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
In 1963, Alabama was home to two 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
