of these crimes to be prosecuted. Notably, Sam Bowers went to prison in 1998 for the murder of Vernon Dahmer, the killing he ordered in 1966, and Bowers died behind bars forty years after Dahmer. Emboldened by such successful prosecutions, the Justice Department formed a Cold Case Initiative to investigate civil rights violence. To date, it has had very little success. But the Justice Department’s renewed efforts lack legitimacy for another reason: they do not include an investigation into the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.
In response to the claims of James Earl Ray’s attorney, William Pepper, whose theories had gained favor with some of King’s family members, the Justice Department did briefly reanalyze the King assassination in 2000. Having once again dismissed Ray’s improbable Raul stories, and having found that Pepper’s chief witness to a conspiracy, Loyd Jowers, was someone who was clearly motivated by money and not honesty, the Justice Department correctly dismissed Pepper’s arguments. Narrowly focused, this effort in 2000 did not examine many of the key outstanding issues in the case.
A renewed effort by the Cold Case Initiative should not simply focus on the material developed in this book but also on crime-scene evidence that has never been subjected to the latest forensic analysis. The authors have located the fingerprint evidence in the King murder and have taken high-resolution digital copies of prints that were never tied to James Earl Ray. The FBI made exhaustive efforts to tie several of these prints to potentially innocent contributors, such as FBI agents and police officers, with no success. The Justice Department attempted to run these prints through the FBI’s fingerprint database system, the Integrated Automated Fingerprints Identification System (IAFIS) in 2000 with no success, but technology was new and the database was not as robust.
The authors can now report a major development in this area. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Cliff Spiegelman, a statistics expert who specializes in (among other things) the application of probability theory to forensic science, the authors were able to reach out to various crime labs in the United States. Michele Triplett, forensic operation manager for the King County crime lab in Seattle, was gracious enough to offer her services; one of her best fingerprint analysts at the lab, Cynthia Zeller, has reviewed several prints and sent them through Next Generation Identification (NGI), a newer and more robust update of the IAFIS system that allows for palm print checks as well as fingerprint comparisons. Balancing her time with ongoing cases, Zeller has uploaded more than a dozen prints from various King assassination crime scenes into the system. As of yet, there have been no matches generated by the database—that is to say, nothing in the FBI’s central database triggered a match. But similar concerns remain from the from the original Department of Justice IAFIS analysis of King assassination prints in 2000: it is not clear if the database includes prints that go back before 1968; it is not clear if the FBI ever obtained the fingerprints from a number of KKK members; and the Seattle crime lab lacks the authority to request that other, independent state and city crime labs run searches through their local databases. When time permits, some of these issues may be resolvable, and the authors continue to collect fingerprints in hopes that Ms. Zeller and Ms. Triplett can find potential suspects.
Such a delayed response to the murder would not have surprised Martin Luther King Jr., who liked to tell audiences frustrated with the pace of social reform that “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”28 Decades have passed since his murder, but the time has come for a serious pursuit of justice. Digging into the King murder mystery may force us to revisit parts of our history that are uncomfortable or painful to remember. It may disclose oversights or connections to informants that are embarrassing or shocking. It may disclose additional, private information about Dr. King himself, details that remind us of his human flaws but that also remind us of his courage in fighting for justice even in the face of scurrilous rumors aimed at besmirching his character and dignity. But these efforts could not be more uncomfortable and painful, more embarrassing and shocking, than King’s murder itself, which deprived the country of a leader who challenged America and Americans, however burdensome it was, to be a better country, to be better human beings. Perhaps it is only through such sacrifice and suffering, as Bobby Kennedy reminded that crowd in Indianapolis, that we truly achieve understanding. “Even in our sleep,” Kennedy told the audience, quoting the Greek poet Aeschylus, “pain that does not forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God.”
acknowledgments
This book would not have been be possible without the generous contribution of time, insights, and critiques by a number of individuals. The authors would especially like to thank Jerry Mitchell, Rev. Ed King, Charles Faulkner, Dr. Gerry McKnight, Dan Christensen, David Boylan, Keith Beauchamp, and Dan Dunn for their contributions and support of our efforts. We also offer our special thanks for support and encouragement to our family members Lawrence Wexler and Kathy Hancock, and to our good friends Debra Conway and the late Sherry Feister.
We are also grateful to others who were very helpful in our research into the King murder and the network of white supremacists and associated individuals surrounding the case. We especially appreciate the comments and contributions of Joy Washburn, Rev. Ken Dean, Ernie Lazar, Jason Kull, Roanna Elliott, Pat Speer, William Kelley, Dr. Chester L. Quarles, Carmine Savastano, Dr. John Drabble, Rex Bradford, Mark Zaid, Kel McClanahan, Lamar Waldron, Donald Tomasello, Scott Kercher, and Alan Kent.
Dr. Cliff Spiegelman, Michele Triplett, and Cynthia Zeller deserve enormous credit for risking their professional reputations to analyze the fingerprints in a case as controversial as the MLK assassination. I hope together we can find that break that changes the course of history.
In addition, a number of individuals provided important information to the authors via interviews. That list includes Janet Upshaw, retired Detective Fred Sanders, and several others who, due the sensitive nature of their comments, we will not identify. Special thanks go to Donald Nissen, who, for fear for his life, stayed quiet for many years, but who—in the face of those same fears—finally confirmed his own experiences with a White Knight bounty offer on the life of Martin Luther King Jr.
We would also like to express our appreciation to several former FBI agents who were interviewed for this book. Whatever flaws plagued the original FBI investigation into Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, those problems should be attributed to the bureau’s institutional impediments, and to the man who put those structures in place, Director J. Edgar Hoover. Individual field agents commonly worked the case to the best of their ability, producing key investigative reports and data. We feel th
at their individual work was severely limited by organizational and reporting procedures as well as Director Hoover’s own personal biases—including his extreme dislike of Dr. King. The former agents we’d most like to thank for their dialog with us are Stanley Orenstein and Gerard Robinson. The late Jim Ingram was also especially helpful in providing early insights to the authors, and he continued to encourage our research until he passed away.
Likewise, staff members at several institutions were most helpful to our work. We would like to thank the staff of the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis; of the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; of the Record Information and Dissemination Section of the FBI; and of the library research staff at the University of Michigan—especially Julie Herrada, for her relentless pursuit of material from the “Dixon Line.”
The support we received from our publisher has made what could have been a stressful experience one that was, instead, enjoyable and meaningful. Jack Shoemaker, Jennifer Alton, Megan Fishmann, Jennifer Kovitz, and Wah-Ming Chang helped us add a new level of quality to our work. And this project would not have been possible without Charlie Winton, who has been our advocate, mentor, editor, and friend all in one package.
appendix
Photographs
Killing King Page 24
