The rant begins by referencing two sections of the book of Revelations: 2:9–10 and 3:9. These passages reference the “Synagogue of Satan” and those who “lie” and “say they are Jews.” As Chester Quarles has noted, these specific New Testament passages are foundational texts for two-seedline CI adherents. Under two-seed theology, Jews have conspired to convince the world that they are the chosen people, when in fact they are the offspring of Satan. If there is any doubt that this is the thinking of Bowers, the Klan Ledger continues, “Today’s so-called Jews persecute Christians, seeking to deceive, claiming Judea as their homeland and they are God’s Chosen… . They ‘do Lie,’ for they are not Judeans, but Are the Synagogue of Satan!” It adds, “If a Jew is not capable of functioning as an individual, and must take part in Conspiracies to exist on this earth, that is his problem.” Passages also reference “Jew consulting anti-Christs” and assert that “Satan and the Anti-Christ stalk the land.”13
Again, anti-Semitism was common to KKK groups in the 1960s. But it was often in the same form as anti-Semitism the world over—the claim that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. The refusal of Jews, the chosen people of the Old Testament, to accept Jesus as their Messiah is the other long-standing grievance leveled against Jews by hostile gentiles. What distinguishes Christian Identity from other forms of anti-Semitism is the blatant rejection that Jews were ever the chosen people, that they were ever in a position to accept Jesus as their savior in the first place. Swift and his followers frequently referred to what he called Ashkenazi Jews as imposters. That this line of thinking is evident in a periodical so close to the MIBURN murders suggests that Bowers had accepted this idea before 1967. Was this theological worldview a motivation for the actual MIBURN crime?
Bowers’s rhetoric on the eve of the murders strongly suggests it may have been. In a speech on June 7, 1964, two weeks prior to the Neshoba murders, Bowers predicted a groundbreaking event to his followers—most of whom had no idea that the attack in Neshoba was in the works. Many have assumed that Bowers was simply foreshadowing the upcoming conflict over Freedom Summer. But the proximity of the speech to the murder of the three activists, and Bowers’s certainty that there would be violence and federal intervention within days, suggests the likelihood that Bowers had the upcoming killings on his mind when he spoke to the rank and file. Many experts believe that planning for the crime had begun as early as May, after Mickey Schwerner began his work in Meridian, Mississippi, on behalf of CORE. Two elements of this speech are worth highlighting, and they point to the likelihood that Bowers saw the Neshoba murders as a potential entrée into the cycle of violence that Swift followers believed would escalate into an end-times race war. Taken together with other facts, they represent two additional lines of evidence suggesting the crime was an act of religious terrorism.
In his June 7 speech, Bowers begins with a prayer and then tells his audience, “This summer … the enemy will launch his final push for victory here in Mississippi.” Bowers then speaks in military terms, saying that the enemy will have “two basic salients.” The first would be “massive street demonstrations and agitation by blacks in many areas at once, designed to provoke white militants into counterdemonstration and open, pitched street battles,” which would then lead to a “decree from the communist authorities in charge of the national government … declaring martial law.”14 Bowers then outlines the WKKKKOM’s plan of response—a combination of outwardly “legal” resistance alongside local authorities and a “secondary group” who use guerrilla tactics as part of a “swift and extremely violent hit-and-run” strategy. To the rank and file to whom he was speaking, Bowers presented this as an unfortunate but necessary (and imminent) future. But again, he was addressing people who had never heard anything like Christian Identity theology in their churches on Sundays. More to the point, Bowers surely knew that federal intervention of any kind in the South, especially in Mississippi, was bound to be offensive to his audience. These were many of the same people who had violently attacked National Guardsmen sent by President Kennedy to protect James Meredith when he integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. To welcome such intervention would be anathema to a group of people schooled in the idea that the northern military occupation of the South during Reconstruction was a travesty of the first order.
… If anything, Bowers’s actions after the Neshoba murders only would have courted the federal intervention that most of his followers abhorred. Bowers escalated the violence in Mississippi—as many as sixty-five bombings occurred during Freedom Summer15—at a time when polls showed that the general public favored massive federal intervention in Mississippi if the violence in that state persisted. When he outwardly placed a moratorium on violence in response to the growing presence of federal law enforcement, Bowers stopped bombings only in counties that were subject to intense law enforcement scrutiny. In fact, he actually asked for violence to increase in outlying counties to divert the FBI’s resources. It seems likely that at least part of the violence that marked Freedom Summer was intended to provoke further federal intervention. To say otherwise is to impute a level of ignorance to Bowers that none of his contemporaries describe.
But one aspect of the Neshoba murder plot certainly suggests that Bowers was creating the very conditions likely to generate federal intervention and thus his envisioned racial holy war. This was the decision to bury the three men deep beneath the earthen dam at Old Jolly Farm. Many scholars believe the decision to use the dam was conceived as far back as May, a level of planning that itself was remarkable. Certainly, disposing of bodies was not unknown in Klan violence. But it was almost always ad hoc—as evidenced by the other bodies discovered in Mississippi swamps and marshes during the search for the three missing activists. To make arrangements to carefully bury bodies weeks in advance of a crime is largely unknown in the annals of racial violence. For someone hoping that federal intervention would antagonize white southerners, such an action was a stroke of genius. It would all but guarantee that federal law enforcement would spend days, if not weeks, searching through Mississippi to find the three men, especially if the activists’ burned car was left out in the open for law enforcement to find first. And recall that during the mounting federal intervention to find the men, the WKKKKOM expanded its reign of terror. Other records show that if Bowers had had his way, things likely would have gotten much worse in Mississippi.
In the same June 7 speech where he foreshadowed “pitched battles” between whites and blacks in Mississippi, Bowers insisted that the primary targets for “any personal attacks” be “the leaders and the prime white collaborators of the enemy.” FBI evidence revealed in my coauthored book The Awful Grace of God suggests that Bowers had reached out to a criminal network, including a professional hit man, with the goal of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. if he came to Mississippi in 1964. Other FBI documents show that the WKKKKOM openly discussed the possibility of “eliminating” King at its meetings.16 But this goal presented a problem for the WKKKKOM: King rarely visited Mississippi before the summer of 1964, and he did so unexpectedly. What was clear, from the Birmingham bombing and the assassination of Medgar Evers the previous year, was that an outrageous act of violence would provoke King to visit the scene of the crime and to lead protests and services against such violence. It is speculative, but if Bowers wanted to lure King into an ambush, an act of violence like the Neshoba murders may well have been planned to trigger just such an opportunity.
This is not simply a case of imputing a level of cunning and tactical sophistication to Bowers after the fact. Many believe that the burning of the Mount Zion Church in Meridian, Mississippi, on June 20, 1964, was part of a similar plan: to lure Schwerner (and Goodman and Chaney) back to Mississippi. If so, it worked; the three men abandoned their Freedom Summer volunteer training sessions in Oxford, Ohio, and came to Mississippi on June 20 to investigate the Mount Zion Church burning.
In further support of this theory, evidence presented at t
he 1999 trial of one of the murderers of African American farmer Ben Chester White in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1966 showed that Bowers plotted White’s murder with a similar strategy in mind: to lure King to Natchez for an ambush. If King came to protest White’s seemingly wanton and senseless murder (White had no known connection to civil rights activity), King could be more easily and sensationally assassinated. Both the 1964 and the 1966 plots against King failed, as the terrorist acts did not result in King changing his itinerary—possibly because FBI informant Dennis had warned law enforcement about an assassination attempt in advance.
As with the CI/NSRP plots against King in the wake of the Birmingham bombing the previous September, any effort to kill King would have exacerbated racial tensions emanating from the Neshoba murders. The murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers the previous summer had provoked race riots in Mississippi. Any reasonable person would have expected that killing King, the spokesperson for the civil rights movement, would have a similar impact, one that would have the added bonus to an Identity enthusiast of being national in scope. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. had been a goal of Identity followers as far back as 1958.
It seems likely that Bowers was motivated by religious ideology when he planned the Mississippi Burning murders. On the other hand, there is no direct evidence that this ideology motivated the men who lured Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney to Mississippi, jailed them under false pretenses, shadowed them by car, and kidnapped and ultimately shot them in cold blood fifty years ago. These men, including law enforcement officers, were likely motivated by the bigotry and irrational fear that informed so many acts of violence in the South. But Bowers’s case shows how the leaders who planned and plotted these acts of violence could share an agenda that coincided and went beyond the goals of protecting the so-called southern way of life. The leaders of some of America’s most radical groups wanted to create their own version of Armageddon. They believed, alongside the Reverend Wesley Swift, that the secular world was in its final days and that soon the day would come when the forces of God would do battle with the forces of Satan.
Within two months of the Neshoba killings, America officially entered a conflict against the communist-backed North Vietnamese. By the end of 1964, growing frustration with the pace of political change had created a major schism within the civil rights movement, between those who continued to favor nonviolence and those who favored militancy and black nationalism. Together, these two developments would escalate social upheaval in the United States and around the world, forcing law enforcement to resort to unprecedented tactics in its fight against extremists on both sides, left and right. To those listening to the sermons of Wesley Swift, his message of impending crisis and spiritual renewal was becoming more appealing.
6
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
BLACK MILITANT REACTION and the URBAN RIOTS of 1964–1965
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi failed to meet their immediate goals with the Neshoba murders. Among other things, they failed to intimidate the thousands of volunteers coming to Mississippi for Freedom Summer—the campaign to register black voters and to educate black children. They even failed to intimidate the large numbers of local black Mississippians who participated in Freedom Summer, housing activists from the COFO, registering to vote, and sending their children to Freedom Schools (organized by activists to teach a civics-heavy, Afrocentric curriculum to black Mississippi students). The public outcry over the Neshoba murders spurred the FBI to launch a massive investigation into the crime, resulting in the creation of an FBI field office in Jackson, Mississippi. Despite the KKK’s efforts, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, effectively ending legal discrimination in America. And the murders breathed new life into Johnson’s other initiative: to pass comprehensive voting rights legislation.
At first blush, the outcome seemed to undermine the hidden agenda of Sam Bowers as well. After all, Bowers had predicted, to Delmar Dennis, a massive federal intervention creating a cycle of violence between blacks and whites. Neither happened—certainly not to the degree that Bowers wanted. But Sam Bowers and his fellow devotees of radical Christian Identity theology were playing the long game. And in the years that followed the Mississippi Burning murders, Bowers and his fellow religious extremists could only have been pleased with social developments, not only in Mississippi but in America as a whole.
In September 1964, with the help of informant Delmar Dennis, authorities uncovered the bodies of the three slain civil rights activists at Olan Burrage’s farm. By December, a U.S. commissioner from Mississippi had voided the indictments of all nineteen men responsible for the killings. Fed up, thirty-seven teenage activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) met with Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leader Fannie Lou Hamer at Hotel Theresa in New York City to listen to famed Muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X. Urging his young audience to “see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself,” the former spokesman for the militant black separatist group the Nation of Islam (NOI) continued:
If the leaders of the nonviolent movement can go into the white community and teach nonviolence, good. I’d go along with that. But as long as I see them teaching nonviolence only in the black community, we can’t go along with that. We believe in equality, and equality means that you have to put the same thing over here that you put over there. And if black people alone are going to be the ones who are nonviolent, then it’s not fair. We throw ourselves off guard. In fact, we disarm ourselves and make ourselves defenseless.1
Malcolm X had befriended members of SNCC in a chance encounter with SNCC leaders on a tour of Africa. Highlighting the need to link the African American civil rights struggle to similar liberation movements in Africa, the activist asserted, “Whenever anything happens to you in Mississippi, it’s not just a case of somebody in Alabama getting indignant, or somebody in New York getting indignant. The same repercussions that you see all over the world when an imperialist or foreign power interferes in some section of Africa—you see repercussions, you see the embassies being bombed and burned and overturned—nowadays, when something happens to black people in Mississippi, you’ll see the same repercussions all over the world.”2
Malcolm X and the group he once served, the NOI, had long argued that violence, especially in retaliation for harassment, was not only acceptable but was politically and morally necessary. Though he had split from the NOI and softened his antagonism toward whites as a race, he still favored fighting fire with fire. He closed his exhortation to his New York City audience by adding, “You’ll get freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it. When you get that kind of attitude, they’ll label you as a ‘crazy Negro,’ or they’ll call you a ‘crazy nigger’—they don’t say Negro. Or they’ll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough, and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom.”3
According to Stokely Carmichael, an SNCC leader in Mississippi at the time, the young activists returned to the Magnolia State very impressed with what Malcolm X had to say. For years, Malcolm X had been the most outspoken voice for armed self-defense in the civil rights struggle. Now, after the killing of Medgar Evers, after the Neshoba murders and the multiple bombings that followed, his message began to have much more resonance.
The debate over armed resistance in nonviolent organizations, such as SNCC and CORE, predated the Neshoba murders. As far back as 1963, members had proposed softening or eliminating written policy banning the use or brandishing of firearms. On the eve of Freedom Summer, in June 1964, the debate reemerged in anticipation of massive violence from Bowers’s Klan. The proposals failed, but the reality was that many civil rights activists either quietly flouted the mandate against armed resistance (for example, Medgar Evers had carried a weapon for prot
ection) or relied on others, including the local black farmers who welcomed activists into their homes and communities, to provide armed protection. Many civil rights activists, including Stokely Carmichael, regarded nonviolence simply as a tactic to win public support, not as a philosophy and moral code (à la Martin Luther King Jr.). Others had abandoned the pretense of nonviolence years before; as far back as 1956, Robert Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP, had gathered armed men to confront the KKK. King and others had shown the political value of nonviolence in Alabama and elsewhere, but the Neshoba murders and the wave of bombings that immediately followed went a long way to changing attitudes about armed self-defense. Famously, at the funeral for the three murdered activists, SNCC activist Dave Dennis asserted:
I’m sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men… . I’ve got vengeance in my heart, and I ask you to feel angry with me… . If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us … if you take it and don’t do something about it … then God damn your souls!4
Just one month before the thirty-seven students heard Malcolm X speak in New York City, a seemingly minor event in Waveland, Mississippi, foreshadowed this shift in approach. In his book We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Professor Akinyele Omowale Umoja describes an attack on an SNCC staff retreat that November 1964:
Retreat participants were alerted when they heard a low-flying plane soaring near the facilities. Later that evening, a vehicle drove near the meeting place and threw a Molotov cocktail on a nearby pier. Suddenly, several male members of SNCC ran from the meeting carrying arms, and the nightriders were abducted and released after a warning from the young freedom fighters. Lorne Cress, a Chicago native and SNCC staffer in McComb, was surprised by the armed response from her comrades. Up until that day, she had believed she was a member of a nonviolent organization. She turned to Howard Zinn—a college professor, historian, and advisor to SNCC—and stated, “You have just witnessed the end of the nonviolent movement.”5
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