Killing King. Larry Hancock
additional murder plots against Dr. King. In the early morning hours of May 12, 1963, in Birmingham, a bomb destroyed King’s room at the A. G. Gaston Motel. This came hours after another bomb detonated at the home of his brother, Rev. A. D. King, the night of May 11. The two men had been working with other civil rights leaders began to secure integrationist concessions from Birmingham’s white elites after weeks of protests. That both men survived the attacks can only be attributed to luck. The motel bombers, as King later noted, “placed [the explosives] as to kill or seriously wound anyone who might have been in Room 30—my room. Evidently the would-be assassins did not know I was in Atlanta that night.”27 No one was ever arrested, but internal police investigations show the FBI strongly suspected members of the NSRP, who had held a segregationist rally that night, of participating in the attack. The timing of the attack suggests an additional motive—inflaming the black community. King himself suggested this. “The bombing had been well-timed,” the civil rights leader asserted. “The bars in the Negro district close at midnight, and the bombs exploded just as some of Birmingham’s Saturday night drinkers came out of the bars. Thousands of Negroes poured into the streets.”28 If this was the goal, it had its intended effect. The coordinated bombings triggered the first major race riot in the history of Birmingham, one that almost forced President John F. Kennedy to use federal troops to quell it.
The second major riot occurred four months later, when members of a Klavern blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. The leaders of the United Klans of America, the nation’s largest Klan group, had recently shunned Eastview Klavern #13 for its connections to the over-the-top-violent NSRP, the church bombers associated with Fields and Stoner.29 No one would have expected King to be in the Birmingham church, but King had used the building as a headquarters for his May protest campaign. Rev. King acted as everyone would have predicted in the wake of the horrifying violence—he returned to Birmingham to deliver the girls’ eulogy. He also came, with other civil rights leaders, to help calm Birmingham as tensions remained high following the bombing and large-scale riots. Birmingham was a city on the brink of horrific urban combat, according to civil rights activist Rev. Ed King (no relation to Martin Luther King), who joined the push for nonviolence following the bombing. Ed King saw law enforcement officers with heavy-
caliber machine guns on the streets. He is convinced, to this day, that any additional rioting would have resulted in a large-scale bloodbath. “All it would have taken was a bottle breaking, sounding like a gun,” he said.30
This is likely what Christian Identity believers had intended when they spent the days following the bombing looking for an opportunity to shoot King with a high-powered rifle. The “honor” fell to Noah Carden, a member of the Mobile White Citizens Council and a Swift devotee who was once discharged from the military on suspicion he was psychotic. According to Sidney Barnes, whose description months later of the assassination plot was surreptitiously recorded by informant Willie Somersett, Carden could never get a clear shot on King, who was constantly surrounded by aides. Barnes also revealed that he, Carden, and three other Christian Identity radicals—William Potter Gale, Admiral John Crommelin, and Bob Smith—all met in Birmingham the day before the bombing of the church.31 None were Birmingham natives, and Gale came hundreds of miles from California. This raises the possibility that these men knew about the church bombing in advance. Many suspected Stoner helped mastermind the bombing; he enjoyed close relationships with all five men. Crommelin ran for political office, including, in 1960, vice president of the United States, under the banner of the NSRP. Had Carden succeeded in assassinating the leader of the civil rights movement on the heels of the murderous bombing, Ed King believes it would have triggered massive riots and violence not only in Birmingham, but across the South.32
Barnes and company continued to plot against Martin Luther King Jr.’s life in 1964, according to information Barnes conveyed to Somersett and recorded on tape without his knowledge. Somersett even provided Barnes with a rifle for the task, one that Miami police had secretly marked. King’s unpredictable changes in itinerary continued to keep him alive.33
Records indicate Stoner joined a close friend of his, James Venable, a fellow attorney from Georgia and longtime leader of the oldest national Klan organization, in an attempt to kill King in 1965, one that also involved the goal of triggering race riots. The plot was exposed when a young radical, Daniel Wagner, got caught transporting explosives from Georgia to Ohio. Wagner told Columbus, Ohio, police—and later Congress—about a King assassination plan revealed to him by a bleach-blonde Klan empress, Eloise Witte, one the few female Klan leaders in the country. Witte, who ran a Midwest chapter of Venable’s National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, told Wagner that the Klan planned to gun down King and his family after King delivered a commencement speech at his wife Coretta’s alma mater, Antioch College in Ohio. The plot failed when Witte could not organize enough men in time to participate in the ambush, despite a $25,000 bounty offered by Venable’s Klan. A second witness, a young member of the NSRP, confirmed this account to Congress even as Witte, predictably, denied it. Such an egregious act of violence certainly would have triggered massive violence in Ohio, and possibly across the country.34 But Wagner added something else—the explosives he brought to Ohio, given to him by Venable’s Klansmen, were to be used to blow up buildings belonging to civil rights groups and to the Nation of Islam, a militant, black separatist group. The goal, Wagner said, was to ignite a race war.35
A second 1965 King assassination plot in Swift’s native state of California would have been just as if not more inflammatory had it succeeded. Police arrested a Swift acolyte, Keith Gilbert, with 1,400 pounds of dynamite; the intended target: the Palladium theater in Los Angeles, as the city honored King for recently winning the Nobel Peace Prize.36 In recent years, Gilbert has opened up about the plot, minimizing his own role (and his connection to Swift) but highlighting the part played by Dennis Mower, Swift’s chauffeur. Gilbert described being pressured into the Palladium bombing plot against his will by Christian Identity fanatic Mower. Gilbert even claims that he gave the anonymous tip to the police that led to his own arrest—a way of avoiding mass murder while also avoiding the wrath of Mower. Either way, killing King and hundreds of his supporters in one blast certainly would have triggered violent outrage.37
Because these plots routinely failed, they generally left little concrete evidence to back a prosecution for potential murder. Only Gilbert, who was caught red-handed with explosives, went to prison for his role in a King plot. The FBI, when it had jurisdiction to investigate these crimes, often risked exposing informants at a potential trial, with little or no guarantee that such a leap of faith would be rewarded with a prosecution. It was hard enough to convict someone in the South for actual acts of racial violence, much less potential acts of violence. In other instances the FBI failed to piece together the contours of the plots, questioning their very existence. This was true, notably, of the original plot involving McManaman and Sparks. More than anything, law enforcement agencies at all levels of government failed to see the ideological framework that connected these plots, the two degrees of separation, so to speak, from every serious MLK murder plot and Wesley Swift’s teachings. Christian Identity did not become a commonly understood phenomenon in counterterrorism circles for at least another decade, in part because Swift’s devotees were so good at blending in with more conventional white supremacist groups. No one was better at this game than Sam Bowers.
Bowers faced the same issues confronting other Christian Identity activists—the lack of enthusiasm from rank-and-file racists for anti-Jewish terrorism, the resistance to excessive violence in general, the lack of openness to Identity teachings. Bowers, like the senior members of the NSRP and the Minutemen, had to hide his extremist religious beliefs from his rank-and-file members. He did a good enough job of this that few scholars recognize the impact of Swift’s teachings on the leader of the White Knights of Mississippi. Bowers self-identified as a “warrior priest” in interviews he gave at the end of his life. He also described a spiritual moment in the 1950s, when, in grave condition from an automobile accident, a heavenly power “visited him” and convinced him to serve God. But Bowers’s idea of serving God may well have been influenced by his time in Southern California studying engineering at USC. Bowers attended the school after serving in the navy in World War II. He would have been in Southern California at exactly the moment that men like Swift began to systematize Christian Identity teachings.38
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