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

by Stuart Wexler

  But the nonviolent movement was not quite dead. King and others would score another moral victory with their voting rights protests in Selma, Alabama, the following year. The widely publicized scenes of armed police officers on horseback beating unarmed protestors with batons shocked the nation, giving President Johnson’s Voting Rights Act the public support it needed to pass. With its passage, almost every state-level obstacle to constitutionally guaranteed voting rights—notably literacy tests—was removed. But for many in the African American community, the legislation—and the civil rights act that had preceded it—were not enough to pacify their increasingly growing frustration with the status quo.

  More and more, economic concerns joined political concerns for African Americans. In the 1960s, America entered into a period of rapid economic dislocation as countless numbers of factories closed, reopening in cheaper labor markets outside the nation. This foreign outsourcing profoundly affected the African American community in many cities. The types of factory jobs that had lured waves of African American migrants to abandon the life of southern sharecropping and that could, in the post–World War II economic boom, sustain a nuclear family on one income, were disappearing. Even when such jobs were available, discriminatory lending practices and prejudicial housing schemes (called redlining) forced even middle-class blacks into ghettos. These were injustices not addressed in either of the two major pieces of legislation in 1964 and 1965.

  In fact, the two laws changed little for black Americans outside the South. Northern and western cities already permitted blacks to vote (and had done so for decades), and blacks there faced little in the way of overt legal discrimination. One rarely saw formally segregated bathrooms, swimming pools, or dining facilities in these regions. But what African Americans there did face was de facto discrimination, which was just as pernicious. One found all-black and all-white schools, not because of the legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson but because of historical patterns of housing discrimination and economic prejudice—the kind that allowed blacks to work in factory jobs but refused them entry into many labor unions. And while the attacks on nonviolent protestors in the land of Jim Crow scandalized the rest of the country, the nation all but ignored similar problems elsewhere. America’s police departments were among the most racially homogenous labor sectors in the nation—not just in the South but in almost every major city in the country. And urban blacks were all too familiar with the kind of discrimination and harassment that generally accompanied an all-white police force. In northern and western cities, this harassment was among the most serious forms of overt racism they faced. But by 1964, many were no longer prepared to turn the other cheek.

  The first major crack in the national nonviolent facade came one month after the Neshoba murders. The Associated Press described events in New York that began on July 19:

  Missiles rained from roofs, crowds knocked down barricades, fists and knives flashed in the steady heat, and police guns barked. Harlem was rioting… . The initial outburst followed protest rallies over the fatal shooting of a Negro boy by a white policeman. The violence left one man shot to death, 108 arrested and more than 100 injured, including a dozen patrolmen.6

  Soon the unrest spread to nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant and then to Brooklyn, continuing for six days and leading to more than 450 arrests. More riots began soon afterward in upstate New York in response to perceived police abuses in Rochester. United Press International described “three successive nights” (July 24 to 27) of “violence and pillage,” including “hurled rocks, bottles and firebombs.” At one point, “three persons were killed when a Civil Defense helicopter … crashed into a rooming house turning it into an inferno.” In response to the chaos, the UPI noted, “New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller committed 1,200 to 1,300 National Guardsmen to the riot-torn city.” By the end of the three days, 555 people had been arrested; the “burned buildings and looted stores” resulted in “over one million dollars worth of damages.”7

  The rage continued to spread as quickly as a virus. That August, urban race riots flared in Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, again in response to perceived police abuses. Soon the rioting reached Philadelphia, where just the rumor that an African American woman had been killed by police sparked unrest in the area near Temple University. According to Dr. Ellesia Ann Blaque, over two days the area “was battered and looted by thousands of people. When the riot ended, more than 300 people were injured, close to 800 had been arrested, and over 220 stores and businesses were damaged or permanently devastated.”8 Later in August, another riot broke out in Dixmoor, Illinois, just south of Chicago.

  All in all, there were eleven urban riots in 1964, with two killed, 996 injured, almost three thousand arrests, and more than 230 acts of arson. It was the most widespread race-related rioting since the Red Summer of 1919, which saw twenty-six racially motivated riots between April and October. In 1965 matters got notably more intense. For a second year there were eleven riots in the United States, but this time there were thirty-five killed, more than one thousand injured, more than four thousand arrested, and, stunningly, more than three thousand acts of arson.9

  The bulk of this staggering increase (thirty-four of the thirty-five killed and more than nine hundred of the one thousand injured) came from a single event: the August 1965 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Following the arrest of a black driver by a white police officer on suspicion of drunk driving, a crowd of blacks pelted the police with rocks and bottles. The tension escalated, and the riot—the most destructive in U.S. history to that point—raged for six days. Time magazine called the rioting an “Arson and Street War” on one cover, and Life magazine printed the cover headline “Out of a Cauldron of Hate.” The latter featured a “menacing image of an angry black youth. The underlying caption read, ‘Get Whitey!’”10

  Martin Luther King Jr., a recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, visited Watts in an attempt to promote calm. 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.11

  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.12

  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.”13

  Another minister, whose base of operations near Ho
llywood was not far from the riots, welcomed the prospects of just such a war. The Reverend Wesley Swift, in a sermon titled “Power for You Today,” directly referenced the recent violence.

  Don’t let Watts suppress your souls, it’s just, my friends, a demonstration of the animal nature of A SATANIC CONTROLLED SOCIETY IN UPROAR AGAINST GOD, AGAINST LAW, AGAINST RIGHTEOUSNESS, IT’S A PART OF A DESIGN TO INTIMIDATE YOU WITH THE FEAR OF THE BEAST, but I want you to know that with all these patterns, we are prepared to do the work of the Kingdom, to defend ourselves against any area of catastrophe, to defend ourselves against the Beast invasion, to participate in all the events that relate to the status of this day and TO FULFILL IT AS SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE PURPOSE OF GOD’S PLAN.

  This doesn’t mean acquiescence to evil, it doesn’t mean that we buy off evil, it doesn’t mean we bribe people not to do the things which the enemy or the Kingdom would like to do. The way to handle some of these situations today is to meet them with power. The way, my friends, to put down an uprising is to march in the Police Force and the troops and then let it sit there afterwards and don’t, my friends, reward people for their evil. Don’t make people think by violence and uproar against the Kingdom of God that they are going to gain greater power and more expansive ends. Just remember that you are in a day WHEN IT’S THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD WHO SHALL WAKE UP AND SHALL DETERMINE THE COURSE AND THE DESTINY OF AMERICA AND EVERY OTHER CHRISTIAN NATION AND EVENTUALLY THE WHOLE WORLD SHALL COME UNDER THE ADMINISTRATION OF GOD’S KINGDOM [emphasis in original].14

  He returned to the subject of the riots shortly afterward:

  You know why this is an important week? Because by its measures since they always start with the following cycles of the moon that three and a half years from that time was going to start THE JUDGMENTS IN THE HOUSE OF GOD UPON THE ENEMIES OF GOD’S KINGDOM AND THOSE THAT RISE UP TO DESTROY. Do you realize that would make the beginning of that period by its farthest perimeters this September which we’re almost in and, of course, if you go back to the measure of when it happened, why, these riots were going on right in the beginning of that judgment time and I’m going to tell you something. It wasn’t 35 that were killed, there were hundreds of them killed and hundreds of them that brought it on themselves. There are over a thousand bodies in those ruins right now. You say, how do you know? Because Guardsmen reported what happened when they were fired on, some of them had to kill 20 or 30 of them themselves for protection. Bodies were dumped back into burning stores because they were moving down the way. I know at this moment that there are a thousand dead minimum in that crisis.15

  One cannot know if the Reverend Swift was deliberately exaggerating the casualties from the riots to manipulate his audience or if he, for some reason, believed his own propaganda. But he clearly saw the riots as a major sign that “we are in a climactic time.” The minister continued:

  Someone said, oh, if we could only push these things off. I don’t want to push it off, if I could bring it all in the next 24 hours, I’d precipitate it because I know GOD WOULD BE HERE BEFORE THE 24 HOURS WAS OVER… . WE ARE IN THE DAY, WE ARE IN THE CLIMAX, WE ARE IN THE EXPERIENCE OF WATCHING ONE AGE FOLD UP AND A NEW ONE COME IN, ONLY IT’S GOD’S DAY THIS TIME.16

  Events of the next year only reinforced Swift’s enthusiasm for an approaching Armageddon. The eleven riots in 1965 grew to fifty-three by the end of 1966. While there were fewer people killed and injured than in 1965, more rioters were arrested than in the previous year, because the nation had experienced 109 total days of urban rioting compared to just 20 in 1965. After occurring again in Los Angeles, riots broke out in Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. They even spread to unexpected cities such as Omaha, Nebraska, and Des Moines, Iowa.17

  As Martin Luther King Jr. shifted his focus to de facto racism and economic issues in northern cities, he became increasingly frustrated by the growing tendency toward violence by both blacks and working-class whites. This trend became abundantly clear in Chicago, where King moved his movement and his family, famously living in a public housing tenement to highlight the poverty inherent in the city’s racially tinged housing policies. Even after King managed to negotiate a ten-point deal with the city’s political leadership, skeptical members of CORE launched a protest march in violation of King’s agreement. Marching in all-white Cicero, Illinois—the site of a racial conflagration in 1951—250 protestors “were met by several hundred hecklers who hurled, rocks, eggs, and small explosives.”18 But this was an extremist group of CORE activists. Rather than turn the other cheek, they picked up the bottles and bricks and threw them back at the hecklers. In the end, the National Guard was needed to bring order to the city.

  By 1966, to the dismay of Gandhian leaders like the Reverend Ed King and Martin Luther King, groups like CORE and SNCC openly embraced armed resistance in their charters. Borrowing from the late Malcolm X’s famous phrase, they contended that liberation should be obtained by “any means necessary.” But SNCC and CORE were relatively tame compared to other groups that rose to prominence in the mid-1960s. Most notable among these was the Black Panther Party, which formed in Oakland, California, in October 1966. As a sign of the growing shift in the disposition of civil rights activists toward violent resistance, the Panthers got the inspiration for their name from outspoken SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael, who in 1966 told an audience:

  In Lowndes County, we developed something called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. It is a political party. The Alabama law says that if you have a Party you must have an emblem. We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he’s back so far into the wall, he’s got nothing to do but spring out. Yeah. And when he springs he does not stop.19

  The Panthers also borrowed from Carmichael the much-misunderstood phrase that came to symbolize the growing schism between integrationists and black nationalists: “Black Power.” Ostensibly a slogan of racial pride, self-determination, and equality, “Black Power” represented a “menace to peace and prosperity” to more conservative civil rights groups like the NAACP. Martin Luther King Jr., who valued the concept of black self-empowerment even as he demanded legal and socioeconomic recognition from the American government, argued that the concept was “unfortunate because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism … black supremacy would be as evil as white supremacy.”20 In the perception of the white political establishment, which was manifested in the media, “Black Power” became associated with separatism, violence, and militancy due its association with the Black Panther Party.

  Making no effort to hide their revolutionary Marxism, the Panthers favored the violent overthrow of what they saw as America’s imperialist and capitalist society, as a means to racial and economic liberation. While providing social services in the communities where they resided, the Panthers also responded to allegations of police brutality by brandishing shotguns, dressing in “radical chic” black clothing, and at times ambushing or engaging in pitched street battles with law enforcement officers.

  The rise of the Panthers, the radicalization of once nonviolent groups like SNCC and CORE, the growing number of urban race riots—all of these affirmed the aspirations of those Swift devotees, like Sam Bowers, who hoped that conflicts between leftists in the black community and conservative whites would invite federal military intervention and escalate into a holy race war. Bowers privately told Delmar Dennis that he wanted to instigate such a conflict. And he continued to do his part, leading a group that from 1964 to 1968 would commit 300 of the estimated 538 acts of anti-black violence occurring since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Joining Bowers in his effort to stoke the flames of white resentment were fellow CI devotees like the Reverend Connie Lynch, who in 1966 visited scenes of racial tension and urban riots, inciting white-on-black violence with his bombastic and virulently racist speeche
s. In Baltimore Lynch delivered what the UPI called the “To Hell with Niggers” rally, where Lynch “called for war against the city’s Negroes… . After the rally broke up, gangs of white youths charged into a predominantly Negro area, throwing bottles at Negroes and attacking those they could lay their hands on with their fists.”21

  Clearly, as in the past, the CI radicals were not content to passively wait for Armageddon. Swift had insisted that they were already in the end-times and that his followers must actively participate in the events. Foreign affairs, notably the rapidly escalating war in Vietnam, which was exacerbating social divisions within the United States, reinforced Swift’s notion that the world was “on the edge of terrific events.”

  But for all of the racial unrest in America after 1964, the prospects for white supremacist groups to actively accelerate Armageddon seemed dim—at least on the surface. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did little to address the immediate socioeconomic concerns of the wider African American community, the two laws represented a double-fisted blow to overt white supremacist groups. Membership in racist groups across the country declined dramatically, and outside support fell as well. Congress and law enforcement began to openly turn against the KKK. Once southern nationalists lost the fight to save segregation and Jim Crow, the costs of staying in the organization greatly outweighed the benefits. The remaining members and leaders, who included several hardcore CI followers, appear to have faced a conundrum. Before 1965, when their organizations’ memberships were at their highest, CI followers like Bowers had to work toward their hidden religious objectives by manipulating their fellow members. Now, in 1966, when conditions in the country finally seemed to conform to their religious worldview, these organizations seemingly lacked the membership to wage the prophesied race war.