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 prophecy. Some biblical prophets are tasked by God to warn a wayward community of believers that they are deviating from God’s expectations, to remind them of the noble calling from which they strayed, lest they receive God’s wrath. But as Jesus told his congregants at Nazareth, “No prophet is accepted in his own country.” If he did not realize this before 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. certainly came to understand it firsthand as his mission began to evolve in the years immediately preceding his death.
No one represented the prophetic tradition, in the American context, better than Martin Luther King Jr. Fusing ideas of salvation with concepts like liberty and equality, King called on America to repent from the sins of segregation and Jim Crow, and, as he famously told a crowd in Washington, D.C.: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice . . . Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”2
His efforts, combined with sacrifices and grassroots political activity from thousands of others, helped push forth the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing legal discrimination, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, tearing down most conventional barriers to the franchise for black Americans. The country inched its way toward King’s dream of an egalitarian nation and King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and a place among Gallup’s most admired Americans.3
But by 1967, King’s optimism for America’s future began to temper. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act represented major blows to legal racism, but the impact was limited largely to the American South. Since World War I, millions of blacks had migrated out of the South to America’s urban areas in the North and on the West Coast. Jim Crow and poll taxes did not limit their opportunities. Simple but profound prejudice, manifested in limited social mobility, economic and housing discrimination, concentrated poverty, and police brutality, posed the biggest obstacles to blacks outside Dixie. King did not rest on his laurels as of 1965; he simply shifted his priorities to issues of social and economic justice that had always animated part of his mission. And he began to shift his geographic attention as well, to northern cities. In 1966 he uprooted his family from their middle-class Atlanta existence to live, for six months, in a Chicago ghetto, to highlight patterns of housing discrimination and poverty.4
But northern racial prejudice proved to be a daunting challenge for King, and the people he championed became increasingly frustrated, throughout the country, with the lack of justice and opportunity in their everyday lives. The beginnings of capital flight and deindustrialization only exasperated people of color even more. Higher-paying jobs in unskilled factory labor, often the best and only chance for a middle-class lifestyle for blacks denied widespread access to higher education, slowly began to disappear. As the black community’s hope for King’s vision began to waver, so too did its faith in his approach of nonviolent resistance.
King viewed nonviolent resistance as a philosophical idea informed by Jesus Christ as much as Mahatma Gandhi. “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it,” King argued in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.5 But to others, nonviolence was simply a means to an end: at best a strategy, and otherwise simply a tactic to be used for black liberation. So long as it helped publicize the civil rights conflict to indifferent audiences in Montana and North Dakota, and even to the unaligned world in the midst of a cold war, many activists could turn the other cheek. But as many contemporary historians pointed out, even at the peak of King’s influence not everyone embraced nonviolence. In 1963, Malcolm X, the spokesman for the Nation of Islam, comparing his religion’s ideas of violence to King’s, said, “Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”6
Malcolm X referred specifically to acts of violent unrest earlier that year as signs of growing frustration within the black community. The murder of Medgar Evers in June 1963 and the bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church in September of the same year, ignited riots in Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, respectively. That said, each of these uprisings occurred in response to acts of outrageous violence. The
