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

by Stuart Wexler

  The National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (NKKKK): This was, in the 1960s, the second-largest Klan organization in the United States, after the United Klans of America (UKA), in terms of membership. Headquartered in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the NKKKK was led by Imperial Wizard James Venable. The NKKKK had affiliated groups and Klaverns across the country, including in Ohio and California. Notably, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (CKKKK), formed in 1966 and led by Wesley Swift minister William V. Fowler, were an offshoot of the NKKKK. James Venable spoke to the CKKKK on several occasions in 1967.

  The “traveling criminals” or “Crossroaders” or “Dixie Mafia”: These were loosely knit groups of outlaws willing to commit crimes, especially robbery and theft, across long distances. More of a phenomenon than an official organization, career criminals would join forces in decentralized gangs and work across state lines for major “jobs.” Primarily engaged in bootlegging across state lines as some states remained “dry” after Prohibition was repealed in 1934, these criminals expanded their activities in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. This became more and more common as increasingly available phone communication and interstate travel, by plane or over the new interstate highway system, made cross-state activity more possible. The “traveling criminals” were especially active in two regions: the Southeast (stretching from the Mississippi Delta to Florida) and the Great Plains. Not to be confused with the Sicilian Mafia, these criminals lacked a hierarchy and were far less structured than conventional, organized crime syndicates. They were often, at the same time, more bold than the Sicilian Mafia, targeting even law enforcement officials (famously Sheriff Buford Pusser in Tennessee) and federal judges. By the 1970s, this loose-knit coalition was one of the major forces for criminal activity in the United States, with some crediting its members as having committed more actual killings than the Sicilian Mafia. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, in response to this growing criminal gang, law enforcement began using the shorthand “Dixie Mafia,” even though both terms are misnomers.

  White Citizens Councils: These groups were formed, major city by major city, in the 1950s after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court set the stage for ending segregation; their goal was to “formally” undermine integration. Often comprised of prominent business and civic leaders, they used their influence and resources to outwardly oppose the civil rights movement in a more “respectable” and legal way than that of the Ku Klux Klan. However, many White Citizens’ Council members were directly and indirectly tied to more violent groups, such as the NSRP and the KKK, even if those connections were often informal and covert. Joseph Milteer claimed to be an “informal” member of the Atlanta White Citizens’ Council, and Noah Jefferson Carden was a member of the Mobile White Citizens’ Council. Both men were connected with purported plots to kill Martin Luther King Jr.

  Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR): Formed in the mid-1960s in Mississippi, this group was similar to the White Citizens Councils, in providing an outwardly “civil” response when undermining integration efforts. The group would, for instance, raise money for the defense funds for racists accused of hate crimes or publish newsletters opposing the integration of schools. However, the FBI recognized the APWR as a front for the WKKKK, and its most prominent members and leaders were almost all, to a person, followers of Sam Bowers.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If this book forces a new dialogue about terrorism and fosters a deeper understanding of the nature of religious violence in American history, as I hope it will, it does so only because of the help of many people. The first iteration of my thesis was explored in a cowritten book, The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King Jr., in 2012. The more developed argument in America’s Secret Jihad would not have been possible without the insights of my Awful Grace of God coauthor, Larry Hancock. Publisher Charlie Winton and the staff at Counterpoint have shown great patience and enthusiasm for my research, despite the controversial nature of the thesis. A very special thanks must go to developmental editor Eric Brandt for his input and care in preparing the manuscript. I am grateful to my students,—April Nicklaus, Swetha Subramaniam, Rithesh Neelamagam and Niranjan Shankar—for helping with the editing process. Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson (Mississippi) ClarionLedger, has been an inspiration and a resource for my investigation of civil rights cold cases. Charles Faulkner provided important information for my work on the King assassination. Researcher Ernie Lazar donated a treasure trove of FBI and other material—a lifetime of work—which is now available to researchers and historians for free in a fully text-searchable format online; the late Harold Weisberg did the same through the archives at Hood College; programmer and historian Rex Bradford did the same (albeit through a paid service) for The Mary Ferrell Foundation. This material, coupled with documents available at the National Archives and Research Administration in Maryland, whose staff is always helpful, was fundamental to my research. The FBI’s Freedom of Information Act staff was likewise very helpful and responsive to my requests for new documents. Several witnesses, among them Donald Nissen, Scott Shepherd, Bob Eddy, and former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, also provided key insights for a number of chapters. Finally, my family and friends—my parents especially—have done nothing but encourage my efforts, on this and everything else I do. This book is dedicated to them.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  1.Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Attempt to Dynamite Charlotte Synagogue Fails; Police Investigate,” JTA, November 27, 1957, http://www.jta.org/1957/11/27/archive/attempt-to-dynamite-charlotte-synagogue-fails-police-investigate#ixzz3GpJQ8aRo.

  2.Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “FBI Investigates Bombing of Jewish Centers in Miami and Nashville,” JTA, March 18, 1958, http://www.jta.org/1958/03/18/archive/f-b-i-investigates-bombing-of-jewish-centers-in-miami-and-nashville#ixzz3GpLZfNLU.

  3.Clive Webb, “Counterblast: How the Atlanta Temple Bombing Strengthened the Civil Rights Cause,” Southern Spaces, June 22, 2009, www.southernspaces.org/2009/counterblast-how-atlanta-temple-bombing-strengthened-civil-rights-cause.

  4.JTA, “FBI Investigates.”

  5.Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Jews in Jacksonville Map Plans for Checking Anti-Jewish Terror,” JTA, April 30, 1958, http://www.jta.org/1958/04/30/archive/jews-in-jacksonville-map-plans-for-checking-anti-jewish-terror.

  6.John McKay, It Happened in Atlanta: Remarkable Events That Shaped History (Guilford, CT: Morris Book Publishing, 2011), 110.

  7.Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Eisenhower Condemns Bombers of Synagogues as ‘Gangsters,’” JTA, October 16, 1958, http://www.jta.org/1958/10/16/archive/eisenhower-condemns-bombers-of-synagogues-as-gangsters#ixzz3P6Gla8xr.

  8.JTA, “FBI Investigates.”

  9.Webb, “Counterblast.”

  10.Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “People in South Not Influenced by Ku Klux Klan Anti-Jewish Propaganda,” JTA, June 16, 1958, http://www.jta.org/1958/06/16/archive/people-in-south-not-influenced-by-ku-klux-klan-anti-jewish-propaganda#ixzz3P6L6wqsv.

  11.Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 179.

  12.Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King Jr. (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2012), 51.

  13.“Speech to the Aryan Nations Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho, in 1994,” YouTube, uploaded by priapus2222 on August 15, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUsHMymEJag.

  14.Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, “AntiSemitism in the United States in 1947,” Documenting Maine Jews, accessed April 17, 2015, http://mainejews.org/docs/Colby/ADLReportAntiSemitism1947.pdf.

  15.Clive Webb, Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 52.

  CHAPTER 2

  1.Webb, “Counterblast.”

 
2.Federal Bureau of Investigation, “National States Rights Party, Part 1 of 1,” FBI, accessed April 16, 2015, http://vault.fbi.gov/National%20States%20Rights%20Party/National%20States%20Rights%20Party%20Part%201%20of%201%20/view.

  3.Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 92.

  4.Wexler and Hancock, Awful Grace of God, 55.

  5.Patsy Sims, The Klan, 2nd ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 135.

  6.Ibid.

  7.Wexler and Hancock, Awful Grace of God, 66.

  8.Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 106.

  9.Our Campaigns, “Faubus, Orval E.,” Our Campaigns, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=4200.

  10.Our Campaigns, “Crommelin, John G.,” Our Campaigns, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=19159.

  11.Our Campaigns, “Kasper, John,” Our Campaigns, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=4498.

  12.National States Rights Party, “They Called It the Speech of the Century,” Thunderbolt, April 1962, https://archive.org/stream/foia_NSRP-Chicago-2A/NSRP-Chicago-2A#page/n41/mode/2up/search/scheme.

  13.Daytona Beach Morning Journal, “How about These ‘Outsiders’?” Daytona Beach Morning Journal, August 5, 1964, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1873&dat=19640805&id=dpooAAAAIBA-J&sjid=k8wEAAAAIBAJ&pg=716,781543.

  14.Stephen E. Atkins, Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 137.

  15.Edwin Black, “Eugenics and the Nazis: The California Connection,” SFGate, November 9, 2003, http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Eugenics-and-the-Nazis-the-California-2549771.php.

  16.Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 237.

  17.Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: Scribner, 1921), 90–91.

  18.Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 237.

  19.Hiram Wesley Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” North American Review, 1926, http://faculty.atu.edu/cbrucker/Engl5383/Evans.htm.

  20.Committee on Un-American Activities, “Activities of the Ku Klux Klan Organizations in the United States,” Internet Archive, accessed April 16, 2015, https://archive.org/stream/activitiesofkukl03unit#page/2486/mode/2up/search/romans.

  21.Ibid.

  22.Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 1997), 30–32.

  23.Ibid.

  24.Clarence Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 197.

  25.Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011), 212.

  26.Ibid., 171.

  27.S.T. Joshi, Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 413.

  28.Robert Singerman, “Contemporary Racist and Judeophobic Ideology Discovers the Khazars, or, Who Really Are the Jews?” (lecture, Thirty-ninth Annual Convention, Association of Jewish Libraries, Brooklyn, 2004).

  29.Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right, 177.

  30.Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 73–75, 133, 203–205.

  31.Wexler and Hancock, Awful Grace of God, 93.

  32.Ibid., 24.

  33.Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan: History, Organization, Language, Influence, and Activities of America’s Most Notorious Secret Society (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2007), 170.

  34.Wexler and Hancock, Awful Grace of God, 40.

  35.Ibid., 37.

  36.D. Boylan, “A League of Their Own: A Look inside the Christian Defense League,” Cuban Information Archives, 2004, http://cuban-exile.com/doc_026-050/doc0tml.

  37.Office of the Attorney General, “ParaMilitary Organizations in California,” Harold Weisberg Archive, Hood College, accessed April 17, 2015, http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/L%20Disk/Lynch%20Report/Item%2001.pdf.

  38.Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Wallace, Hugh Allen, Et al, Bombing of the Temple, Atlanta Georgia, October Twelve Last, Information Concerning,” Internet Archive, accessed April 17, 2015, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Allen_Wallace_H.-HQ-9/Allen_Wallace_H.-HQ-9#page/n27/mode/2up/search/destroy.

  CHAPTER 3

  1.Wesley Swift, “As in the Days of Noah, 9-30-62” Wesley Swift Library, accessed April 16, 2015, http://swift.christogenea.org/book/export/html/528.

  2.Wright Thompson, “The Ghosts of Mississippi,” ESPN: Outside the Lines, accessed April 16, 2015, http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=mississippi62.

  3.Ibid.

  4.Ibid.

  5.Ibid.

  6.Millard J. Erickson, A Basic Guide to Eschatology: Making Sense of the Millennium (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998).

  7.Conrad Gaard, “Spotlight on the Great Conspiracy,” Israel Elect of Zion, accessed April 17, 2015, http://israelect.com/reference/ConradGaard/Spotlight%20on%20the%20Great%20Conspiracy.htm.

  8.Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right, 240.

  9.Ibid., 258.

  10.Swift, “As in the Days of Noah.”

  11.Chester Quarles, Christian Identity: The Aryan American Bloodline Religion, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004), 180.

  12.Thomas A. Tarrants, The Conversion of a Klansman: The Story of a Former Ku Klux Klan Terrorist (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).

  13.Ibid., 50.

  14.Wesley Swift, “Armageddon—Local and Worldwide (5-5-63),” Wesley Swift Library, accessed April 16, 2015, http://swift.christogenea.org/content/armageddon-local-and-worldwide-5-5-63.

  15.Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” African Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, accessed April 16, 2015, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html.

  16.Associated Press, “Federal Troops Poised to Move into Birmingham,” Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, May 13, 1963, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=957&dat=19630513&id=eoRhAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OswFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2700,2625710&hl=en.

  17.Wesley Swift, “Evidence of Divine Assistance (5-13-63),” Wesley Swift Library, accessed April 16, 2015, http://swift.christogenea.org/content/evidence-divine-assistance-5-13-63.

  18.John C. Henegan, “Medgar W. Evers—‘Turn Me Loose,’” Capital Area Bar Association, May 2013, http://www.caba.ms/articles/features/medgar-evers-turn-me-loose.html.

  19.Wesley Swift, “Strategy of the False Prophet (6-23-63),” Wesley Swift Library, accessed April 16, 2015, http://swift.christogenea.org/content/strategy-false-prophet-6-23-63.

  CHAPTER 4

  1.Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Airtel from SAC Miami to FBI Director re: BAPBOB, Sidney Crockette Barnes a.k.a. Racial Matters,” FBI, March 12, 1964. http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_eulogy_for_the_martyred_children

  2.United Press International, “Bomb Hurled into Church from Auto,” St. Petersburg Times, September 16, 1963, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19630916&id=xp5PAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NFIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5701,2906766&hl=en.

  3.Ibid.

  4.Martin Luther King Jr., “Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, accessed April 16, 2015, http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/eulogy_for_the_martyred_children/.

  5.Mike Clary, “Birmingham’s Painful Past Reopened,” Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2001, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/apr/14/news/mn-50901.

  6.Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights R
evolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 114–15.

  7.McWhorter, Carry Me Home; Petric J. Smith, Long Time Coming: An Insider’s Story into the Birmingham Church Bombing That Rocked the World (Birmingham, AL: Crane Hill, 1994); T.K. Thorne, Last Chance for Justice: How Relentless Investigators Uncovered New Evidence Convicting the Birmingham Church Bombers (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013). All of these books were valuable in reconstructing basic events.

  8.His name is being withheld because he is still alive.

  9.Pamela Colloff, “The Sins of the Father,” Texas Monthly, April 2000.

  10.David Mark Chalmers, Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 19.

  11.Susan Willoughby Anderson, “The Past on Trial: The Sixteenth Street Church Bombing and Civil Rights History,” American Bar Foundation, accessed April 16, 2015, http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/uploads/cms/documents/anderson_abf_talk_nov_2010.pdf; see foot note on page 17.

  12.Gary May, The Informant: The FBI, The Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 102.

  13.McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 540.

  14.Gary May, “Forty Years for Justice: Did the FBI Cover for the Birmingham Bombers?” Newsweek/Daily Beast, September 15, 2013, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/15/40-years-for-justice-did-the-fbi-cover-for-the-birmingham-bombers.html.

  15.Birmingham Police Department, “Interview with Phillip Maybry,” File 1125.3.3, Alabama Police Department Surveillance Files 1947–1980, Birmingham Public Library Archives. This document appears to be an FBI file saved by the Birmingham Police Department, but the cover page that might provide FBI information is missing.