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
How he first became acquainted with Christian Identity is unknown. But no close student of Bowers’s career doubts his affinity for Swift 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
