by 1967. He discussed Swift’s sermons with newly arrived Tommy Tarrants, who idolized Swift, and with Burris Dunn, one of Bowers’s closest lieutenants. Dunn helped distribute Swift’s taped sermons, and his fanaticism for Swift ultimately drove away his wife and children. What even the most avid scholars of Bowers’s career, such as Charles Marsh, fail to recognize is that the Grand Wizard embraced Swift’s ideas from the moment he assumed leadership of the White Knights, in 1964. Dunn, for instance, was on Swift’s mailing list at least as of 1965, and no one who knew the pair would believe that Bowers followed Dunn’s lead rather than the other way around. Informants describe Bowers trying to convince his other Klan members to be an anti–“Jew Klan” rather than a solely anti–“N***R Klan” in 1964, but with little success. But the most obvious signs of Christian Identity influence come via Bowers’s own writings.
In the October 1964 Klan Ledger, the periodical Bowers wrote for the Ku Klux Klan, Bowers protested against the widespread FBI intrusion into Mississippi to investigate the Mississippi Burning murders. But in the back pages, literally in fine print, Bowers shifted from secular to religious writing. The biblical passages he cited include those that are almost never mentioned outside of Christian Identity polemics, even by conventional pastors who used the Bible to justify segregation. Bowers, predictably, railed against “today’s so-called Jews” who “persecute Christians, seeking to deceive, claiming Judea as their homeland and [that] they are ‘God’s Chosen’ . . . They ‘do Lie,’ for they are not Judeans, but Are the Synagogue of Satan!” He adds: “If a Jew is not capable of functioning as an individual, and must take part in Conspiracies to exist on this earth, that is his problem.” Passages also reference “Jew consulting anti-Christs” and assert that “Satan and the Anti-Christ stalk the land.”39
The early influence of Swift on Bowers helps explain why Bowers became obsessed with killing Mickey Schwerner, the Jewish activist who was among the three activists targeted by Bowers’s goons in Neshoba County. Schwerner’s enthusiasm for civil rights was enough to motivate the men, like Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, who arranged the Mississippi Burning murders. But Bowers chose to highlight something else after the three deaths. It was “the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew,” he gloated.
The Christian Identity component of Bowers’s thinking also explains the grand predictions he made on the eve of the killing and the actions he took immediately after. Recall that in a speech given two weeks before the Neshoba murders, Bowers prognosticated that soon-to-pass events in Mississippi would bring forth martial law, that they would create conditions for an internal rebellion in the state, and a cycle of violence involving white Southerners and black militants. Many see that speech as anticipating the violence that would greet the wave of student activists set to “invade” Mississippi during Freedom Summer. But through the lens of Christian Identity, the warning makes much more sense as a prediction of the beginnings of a race war, one that Bowers hoped to stoke with the Mississippi Burning murders. In killing whites as well as blacks, then carefully hiding their bodies, Bowers invited the very federal interference he railed against in his public speech. This was especially true as Bowers continued to arrange for violent acts for weeks as federal agents searched for the three missing activists. It is important to recognize that Bowers was exploring an assassination attempt on King, using criminals like Donald Sparks, in 1964. He spoke about targeting the leaders of the civil rights movement in the same speech in which he warned of the (supposedly) coming insurrection in Mississippi. Polls show that Bowers almost got his wish, with the majority of the country favoring placing Mississippi under martial law if the violence in Mississippi became more serious in the summer of 1964.40 Had the country witnessed the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., and the rioting it surely would have provoked, that easily would have qualified as “more serious.”
But Bowers could not publicly disclose his true intentions—to provoke federal intervention—to his audience of white Southerners raised for decades to resent federal interference during Reconstruction. Christian Identity beliefs did not hold sway with rank-and-file Klansmen who, if anything, wanted less federal intrusion in their state’s affairs. Bowers’s aide Delmar Dennis in fact described Bowers telling him privately that “the typical Mississippi redneck doesn’t have sense enough to know what he is doing . . . I have to use him for my own cause and direct his every action to fit my plan.”41
He also described that plan to Dennis:
Bowers outlined on a blackboard the overall strategy of which the White Knights were merely a part. He said he was trying to create a race war, and open violence on the part of white Mississippians against native Negro citizens and civil rights agitators. He predicted that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would be required to send troops into Mississippi to restore order. Martial law would be declared and the state would be under full dictatorial control from Washington. The excuse for the control would be the race war he was helping to create by engendering hatred among whites in the same manner as it was being fomented by leftist radicals among blacks.42
Delmar Dennis specifically tied Bowers’s plan to foment a “race war” to the Grand Wizard’s 1965 assassination plan to murder King when the civil rights leader passed through Mississippi, over a bridge, on his way to protests in Selma, Alabama. As previously discussed, Option A in that plan involved a shooting ambush, while Option B involved blowing up the bridge. Only Dennis’s intervention as an informant averted the plot.
Ben Chester White was murdered on June 10, 1966. Bowers had arranged the murder in hopes of luring King into an ambush zone. Four days earlier, a racist shot and wounded James Meredith during his nonviolent March Against Fear, to encourage Missis-
sippi’s black population to vote. Several civil rights leaders, including King, descended on Mississippi to continue Meredith’s mission. But the schisms over tactics, between King and more militant leaders like newly elected Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman Stokely Carmichael, became obvious and open. In fact, Carmichael used the closing of the march to deliver his famous Black Power speech on June 16. One can imagine what would have happened if Bowers had succeeded in luring King to a more controlled kill zone, just days after an icon like Meredith nearly died from racial violence with Carmichael on hand.
By 1967, Swift’s prophecies about the conditions in America continued to focus on the End Times. The taped sermons Bowers and Tarrants “discussed” in the woods spoke of a nation “in great tribulation. And . . . you will see more of this tribulation. [God said] ‘As you see these things coming to pass, then look up . . . For you are my battle axe and weapons of war. And I am going to stir my people up and I will call for my people to stand upon their feet.’ And eventually the Children of the kingdom, the nations of the kingdom, the powers of God, are going to destroy the powers of the Antichrist.”43
To a Swift devotee, the antichrist was not one man, as mainstream fundamentalist Christians believe, but the entire race of demonic, imposter Jews, as Bowers indicated in his comments after the Neshoba murders. Professor Neil Hamilton, in his study of right-wing terrorist groups, noted that white supremacist groups viewed King as an agent of the Satanic-Jewish conspiracy; killing him became a top priority. King’s successes in pushing for integration in America only reinforced that perception.44 But King became, literally and figuratively, the victim of his own success. By 1967, for reasons that will become clear, he was an even more inviting target for those hoping to ignite a holy race war. To fulfill Christian Identity prophecy, men like Bowers became more determined to kill a prophet.
4
the target
More than just basic racism and money motivated the people trying to kill Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime.1 Prophecy also played an important role—prophecy in both senses of the term. Laymen hear the word prophecy and imagine a religious visionary channeling a higher power to predict the future. King’s antagonists, a network of racial terrorists, were convinced they could accelerate God’s final days of judgment on Earth as predicted in the Book of Revelation. Inciting a holy race war became their chief objective, and murdering Martin Luther King Jr. became the linchpin in that strategy. This is because of the unique role King played in American society in the changing social contours of the 1960s. King exemplified a different, far less supernatural, understanding of the concept of