Killing King. Larry Hancock
nation waited for Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (in August), their working relationship, while contentious, remained relatively close. But Johnson knew that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed anything but a close relationship with the civil rights leader.
King, in his capacity as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), made the cardinal mistake of publicly criticizing the FBI for its failures to resolve dozens of civil rights murders throughout the South. Hoover, maniacally protective of his agency’s reputation, responded by publicly labeling Dr. King as an enemy of law and order and insinuating that the activist enjoyed close relations with communists. Privately, Hoover pushed his agents to surveil the minister for the purpose of ruining his reputation and even worse. At one point Hoover’s agents sent King a letter with the goal of shaming the minister into committing suicide over his alleged extramarital affairs, a letter that arrived concurrently with a tape—sent to King’s wife, Coretta—purporting to be a recording of an intimate encounter.10 More relevant to King’s safety, from 1965 on Hoover insisted that his agents discontinue the practice of telling King’s advisors about plots against King’s life. Instead, Hoover ordered his subordinates to inform relevant police agencies only—a dangerous policy for King because these groups often included large numbers of KKK members and sympathizers. Hoover knew full well the dangers of this policy from his experience providing protection to King on Johnson’s orders in 1964. When King went to Mississippi in the wake of the MIBURN murders, Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey protested the additional FBI security for King. His own men, Rainey insisted, could protect King. At that very moment, Hoover knew, Rainey and his subordinates were being investigated for their role in facilitating the MIBURN killings.11 Rainey, as noted earlier, belonged to Bowers’s group, and detained the three MIBURN victims in his jail on June 21, 1964.
Bowers remained undeterred in his desire to assassinate King, but by 1966, King’s own prerogatives created problems for any would-be plotters. Having helped undo legal segregation and discrimination in the South, King increasingly focused his political attention on de facto discrimination in the north, in places like Chicago, Illinois, where King temporarily moved with his family in 1966, to highlight problems with poverty and housing. This brought King out of Bowers’s domain. But Bowers crafted an ingenious if unfortunate plan to overcome this logistical problem: he arranged to lure King into an ambush. Bowers approached three men, Ernest Avant, James Lloyd Jones, and Claude Fuller, misfits the White Knights had recently expelled from their ranks, and promised them readmission to the group if they murdered an innocent black man. The first phase of the plan succeeded with the murder of black farmer Ben Chester White in Natchez, Mississippi, on June 10, 1966. The men selected White mostly as a target of opportunity, but also, in part, because he had no substantive connection to the civil rights movement and his death would seem more senseless than politically motivated violence. Having convinced White to help them find their lost dog, the men lured the farmer into their pickup truck and then brought him to a bridge where they abruptly stopped. Using FBI records and court transcripts (the three men were convicted for murder in 1998), Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell described the subsequent scene four decades later:
Claude Fuller got out of the Chevy, grabbed his rifle and loaded it before going around the car and opening the door where White was. Avants stood beside him.
“All right, Pop,” Fuller told him. “Get out.”
Spotting the rifle, White withered in his seat, bowing his head to pray.
“Get out!” Fuller barked.
“Oh, Lord,” White said, “what have I done to deserve this?”
Fuller answered with his automatic rifle, firing two quick bursts that emptied the gun of all 18 shots.
Fuller then turned to Avants and told him to fire, too.12
The men heaved White’s dead body into the waterway below, and in the days that followed, Sam Bowers waited for the second phase of his plan, once White’s body was found on June 12.
King’s decisions and movements had confounded the efforts to kill him. If the murderers could dictate King’s movements (rather than the other way around), then an ambush would be much more likely to succeed. Anyone studying King’s past behavior may have predicted that a murder like White’s would elicit an appearance by the SCLC leader. King attended the funeral of Medgar Evers in Jackson in June of 1963; he visited Birmingham to eulogize the four young girls who died after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church; later, he visited Mississippi, more than once, to mourn the Neshoba victims and raise public awareness about the lack of justice in that case. The gruesome nature of White’s death could be expected to capture the attention of someone like Dr. King. According to Mitchell:
There were so many injuries that almost any of the bullets could have killed him. Bullets had pulverized his liver and ripped his diaphragm. At least one had carved a gaping hole in the left side of his heart. The aorta, which carried vital blood to the rest of the body, had been torn in many places. There was no question that he bled to death.13
But Bowers miscalculated in believing that White’s murder would bring King to Natchez. For one thing, another white man attempted to kill James Meredith on June 6. Meredith, famous for integrating Ole Miss, had begun a one-man 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, early the previous morning, to inspire African Americans to register to vote. But 30 miles into the march, Meredith sustained serious injuries when Aubrey Norvell, an unemployed hardware store worker, struck him with, as Meredith later described it, “over a hundred pellets” from a 16-gauge shotgun that hit him “in the head, neck, back and legs.” King joined several others in taking up Meredith’s mantle, a three-week trek that did not include a detour to protest White’s murder in Natchez.14
This may not have been the first time Bowers considered this kind of a trap. Though more speculative than the White attempt, evidence suggests that Bowers wanted to draw King to Mississippi for the Sparks-McManaman plot. Under this scenario, Bowers had multiple motivations when he ordered a “code four” on James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in the Mississippi Burning murders. Undoubtedly, the most widely accepted interpretation of the crime—that Bowers wanted to use the murders to scare the hundreds of incoming student activists on their way to Mississippi for Freedom Summer in 1964—is true. But the disappearance of two white men alongside a black man in Neshoba County also generated nationwide attention, and revulsion when federal agents discovered the bodies weeks later. Bowers seemed to anticipate the reaction—one of the largest federal investigations in American history—in a speech given only weeks before in a closely guarded meeting of Klan members.
“The enemy will seek their final push for victory here in Mississippi,” he said, referring to the well-publicized Freedom Summer. But he added that open violence between whites and blacks would lead to a “decree from the communist authorities in charge of the national government . . . declaring martial law.”15 The federal intervention in Mississippi did not quite reach the level of martial law, but polls showed that, during the height of the search for the bodies in Mississippi, when Bowers provoked law enforcement by arranging for additional attacks, a large number of Americans favored something like a declaration of martial law if the violence got worse. Such turbulence surely would invite a visit and protests, as it often did, from Dr. King. And this raises questions about something else Bowers told his audience in the speech before the murders. Speaking of guerrilla strike teams who would resist the federal government and respond to outside agitators, Bowers said:
Any personal attacks on the enemy should be carefully planned to include only the leaders and prime white collaborators of the enemy forces. These attacks against these selected individual targets should, of course, be as severe as circumstances and conditions will permit. The leaders . . . should be our prime targets.16
As will become clear in the following chapter, Bowers calibrated major acts of violence for maximum, public effect. It was part of an even larger plan to incite violence across the country, not only in Mississippi—one that he kept even from his closest followers; one that he pursued with a religious devotion.
His failures to kill King from 1964 to 1966 did not deter Bowers. Instead, he appears to