MLK, a KKK / CoIntelpro Target See http://marylovesjustice.blogspot.com/2012/05/martin-luther-king-jr-cointelpro-and.html Re: The Targeting of Martin Luther King, Jr.

[MaryLovesJustice Neal]

Terrific, Bruce! Thanks. See "Martin Luther King, Jr., CoIntelPro and KKK Target" at this link http://marylovesjustice.blogspot.com/2012/05/martin-luther-king-jr-cointelpro-and.html  IF CoIntelpro lets you.

Mary Neal

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 7:50 PM, Bruce Barnes <keme...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Targeting of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tuesday, 15 May 2012 15:28 By Larry Hancock and Stewart Wexler ,
Coutnerpoint Press | Book Excerpt

Below is an excerpt from "The Awful Grace of God" from Counterpoint Press:
On April 3, 1968, an American Airlines flight from Atlanta to Memphis
was stuck at the departure gate. The pilot made a general passenger
announcement that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was on board
and that the airline had received a bomb threat. For everyone's
safety, they would have to delay their takeoff until all the baggage
had been examined.

The More Than Nine Lives of Martin Luther King Jr.

For Dr. King, the April 3 bomb threat was just one more warning. In
the thousands of pages of files the FBI collected on Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. there are dozens, if not hundreds, of reported threats
against Dr. King's life. Almost all were similar to the plane threat:
menacing but harmless. They came mostly by phone, often to newspapers,
often anonymously. When law enforcement could trace these threats to
their source, they often led to drunks and mentally disturbed
individuals. Yet in some cases, such as the January 1956 bombing of
Dr. King's home in the midst of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott,
the attempts were far from innocuous. Indeed, from the time of that
first bombing until his assassination in 1968, law enforcement
investigated serious threats against King, some foiled only by the
vagaries of chance. In one sense, these ongoing public threats simply
constituted a constant level of "noise"; Dr. King had no choice but to
live with them if he wanted to continue his mission.

When asked a question about when he had personally been most
frightened, King replied that it had been during a visit to
Mississippi. His visit was not only to mourn the victims of the
Mississippi Burning murders but also to bring public scrutiny and
pressure on law enforcement to pursue justice in what history now
calls the Mississippi Burning killings, the brutal slayings of three
young civil rights workers. King offered a prayer in which he had
said, "O Lord, the killers of those boys may even be within the range
of my voice." At that moment, he overheard a big burly sheriff
standing near him say, "You're damn right they are."

At the time Dr. King had no way of knowing that the individuals who
had killed the young civil rights organizers were associated with the
White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi and that the order
for their murders had come from its leader, Samuel Holloway Bowers.
King had no idea that Sam Bowers had himself targeted King for murder
and that Bowers was part of a network that had incited and planned
attacks on King over a period of years. King also did not know that a
local Mississippi sheriff 's deputy would eventually be one of those
convicted in the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and
James Chaney—the three young men for whom King had prayed. As we shall
see, King's visits to Mississippi, to bring national attention to
these murders and to the 1963 assassination of his National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) colleague
Medgar Evers, brought King into the crosshairs of committed radicals.
The nature of the radical network that was targeting Dr. King was more
national in scope and more united in purpose than has been previously
thought. There was a series of systematic attempts on his life by a
little known subculture that was obsessed with King's murder. These
efforts to kill King provide the best window into the likeliest
conspiracy behind King's murder in Memphis. But when examined in depth
for links and commonalities, these plots also reveal a glimpse into a
sinister, clandestine movement within American history, one that
entwined religious zealotry, reactionary politics, and out-and-out
hatred, a story that—if told at all—is often disconnected from the
tumult of the 1960s or, just as important, from the twenty-first
century terrorism to which it bears such a close resemblance.

The First Contract: Birmingham, Alabama, 1958

Alabama was the scene for one of the first serious recorded efforts to
kill King, one that came against the backdrop of the heated civil
rights battles that engulfed Birmingham, Alabama, in the late 1950s.
This plot did not even originally target King but rather the Reverend
Fred Shuttlesworth, president of the Alabama Christian Movement for
Human Rights, who was arguably even more defiant and strident in his
efforts to desegregate Birmingham than King was in Montgomery.
Shuttlesworth famously said of the repeated attempts to "dissuade" him
(including beatings, bombings, and general harassment), "We mean to
kill segregation or be killed by it!" Having seen that the local white
establishment, led by Birmingham's notorious commissioner of public
safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, could not deter the indefatigable
Reverend Shuttlesworth, the state's Ku Klux Klan sought another avenue
to stop him: a contract killing.

For this, they summoned Jesse Benjamin "J. B." Stoner, a Georgia
native who supported the Nazis during World War II for their stance on
racial purity and anti-Semitism and who was the founder of the new and
virulently racist and anti-Semitic National States Rights Party (NSRP)
Stoner, who earned national attention for a public feud with Nation of
Islam leader Elijah Muhammad (famously telling Muhammad that "you want
white blood pumped into your race"14), had originally been contracted
by local Klan leader Hugh Morris to bomb Shuttlesworth's Bethel
Baptist Church. But Stoner offered to include the contract killing of
Shuttlesworth and other civil rights leaders, with Dr. King notably at
the top of the list. Stoner offered a special reduced rate of $1,500
to kill King and only failed because law enforcement— in conjunction
with the FBI—had been running a sting against the Klan and stopped the
plot in advance.

Birmingham Again, 1963

Birmingham continued to be a flashpoint in the civil rights struggle
and was the scene for two other attempts on King—one involving another
bombing and the other a planned shooting. In the spring of 1963, a
large dynamite bomb was thrown at room at the A.G. Gaston Motel where
King had set up the headquarters for his efforts to integrate
Birmingham's eateries and businesses. An apparent response to
countless King-led sit-ins, marches, and protests—efforts that
scandalized the local business community into reaching a
prointegrationist agreement with King and his aides-the bomb left a
five-by-five-foot hole in the motel wall and destroyed two adjacent
house trailers. King narrowly escaped death, as he had unexpectedly
abandoned plans for a celebration at the motel and had left
Birmingham. Law enforcement strongly suspected that the bombing was
the work of the Eastview, Alabama, Klavern known as "The Cahaba River
Group" or "The Cahaba Boys," a militant KKK subgroup that J. B. Stoner
heavily influenced.
Another attempt on King occurred as the nation once again turned its
attention to segregationist violence in Birmingham, this time in the
wake of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four
young girls in September 1963.The four men who reportedly plotted this
attempted assassination of King included William Potter Gale, a
Californian who organized racist and anti-Semitic paramilitary
organizations on the West Coast; Admiral John G. Crommelin, a National
States' Rights Party luminary who would one day run as a vice
presidential candidate on their national ticket; Sidney Crockett
Barnes, a suspected serial bomber who fled a crackdown on racial
violence in Florida to settle in Alabama; and Noah Jefferson Carden, a
violent racist from Mobile, Alabama.

The plotting against King—which involved cooperation with local
extremists—actually started just before the Sixteenth Street Church
bombing and was among the first plots the House Select Committee on
Assassinations (HSCA) considered when Congress reinvestigated the King
murder in the late 1970s. The plot apparently continued into 1964, and
though details of the exact murder scheme are somewhat sketchy,
conversations secretly taped by the Miami Police between Barnes and
police/FBI informant William "Willie" Somersett suggest that Carden
may have received a rifle from Gale, who hoped that Carden would do
the deed. Police even arranged to provide Barnes with a rifle so as to
trace it back to the extremist colonel from California.

Birmingham was apparently one of several sites in Alabama considered
for a King attack, with Mobile being another preferred location. In
fact, the four men even planned a larger wave of statewide violence to
lure King to these other areas, notably the sites of the first
experiments in school desegregation in Alabama. King may well have
been saved from these attempts by another act of violence in Saint
Augustine, which drew him to Florida and away from Alabama.

"Nothing left but white faces . . . ": Saint Augustine, Florida, 1964
In 1964, civil rights activist Robert Hayling and others were
kidnapped at a Klan rally in Saint Augustine, Florida, beaten
unconscious, and nearly burned to death. This drew King and his focus
away from Alabama and toward Florida. In fact, it was King's response
to the growing civil disorder in Saint Augustine, Florida, that
triggered the next major attempt on his life.

After four sit-in organizers had been badly beaten and guns fired into
their homes, Saint Augustine protests degenerated into serious racial
violence, extending over several months in 1963 and 1964 as civil
rights activists battled against southern reactionaries. Some of this
antagonism was stoked by J. B. Stoner and his erstwhile friend the
Reverend Charles "Connie" Lynch from California, a minister in a white
supremacist church with nationwide reach who, commenting on the four
young girls who died in the Birmingham bombing, said that they were
not children, but "little niggers . . . and if there's four less
niggers tonight, then I say 'Good for whoever planted the bomb!'"

Stoner and Lynch, known as a two-person "riot squad," consistently
followed King and staged counterrallies, where they inflamed white
audience members, often to the point of violence. In one Saint
Augustine rally, Lynch promised, "There's gonna be a bloody race riot
all over this country. The stage is being set for a bloodbath. When
the smoke clears, there ain't gonna be nothing left but white faces!"
The aftermath of this rally sent nineteen blacks to local area
hospitals.

In response to the ongoing violence, Dr. King visited Saint Augustine
in May 1964 and announced his support for demonstrations, even telling
President Lyndon Johnson that "all semblance of law and nonviolent
order had broken down in Saint Augustine." King was tempting fate once
again in his trips into Florida. Although little is known as to the
exact identities of those who did the deed, a suspected group of
Klansmen opened fire on King's rented beach cottage near Saint
Augustine, perforating walls and shattering the furniture inside with
their bullets. King had been in California at the time, having been
warned of plots against his life in Florida.
Enter the White Knights: Jackson, Mississippi, 1964

The next reported effort to kill King came in the spring and summer of
1964 and involved a new and very serious group of players in the white
supremacist movement, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of
Mississippi.

The White Knights formed in the cauldron of anti-integrationist
resistance that was Mississippi in the early 1960s. As one of the few
states with a majority nonwhite population, Mississippi's white
establishment vigorously opposed efforts to give equal rights to
minorities. Yet some white Mississippians did not feel that the
reactionary moves made by the wealthy White Citizens' Councils and the
government-backed Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission went far
enough. To some, even the existing Klan regime in the Magnolia State
was too passive, and they abandoned their Klaverns in large numbers,
coalescing to form the White Knights, led by the devilishly brilliant
Samuel Holloway Bowers and eventually becoming the most successfully
violent KKK subgroup in the nation. The FBI would connect the White
Knights with more than three hundred acts of racial violence,
including the Mississippi Burning murders of three civil rights
workers and the murder of voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer.

In one 1964 incident, however, FBI reports indicate that the White
Knights sought outside criminal help to try to kill King.
Specifically, the White Knights contracted with a bank robber and
highly respected contract killer from Oklahoma, Donald Eugene Sparks,
to eliminate King if he came to Mississippi, as he eventually did in
July 1964 in response to the Mississippi Burning murders. According to
the FBI sources, Sparks waited at a motel in Jackson, Mississippi, to
conclude the deal but backed out of the plot when the White Knights
could not raise their promised bounty. Two separate sources described
this earlier plot to the FBI after King's murder, but the FBI did only
a superficial investigation. Although they found that Sparks was known
in White Knights circles, they dismissed the bounty reports because
they could not find Sparks's name in any motel registry in Jackson at
the relevant time. Beyond having failed to look for any one of his
many aliases, they also missed a report in their own files from 1964
that strongly corroborated the story.
White Knights Grand Dragon Billy Buckles told a group of Klansmen
(which apparently included at least one FBI informant) that the White
Knights were contracting with a criminal to perform an act of violence
that would "make the death of Medgar Evers look sick [by comparison]."

There are other reports in the FBI files that describe additional King
murder plots for June/July 1964, but they presently lack the level of
corroboration and specificity available for the Sparks effort in 1964.
However, it appears that these later reports convinced at least one
very important person that King was in danger. President Lyndon
Johnson personally ordered additional federal security for King in
response to these Mississippi threats as well as those from Alabama.

In response, one Mississippi sheriff, Lawrence Rainey, openly
protested the additional federal guards. Within a matter of weeks
Rainey himself would become infamous for his suspected role in the
conspiracy behind the Mississippi Burning murders. Rainey had, in
fact, been an active member of the Mississippi White Knights when he
wrote to the government claiming that his officers—some of whom were
later convicted for their roles in the Mississippi Burning murders
—could provide all the protection King needed while he was under
threat of assassination.

The White Knights Try Again: Selma, Alabama, 1965

An account from the FBI's most trusted inside source on the White
Knights indicates that they tried once again to kill King in early
1965. This time the plot was targeted for the state of Mississippi,
and the White Knights apparently planned to handle it themselves.

The location was in Selma, where Dr. King had been leading a voter
registration drive, without much success. The primary attack was to be
by snipers, with a backup plan of rigging a highway bridge with
explosives if King escaped the shooting. Advanced word of the attack
appears to have come from a deep informant named Delmar Dennis, a
minister who had been close to Klan leader Samuel Bowers but who
turned on Bowers because of his suspicions of Bowers's patriotism and
reservations over the White Knights' excessive violence. The attack
did not occur, but only because King's route was changed at the last
minute. We are still searching FBI files for further details on this
plot.

Dennis's informant file deals mainly with administrative matters
related to paying him for his services, and available files on Bowers
and the White Knights do not directly mention the plot. But most of
the three hundred acts of violence the FBI officially attributes to
the White Knights are not directly mentioned in these summary reports,
which consist of small vignettes aggregated from local field office
files. But in addition to the autobiographical account from Dennis,
one of the FBI's most trusted informants, there are strong hints in
the FBI files that something bigger was brewing in Selma. Reports
emphasize that at this same time, Bowers was questioned for housing
explosives in Alabama. This came just as other, simultaneous in format
reports show that Bowers was asking his White Knights to bury their
weapons in preparation for a future major insurrection. This mystified
his followers but is consistent with a larger strategy Bowers
contemplated—his belief that a major provocation, such as murdering
Dr. King, would result in federal intervention and ultimately a race
war.

Attack on the Palladium: Los Angeles, California, February 1965

On one of the few occasions where an arrest was made in connection
with a King plot, right-wing extremist Keith Gilbert was captured in
late 1965 trying to evade arrest by fleeing to Canada after
authorities found large quantities of stolen dynamite among an arsenal
of weapons (including a 60-mm mortar) and right-wing paraphernalia in
his Glendale, California, residence.

Gilbert had been on the run since February 4, 1965, when he was
reported to have been involved in the dynamite robbery that eventually
led to his conviction. The robbery came as threats began to pour in
that King would be killed on February 25 at the Palladium theater in
Los Angeles when he came to speak, in honor of his Nobel Peace Prize.
One report in particular, that the entire theater would be destroyed
in an explosion, caught the attention of not only authorities but also
the local papers. Authorities received general information that the
bombing was to be attributable to the Christian Nationalist State
Army, while the day after King spoke, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner
received information directly tying Gilbert to the threat. The paper
reported the six-foot twenty-two-year-old as a racist member of the
militant antigovernment group the Minutemen, who was heavily armed and
a direct threat to Dr. King (as Gilbert was not yet captured). The
report did not highlight the most salient aspect of Gilbert's
biography—that he was a committed member of the Church of Jesus Christ
Christian whose views on the superiority of the white race would
continue to inspire racist extremists on through the 1990s, thanks in
part to Gilbert himself.36 In referring to the failed effort to kill
King the day before—probably due to tight security precautions-the
paper's source also ominously promised that the mistake would be fixed
the next time, when King would be killed with a "high-powered rifle."
The Ohio Plot: Yellow Springs, Ohio, June 1965
In a series of events reminiscent of the Gilbert crime and occurring
only a few months later, Daniel Wagner was arrested on suspicion of
armed robbery with weapons, including dynamite, that he later
testified were to be used in a provocation to "start a civil war
within this country" between blacks and whites.38 Wagner also
described two closely connected plots to kill Martin Luther King Jr.
and other public officials. The more sensational of these schemes
involved Wagner shooting King when he was set to speak at Antioch
College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in June 1965.
Wagner testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
and in a ten-page letter described the plans that ten other men would
detonate explosives while attendees fled the shooting. The
nineteen-year-old Wagner said Eloise Witte, a bleached-blonde
forty-year-old Grand Empress of the Ku Klux Klan in the Cincinnati,
Ohio, region, approached him for the plot. The plot failed because
Witte could not convince ten other people to join Wagner as a unit.
Witte, a rare female in a leadership position within the KKK, denied
these reports to HUAC, but a second eyewitness, a young National
States' Rights Party member named Richard Hanna, corroborated Wagner's
story.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Wagner's account to HUAC
relates to an earlier plot that inspired Witte to recruit Wagner.
Wagner said that when Witte recruited him for her own effort against
King, she referred to a recent $25,000 bounty offer on King emanating
from the KKK in Georgia. Though this component is close to hearsay,
there is some corroboration. First, police did confirm that the
dynamite that Wagner and a colleague obtained to spur the hoped-for
civil war did indeed come from Klan sources in Georgia, notably from
Klan associates of Imperial Wizard James R. Venable. Moreover, Witte's
immediate connections were to Venable, who had far-reaching influence
as leader of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (NKKKK).

In 1915 Venable's family had supplied the land used for the
cross-burning ceremony that launched the modern KKK revival in Stone
Mountain, Georgia, where the NKKKK headquarters continued to serve as
a symbolic Mecca for the "Hooded Order." In 1965 Venable, a lawyer who
with fellow racist J. B. Stoner represented individuals accused of
racially motivated crimes (and who shared an Atlanta legal office with
Stoner), launched an outreach program to place several additional
out-of-state Klans in the Midwest under the umbrella of his
organization, including Witte's Klavern. Witte's story, as Wagner
related it, of a $25,000 bounty offer is also consistent with the
available records.

An FBI memorandum of February 8, 1965, from their Atlanta office
warned bureau field offices in Mobile, Alabama, and Washington, DC ,
(locations where King was expected to travel) that Venable was
actively involved in organizing plots to kill Dr. King, and other FBI
reports from the same period implicate Stoner in those efforts.
Venable will eventually be tied into a specific White Knights bounty
that will prove to be integral to deciphering the true circumstances
behind Dr. King's murder on April 4, 1968.

Manufacturing a Pretext: The White Knights' Effort s in 1966
In two of the previously described assassination attempts, white
supremacists planned to take advantage of acts of violence committed
in conjunction with King's travels to protest racial injustice. They
saw that even attempting to kill King could escalate the violence that
could be expected in response to efforts at public integration. In
1966 the White Knights decided to reverse that tactic, performing acts
that would lure King to a "kill zone" in Mississippi.

King came to Birmingham in the wake of the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church bombing; he came to Jackson after both the Medgar Evers
assassination in 1963 and the Mississippi Burning murders of three
civil rights workers in the summer of 1964. Most recently he had come
to Mississippi in the wake of the attempted murder of James Meredith,
the man who had desegregated the University of Mississippi by being
the first black student to apply to and attend the school in 1962 and
who in 1966 was leading his March Against Fear to encourage blacks to
register to vote despite racist intimidation. That King, as a national
figure, would respond in person to well-publicized injustices would be
obvious then to anyone who wanted to strike at him.

With that in mind, Bowers appears to have conceived of one of the more
hideous acts of his violent reign of terror killing a perfectly
innocent black farmer in hopes of luring King into a shooting gallery
in Mississippi. The victim was Ben Chester White, who agreed to help
three unassuming white men look for their supposedly missing dog when
he entered their car, never to be seen alive again. His body was found
battered and riddled with seventeen bullet holes in a creek near a
national forest in Natchez, Mississippi.

The three men who were arrested-Ernest Avants, Claude Fuller, and
James Jones-escaped justice for decades. Jones admitted his guilt and
implicated the other two, but Avants's claim that he only shot White's
already-dead corpse earned him an acquittal, while Fuller (the accused
triggerman) was never even tried. Even Jones (in the face of his own
admission) was set free by a hung jury. Justice was only served in
2003, when Avants was finally convicted for his role in the crime. It
was at that later trial that previously unreleased FBI documents
showed that the three men were members of the White Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan and that Samuel Bowers put them up to killing White in hopes
of enticing King into a death trap.
An Open Contract: The White Knights Bounty Offer in 1967

The White Knights were not deterred by their previous failures to kill
King. Motivated by forces much stronger than just maintaining the
culture of Jim Crow, the White Knights appear to have accelerated
their efforts to murder Dr. King even as their leading members were
finally going to prison for crimes such as the killing of activist
Vernon Dahmer.

Driven by the increased scrutiny of law enforcement on a national as
well as local level, the White Knights increasingly turned to
outsiders for acts of violence. At a time when similar offers appear
to have been circulating in a number of different prison systems, a
Leavenworth penitentiary prisoner- Donald Nissen-reported being
approached by an openly prejudiced fellow inmate with a $100,000 White
Knights-sponsored bounty on King's life.

The inmate knew Nissen was leaving Leavenworth penitentiary and would
make his way to King's home base of Atlanta and told him to contact a
series of intermediaries, known in the criminal and intelligence world
as "cutouts," to confirm his role, which would involve both scouting
King's movements and (if Nissen wanted) actually assassinating the
civil rights leader. Nissen remained quiet for fear of upsetting the
inmate but revealed the details of the offer to the FBI several months
before King was murdered.
There is considerable corroboration for Nissen's story-which includes
names of conspirators-and it provides the key to understanding the
forces that led to King's death in Memphis. According to the HSCA,
similar offers were circulating in the federal penitentiary at
Jefferson City, Missouri, and likely caught the attention of a
soon-to-be escapee, James Earl Ray, the only man arrested and
convicted for King's murder.

Racism or Religion?

It would be easy to say that what united those who made serious
efforts to kill King was a deep reactionary form of racism, a
combination of contempt and fear seen manifested in the brutal beating
of peaceful activists at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Jackson,
Mississippi. But while this has an element of truth to it, it is also
an oversimplification. By 1966 King had achieved almost all his goals
in ending de jure racial discrimination and was shifting toward deeper
issues of economic and social justice. Killing King remained a top
priority for these same people, however, and not as a matter of pure
revenge for his past successes. At the planning level of each of the
major assassination efforts from 1958 onward were individuals devoted
to a hateful Christian denomination led by the Reverend Wesley Swift,
who insisted that "pure-blooded whites are the lost children of
Israel." They joined Swift in promoting the idea of an apocalyptic
race war, and killing King was the best means to that end.
This bond between conspirators can be seen if one simply traces a
social network from retired Colonel William Potter Gale, the
vituperative racist and anti-Semite from California. One month after
reportedly plotting to kill King in Birmingham, Gale addressed a
private gathering of extremists at the William Penn Hotel in Whittier,
California; attendees included California NSRP leader James Paul
Thornton, Atlanta's White Citizens' Council activist Joseph Milteer,
and racist evangelist Connie Lynch. Thornton, Milteer, and especially
Lynch were close associates of Stoner, and all were devotees-like
Gale-of Swift. The Californians Lynch and Gale, while also members of
Stoner's National States' Rights Party, were in fact ordained
ministers in Swift's Church of Jesus Christ Christian, as was Keith
Gilbert. In his church role, Gale was personally invited (by Sidney
Crockett Barnes) to administer the memorial services for Kathy
Ainsworth, a White Knights terrorist who may have had inside knowledge
of aspects of the King murder.

Gale's connection to Mississippi racists likely stemmed from the
active part he played in what many historians view as ground zero in
the southern counterrevolution against integration and
multiculturalism: resistance to James Meredith's admission to and
integration of the segregated University of Mississippi in 1962. Gale
played a major role in fomenting the one-sided violence that required
federal intervention and spurred a proliferation of white supremacist
organizations. In fact, documents from the time describe an unknown,
out-of-state military figure recruiting veterans across Mississippi
into a mysterious, more militant racist organization (clearly the
White Knights). These references raise the possibility that Gale, who
as a World War II officer organized guerrilla operations for General
Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, may have been important in
helping to actually form the White Knights.
Georgia Klan leader James Venable's connections to this coterie of
radical extremists involve his connection to the California Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan (CKKKK). As with Witte's organization in Ohio, the
CKKKK was an offshoot of Venable's umbrella organization, the National
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Venable even spoke to the CKKKK in 1967
at the invitation of its California leader, William V. Fowler, at a
common meeting place for Reverend Swift's religious sermons. Fowler,
in fact, was a devoted minister in Swift's church.58 Although Fowler
handled the day-to-day operations of the CKKKK, FBI informant reports
indicate that Swift had strong and direct influence on the group and
that members were told to attend Swift's religious meetings at least
once a month. Venable liked to portray himself as someone above the
fray, sympathetic to the political goals of the Klan but ambivalent,
at best, to its more radical features. Yet, an informant described
Venable as saying, in 1961, that he "did not believe in violence, but
the time had come . . . when we have to do it." The comment came after
Venable insisted that "Martin Luther King Jr. should have been dead
long ago and that he had to be killed." Perhaps Venable's urgency in
wanting King killed reflected the same worldview as Swift, for
Venable's religious and historical writings make it clear that he
shared the same antagonism toward Jews.

The notoriously racist Reverend Swift, for his part, was so close to
many of these individuals that he was investigated in connection with
their various King plots. The FBI looked at Swift when investigating
the Crommelin/ Carden/Gale/Barnes plot in the early 1960s, as each of
these men were Swift devotees. The FBI even raided Swift's church in
connection with the Gilbert plot in 1965. Of course in each instance,
the accused men themselves (much less their religious leader) were
never actually charged for attempting to assassinate King. And while
the FBI may not have looked at Swift in connection to Stoner's plots
against King, Swift and Stoner clearly shared a lot in common. Swift
kept a flag with a thunderbolt symbol in his office until the day he
died; this was the logo for the National States' Rights Party's
publication The Thunderbolt, a paper that was largely created by
Stoner. Swift's ministers were among the most active members of
Stoner's NSRP movement.
These cross affiliations between anti-King agitators illustrate the
limits of the conventional historical picture of the white supremacist
subculture in America. Without question, as HUAC detailed after its
investigation of extremist movements in 1967, the Klan and similar
groups were highly decentralized even if they were under the umbrella
of several different multistate operations such as Venable's National
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Even within states, much less at the top
of the organizations, it was common for infighting-over power and
money-to fragment various Klans. That said, within these groups were a
subgroup of people who were united by something far more potent and
salient than simple resistance to integration.

White supremacists who plotted to kill King were motivated by a strong
religious impulse, and at least some of those in the white supremacist
movement in the 1960s should be viewed more as religious terrorists
than as political reactionaries. The upper echelons of these groups
were motivated by the white Christian separatism espoused by the
Reverend Wesley Swift and his Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Swift
had founded the Church of Jesus Christ Christian in 1946, and tapes of
his white separatist sermons were literally being played at parties of
like-minded extremists in places like Jackson, Mississippi, in the
early to mid 1960s.
In one stroke, Swift gave Christian religious justification for
beliefs in white supremacy and for the associated antigovernment
communist paranoia appearing in many forms around the country, the
latter casting the civil rights movement as a secret Soviet subversive
operation. This also had an obvious appeal to those resisting
integration as simply a threat to their way of life, giving cover to
their violence. At times individuals would start as mere
segregationists, only to become sucked into Swift's vortex.

This radical variation of Christianity inspired highly devoted
followers from around the nation even as the larger white supremacist
movement lost its secular motivation following the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They formed something akin to
a national militant network under the informal influence of Swift. And
while political causes die or evolve with new laws and elections,
ideological causes-especially religious causes-can have a very long
shelf life. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s victories for integration had
substantially decreased overall Klan membership, and a sharp increase
in successful prosecutions and federal surveillance had dramatically
reduced what little remained of the white supremacist movement by the
late 1960s. But for those who were motivated by religion-and the tapes
and sermons of Wesley Swift-this pressure simply changed their
tactics, as they increasingly turned to outsiders and core true
believers to carry out even more provocative acts of extremism. Their
obsession with assassinating King would become a holy cause, an act of
civil war meant to spark a racial and religious Armageddon.

--
Mary Neal's Google Profile - http://www.google.com/profiles/MaryLovesJustice - Follow me at Twitter @koffietime - http://twitter.com/koffietime - Current, urgent justice issues from a laywoman's viewpoint at my primary blog http://FreeSpeakBlog.blogspot.com (the name is a joke, believe me).  See also http://MaryLovesJustice.blogspot.com and Mary Neal at HubPages. Recommended articles - http://topsy.com/site/freespeakblog.blogspot.com - Address:  MaryLove...@gmail.com (I am censored, but some emails reach my box)