Christian Identity ministers could find natural allies in the Jim Crow South among conventional racists looking to preserve the so-called Southern Way of Life. Reverend Potito, a Christian Identity minister, helped rile up the white crowd at Ole Miss into a violent frenzy without mentioning Jews.
Potito belonged to a group whose name deliberately obscured its extremist and Christian Identity disposition: the National States Rights Party (NSRP). The NSRP was formed in 1957 by white supremacists J. B. Stoner, a limp-legged Georgia lawyer, and his friend and fellow Georgian Ed Fields, a chiropractor. The group did run people for elected office, as their name implies, including for president and vice president of the United States in 1960 and 1964.11 But they also were among the most violent white supremacist groups in the country, earning a place on California attorney general Thomas Lynch’s list of the most dangerous terrorist groups in his state by 1965.12 The group’s periodical, The Thunderbolt, did frequently feature blatantly anti-
Semitic articles, but in public, the group chose not to feature the racist elements of its platform. Stoner’s history illustrates why.
Having openly supported the Nazis as a teenager during World War II, Stoner likely became familiar with Identity ideas as early as the late 1940s, as they filtered to Georgia from Western Canada. He soon moved to Tennessee and began to write books that echoed the Christian Identity message that Jesus was not Jewish, that Jews were imposters and literally Satan’s spawn. He also started his white supremacist career by calling for the mass extermination of Jews. Hitler, in Stoner’s view, did not go far enough. His public focus on condemning Jews, even above blacks, led the Tennessee Ku Klux Klan to expel Stoner from their ranks. Other Klan organizations shunned him, forcing Stoner and Fields to form the Christian Anti-Jewish Party in the 1950s, but that group failed to attract enough members.13
Ultimately the two men chose to form the NSRP in large part to disguise their ideological and violent intentions. Stoner attempted to awaken the white masses to his cause by orchestrating a wave of Jewish temple bombings across the country in 1957 and 1958. But this only confirmed his frustrations and those of his followers. White Citizens Councils, which included some Jewish members, condemned the bombings. President Dwight Eisenhower publicly denounced the bombings and formed a task force that helped identify the immediate perpetrators but failed to develop a case against Stoner. To Stoner’s chagrin, although Klan groups deployed anti-Semitic rhetoric, they directed their violence almost exclusively against blacks. Anti-
black violence satisfied only part of the Christian Identity agenda; it struck at the symptoms rather than the disease. For the Christian Identity End Times prophecy to be fulfilled, “everyday” whites would have to join in the holy race war against Jews and people of color. The Ole Miss riots showed this was at least possible.14
The Ole Miss riots helped galvanize racists across the country; thousands joined the KKK and similar organizations to resist federally mandated integration. Others saw the government’s intervention in the South as a sign that they should join militant antigovernment groups, like the Minutemen. This presented opportunities for Christian Identity fanatics but also risks. If the upheaval in the American South illustrated signs of the End Times, then these radicalized whites could become the foot soldiers people like Swift needed to wage war against the Beast system.
But the Christian Identity believer’s concurrent anti-Semitism and advocacy of egregious violence ran the risk of turning off even hardcore Klan sympathizers. Christian Identity believers had to walk a fine line between their religious imperatives and their need for a widespread following. If they did not form their own organizations, followers of Swift assumed roles in the upper echelons of conventional racist groups while hiding their violent, race-war agenda from rank-and-file segregationists until their God “demonstrated” his message. Swift, with his second in charge Lieutenant Colonel William Potter Gale, was no exception to this balancing act. He used the Church of Jesus Christ Christian as the first “front” in a four-front structure later referred to as the Christian Defense League. Researcher David Boylan describes the system:
Faithful members of the CJCC were recruited for the “Second Front” . . . the AWAKE movement. The more militant members were then recruited in to the “Third Front” which was the Christian Knights of the Invisible Empire “which will have the outward impression of a political-religious group not interested in violence.” It was from this group that the most militant members were recruited for the “Inner Den.” These recruits were the ones that committed acts of violence. Gale stated that “leaders in our country might have to be eliminated to further the goals of the CKIE” and that “God will take care of those who must be eliminated.”15
Several Swift devotees assumed key positions in other supremacist groups. Gale, who enjoyed a hot-and-cold relationship with Swift, worked within the California Rangers, an overtly antigovernment and anticommunist group but one, with Gale in charge, that could also serve a religious agenda. The Minutemen were like a national version of the Rangers. Again, under the auspices of antigovernment and anticommunist militancy, the group attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of members across the United States, people who might have been turned off by talk about astrological signs and the two seed-lines of Adam. But several of the most important leaders also were key figures in Swift’s church. Walter Peyson, the right-hand man to Minuteman founder Robert DePugh, was a Christian Identity fanatic.16 Dennis Mower, the West Coast leader of the Minutemen, was Swift’s personal aide;17 Kenneth Goff, leader of the largest Minutemen subgroup out of Colorado, wrote Christian Identity books.18
It was an easy sell for men like Peyson, Mower, and Goff to get rank-and-file Minutemen to prepare as an army in a future civil war, using the fear of communist subversion of the U.S. government as the pretext. Minutemen collected an enormous arsenal of weapons. In the raid of just one Minutemen compound in New York, federal authorities discovered
1,000,000 rounds of rifle and small-arms ammunition, chemicals for preparing bomb detonators, considerable radio equipment—including 30 walkie-talkies and shortwave sets tuned to police bands—125 single-shot and automatic rifles, 10 dynamite bombs, 5 mortars, 12 .30-caliber machine guns, 25 pistols, 240 knives (hunting, throwing, cleaver and machete), 1 bazooka, 3 grenade launchers, 6 hand grenades and 50 80-millimeter mortar shells. For good measure, there was even a crossbow replete with curare-tipped arrows.19
Another raid of one Minuteman’s ranch in California uncovered “eight machine guns, and one hundred rifles, shotguns and pistols. When they searched his barn they found an ammunition dump for heavy caliber rockets, bombs, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.”20
At a secret Minuteman compound, senior Minuteman leader Roy Frankhouser (another Christian Identity follower) showed a reporter thirty four-foot-long rockets he claimed could strike targets several miles away. Of course, such over-the-top weapons hoarding was also consistent with the religious prophecy of Swift, one in which the forces of God must do battle with the antichrist when the Tribulation begins.
As racial unrest intensified in the long hot summers of 1966 and 1967, Swift encouraged his followers to see the prophetic implications. “No wonder there is confusion in the land,” Swift told his audience in the aftermath of the summer’s rioting. “This confusion comes from the mind of Lucifer whom Jesus said was from the Netherworld while the Children of God came down from above. Thus out of the Netherworld comes a constant revolution and ferment into your society, and this continues until it is destroyed.” But to destroy it, white Europeans would have to start their own “great uprising . . . against the evil in [the nation.]”21
The record shows that Swift’s most devout followers did more than sit idly as tensions mounted, waiting passively for God’s plan to unfold. They became provocateurs, using incendiary rhetoric and even violence to drop a match in a lake of gasoline. Rev. Potito, as mentioned earlier, stoked racial resentment at Ole Miss. Christian Identity Minister Connie Lynch toured the country to attend counter-
rallies with his friend J.
