(he was only a clerk). But at the time that McManaman stayed with Eure, Thomas had been in the news for having been deputized as a marshal temporarily, to help law enforcement as needed, if civil rights protests got out of hand. And, as a clerk in the court, Thomas was in a unique position to cover for McManaman as he violated his appeal bond and visited Mississippi. He could have, for instance, provided false documentation to show that McManaman was in Jackson to provide information to authorities there. No record indicates that the FBI investigated either Sutherland or Thomas as the potential go-between Nissen cited in his July 2 warning about the King plot.
This is because the FBI accepted Eure’s claims of innocence and ignorance without a qualm. They arranged a cursory follow-up investigation at Leavenworth, and did not even bother to interview McManaman until months after the King assassination, even after John May corroborated parts of Donald Nissen’s story. A respectable Southern woman like Eure, they reasoned, would not involve herself in anything like a KKK murder conspiracy. On one level this observation dovetailed with history: women played an important support role for the KKK but they almost never participated in acts of terrorism or assumed positions of leadership. But the FBI, once again, underestimated Sam Bowers. At the very moment the FBI visited Sybil Eure,23 Sam Bowers was planning yet another way around the FBI’s non-stop surveillance, and it included employing a Jackson woman, Kathy Ainsworth, among a team of terrorists.
The choice to use Ainsworth as a terrorist starting in 1967 was a stroke of evil genius. An attractive young elementary schoolteacher, she did not fit any of the stereotypes usually assigned to Klan members, allowing her to keep her terrorist activities hidden even from a vigilant FBI. But Ainsworth embraced racial and ethnic resentment as stridently as anyone who ever burnt down a black church or attacked a civil rights protestor. Raised by a virulently racist single mother, Margaret Capomacchia, Ainsworth was mentored in white supremacy by Sidney Crockett Barnes, a vile bigot who fled Florida to Mobile, Alabama, after a law enforcement crackdown on racial violence. Barnes did not stop his support for terrorism, becoming part of a failed 1963–1964 plot against Martin Luther King Jr.’s life that will be detailed in the next chapter. Both Barnes and Margaret Capomacchia enjoyed close connections to Klansmen in Mississippi, and Barnes sent his daughter to college there, with Kathy as her roommate.24 Kathy later joined the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race in Mississippi, a front group for the Mississippi White Knights, but privately worked closely with both the White Knights and the United Klans of America. She even kept her militant associations secret from her husband, a man Sidney Barnes, the surrogate father who gave her away at her wedding, did not approve of as her spouse. Barnes wished Kathy had married someone else: a like-minded extremist, Thomas Albert Tarrants III.25
Barnes introduced Kathy to Tarrants, a tall, lanky, and bright twenty-year-old, at the Barnes residence in Mobile. He indoctrinated both Tarrants and Ainsworth in a version of racist ideology embraced by Sam Bowers and a network of fanatics that stretched across the United States. Tarrants went searching for Bowers in the summer of 1967, and Bowers would use both him and Ainsworth to launch a series of attacks on black and Jewish targets that bewildered the Jackson office of the FBI for months. But that wave of violence was just a prelude for the grand finale, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
3
the motive
In the summer of 1967, Sam Bowers routinely met secretly in the woods with Tommy Tarrants. Oftentimes, they met only after Bowers changed vehicles several times. When they communicated in person, Bowers often insisted that they exchange messages on paper rather than verbally, and that the papers then be burnt. Sam Bowers had great plans for Tarrants, plans of which the young radical may not have been fully aware, and Bowers had no intention of letting local or federal law enforcement disrupt his agenda.
In using Tarrants and Ainsworth, Bowers was not using outsiders simply to avoid legal scrutiny and engage in terrorism. Bowers was showing his true colors for the first time since he became the Grand Wizard of the White Knights in 1964. Bowers ran the White Knights with two agendas. One, defending the so-called Southern Way of Life, was obvious both to his members and to the general public. The other, a religious vision of a holy race war, he kept even from his top lieutenants. But not from Tarrants. Sidney Barnes, the Mobile painter who mentored Tarrants and Ainsworth, had already inculcated both of his charges in the same religious worldview as Bowers. All of them—Bowers, Barnes, Tarrants, and Ainsworth—followed the teachings of Wesley Albert Swift. One of the few White Knights who knew about this new, secret cadre of terrorists was Laud E. (L. E.) Matthews. He even referred to the Tarrants/Ainsworth group as Swift’s “underground hit squad.”1
From his pulpit in Southern California, Swift stood, literally and figuratively, as the focal point in a religious movement that wedded together fundamentalist, apocalyptic Christian ideas with white supremacist ideology. Known today as Christian Identity, its roots could be traced to Victorian-era pseudo-anthropology. A small set of amateur anthropologists with theological interest began speculating about the lost tribes of Israel, the subgroups of Hebrews who in Old Testament lore settled the northern half of the Kingdom of Israel in 722 b.c., only to be exiled by an Assyrian king, never to be seen again. These Victorians argued that some of these lost tribes ultimately resettled in Europe, becoming the progenitors of white Europeans. In this telling, white Christian Europeans then had partial claim, alongside Jews, to being God’s chosen people.2
When these ideas spread to the United States, they became popularized by William Cameron, the editor for automobile tycoon Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. Ford and Cameron infamously used their periodical, with a distribution in the hundreds of thousands, to spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories throughout North America and the world (Adolf Hitler had copies). The appeal of the paper dovetailed with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership in the 1920s reached into the millions across the United States. The pro-
Confederacy Lost Cause narrative celebrated in the critically acclaimed film The Birth of a Nation (1915), and the nativist and xenophobic animus directed at the wave of immigrants—Jewish and Catholic—who flooded the United States between 1880 and 1920, helped revitalize the Klan. Thus in the United States, and in North America as a whole, the Anglocentric interpretation of the Lost Tribe narrative became mixed with racism and anti-Semitism. Before long, racist scholars began arguing that white Europeans had exclusive claims as the Chosen People and that those calling themselves Jews in the contemporary world were something akin to imposters. But it took young theologians like Wesley Swift to develop ideas rooted in an idiosyncratic and “creative” reinterpretation of the book of Genesis into a full-fledged school of thought.3
Swift and a handful of other seminarians attending Bible school in Southern California focused their attention on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As World War II raged, their thoughts paralleled the worst racist dogma of Hitler’s Third Reich. According to Swift and his friends, conventional understandings of the story of the forbidden fruit missed a key element. Swift agreed with some conventional religious scholars that the account is a metaphor for a sexual relationship between Adam and Eve; this is the great (original) Sin that leads to the Fall of Man after the serpent, Satan in reptilian form, tempts Eve to disobey God and eat from the Tree of Knowledge. But Christian Identity’s originators believed that the book of Genesis alludes to a second intimate relationship—one between Eve and the serpent/Satan. The first act of intercourse produces one seed-line of humanity, through the person of Seth. This seed-line produces the people who will reach a covenant with God through Abraham, and settle the Kingdom of Israel to fulfil God’s promise to Abraham’s descendants—the “Chosen People.” Consistent with the earlier, if speculative, scholarship, these are the “Chosen People” who are exiled from Israel and migrate to Europe. But the second act of intercourse, between Eve and the serpent, produces a demonic seed-line, through the person of Cain. Cain is the offspring of Satan in this rendering, and “so-called Jews” belong to Cain’s bloodline. So, according to Christian Identity scholars, the people who call themselves Jews today are really imposters, falsely asserting their status as Chosen People while really operating on Satan’s behalf. As for people
