Killing King. Larry Hancock
foot soldiers people like Swift needed to wage war against the Beast system.
But the Christian Identity believer’s concurrent anti-Semitism and advocacy of egregious violence ran the risk of turning off even hardcore Klan sympathizers. Christian Identity believers had to walk a fine line between their religious imperatives and their need for a widespread following. If they did not form their own organizations, followers of Swift assumed roles in the upper echelons of conventional racist groups while hiding their violent, race-war agenda from rank-and-file segregationists until their God “demonstrated” his message. Swift, with his second in charge Lieutenant Colonel William Potter Gale, was no exception to this balancing act. He used the Church of Jesus Christ Christian as the first “front” in a four-front structure later referred to as the Christian Defense League. Researcher David Boylan describes the system:
Faithful members of the CJCC were recruited for the “Second Front” . . . the AWAKE movement. The more militant members were then recruited in to the “Third Front” which was the Christian Knights of the Invisible Empire “which will have the outward impression of a political-religious group not interested in violence.” It was from this group that the most militant members were recruited for the “Inner Den.” These recruits were the ones that committed acts of violence. Gale stated that “leaders in our country might have to be eliminated to further the goals of the CKIE” and that “God will take care of those who must be eliminated.”15
Several Swift devotees assumed key positions in other supremacist groups. Gale, who enjoyed a hot-and-cold relationship with Swift, worked within the California Rangers, an overtly antigovernment and anticommunist group but one, with Gale in charge, that could also serve a religious agenda. The Minutemen were like a national version of the Rangers. Again, under the auspices of antigovernment and anticommunist militancy, the group attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of members across the United States, people who might have been turned off by talk about astrological signs and the two seed-lines of Adam. But several of the most important leaders also were key figures in Swift’s church. Walter Peyson, the right-hand man to Minuteman founder Robert DePugh, was a Christian Identity fanatic.16 Dennis Mower, the West Coast leader of the Minutemen, was Swift’s personal aide;17 Kenneth Goff, leader of the largest Minutemen subgroup out of Colorado, wrote Christian Identity books.18
It was an easy sell for men like Peyson, Mower, and Goff to get rank-and-file Minutemen to prepare as an army in a future civil war, using the fear of communist subversion of the U.S. government as the pretext. Minutemen collected an enormous arsenal of weapons. In the raid of just one Minutemen compound in New York, federal authorities discovered
1,000,000 rounds of rifle and small-arms ammunition, chemicals for preparing bomb detonators, considerable radio equipment—including 30 walkie-talkies and shortwave sets tuned to police bands—125 single-shot and automatic rifles, 10 dynamite bombs, 5 mortars, 12 .30-caliber machine guns, 25 pistols, 240 knives (hunting, throwing, cleaver and machete), 1 bazooka, 3 grenade launchers, 6 hand grenades and 50 80-millimeter mortar shells. For good measure, there was even a crossbow replete with curare-tipped arrows.19
Another raid of one Minuteman’s ranch in California uncovered “eight machine guns, and one hundred rifles, shotguns and pistols. When they searched his barn they found an ammunition dump for heavy caliber rockets, bombs, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.”20
At a secret Minuteman compound, senior Minuteman leader Roy Frankhouser (another Christian Identity follower) showed a reporter thirty four-foot-long rockets he claimed could strike targets several miles away. Of course, such over-the-top weapons hoarding was also consistent with the religious prophecy of Swift, one in which the forces of God must do battle with the antichrist when the Tribulation begins.
As racial unrest intensified in the long hot summers of 1966 and 1967, Swift encouraged his followers to see the prophetic implications. “No wonder there is confusion in the land,” Swift told his audience in the aftermath of the summer’s rioting. “This confusion comes from the mind of Lucifer whom Jesus said was from the Netherworld while the Children of God came down from above. Thus out of the Netherworld comes a constant revolution and ferment into your society, and this continues until it is destroyed.” But to destroy it, white Europeans would have to start their own “great uprising . . . against the evil in [the nation.]”21
The record shows that Swift’s most devout followers did more than sit idly as tensions mounted, waiting passively for God’s plan to unfold. They became provocateurs, using incendiary rhetoric and even violence to drop a match in a lake of gasoline. Rev. Potito, as mentioned earlier, stoked racial resentment at Ole Miss. Christian Identity Minister Connie Lynch toured the country to attend counter-
rallies with his friend J. B. Stoner. Together, the men formed what Klan expert Patty Sims called a “two-man riot squad.” Sims describes their escapades in her book The Klan:
Lynch once told a Baltimore rally crowd: “I represent God, the white race and constitutional government, and everyone who doesn’t like that can go straight to hell. I’m not inciting you to riot—I’m inciting you to victory!” His audience responded by chanting, “Kill the niggers! Kill! Kill!” After the rally, stirred-up white youths headed for the city’s slums, attacking blacks with fists and bottles. At another rally in Berea, Kentucky, Lynch’s diatribe was followed by two fatal shootings. Again, in Anniston, Alabama, he goaded his audience: “If it takes killing to get the Negroes out of the white man’s streets and to protect our constitutional rights, I say, ‘Yes, kill them!’” A carload of men left the rally and gunned down a black man on a stretch of highway.22
The Minutemen planned several acts of violence, including placing poisonous gas in the ventilation system at the United Nations and attacking Jewish summer camps. Only poor planning prevented what could have been highly provocative actions in the cauldron of the 1960s. As one New York investigator noted: “Kooks they are, harmless they are not. . . . It’s only due to their incompetence, and not any lack of motivation, that they haven’t left a trail of corpses in their wake.”23
But the Minutemen did attempt to inflame racial tensions between blacks and whites during the peak of civil disorder in the 1960s. They prepared fake pamphlets, designed to look like black nationalist propaganda, urging blacks to riot. “Kill the white devils and have the women for your pleasure,”24 they read. At one point, Minutemen sped through black neighborhoods tossing these pamphlets out the window.
Swift devotee and Minuteman acolyte Thomas Tarrants described the entire phenomenon thusly: “Part of the strategy was to create fear in the black community—but it was more important to produce racial polarization and eventual retaliation. This retaliation would then swell the ranks of whites who would be willing to condone or employ violence as a viable response to the racial problem . . . Our hope and dream was that a race war would come.”25
Ultimately killing Martin Luther King Jr. came to be seen by Samuel Bowers and certain of his associates as the one act that could indeed foment a national holy race war. For years King had been a target of these radicals; he would become the only target. Nearly every serious attempt to kill King from 1958 to 1967 involved Christian Identity zealots or groups who were led by them.
As early as 1958, Stoner had offered to “bring his boys from Atlanta” to Alabama to kill King for a “discounted rate” of $1,500. Stoner directed the offer to members of the United Klans of America, as part of a larger package of violent activity that included bombings targeting other Alabama civil rights activists. Stoner managed to carry out some of the ancillary attacks, but his more brazen plans were thwarted by authorities who knew about them in advance. Stoner was the target of an operation organized by Alabama law enforcement authorities, including arch-segregationist Bull Connor. Interesting that someone as bigoted and barbaric as Connor—he famously arranged with Klan members to let them violently beat the Freedom Riders at Birmingham bus terminals in 1961—would be far outside the mainstream Stoner when it came to violent extremism. In 1958, Connor arranged with a KKK member to coax Stoner into talking about potential acts of violence in Alabama. Prosecutors believed that the effort came too close to entrapment, and did not prosecute Stoner. Stoner did not get a chance to have “his boys” kill King, but as usual, he did not go to prison for his antics, either.26