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 of color—they are subhuman descendants of the “beasts of the fields” described in Genesis as created before God formed Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib. The essence of Christian Identity theology thus becomes this: the satanic, imposter Jews manipulate people of color in a two-thousand-year cosmic conspiracy against the true Chosen People, white Europeans.4
Embraced at first by a very small group of people, this radical theological interpretation had far-reaching consequences—ultimately producing a unique motive for Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The motive grew out of Christian Identity devotion to their own view of End Times—God’s final judgment on humanity, before the righteous are saved and Jesus returns to earth in a thousand-year reign in a paradise on Earth. Like other fundamentalist Christians, Identity believers look for guidance from the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, to understand what God has in store for the world. They share a belief that the prophecies in the Book of Revelation will signal the pending End Times. Notably, Identity Christians, like many fundamentalist Christians, believe that God will impose a series of enormous calamities on the Earth, during a period known as the Tribulation. A false prophet—the antichrist—will seemingly solve the world’s problems but, in reality, he is Satan’s minion. The forces of Satan will amass an army and terrorize humanity until Jesus, and the army of God, vanquish them at the final battle—the Battle of Armageddon. God will then bless his faithful followers with a thousand-year reign, with Jesus as king.
But Swift and his devout followers interpret the End Times differently than do conventional Christians, differences largely rooted in their reinterpretation of the origins of mankind. The antichrist, in their telling, is not just one man, but the entirety of world Jewry. Moreover, since the birth of Cain, these minions of Satan have been working against mankind. Swift’s sermons frequently asserted that Jews, using international communism as their tool, manipulated everything from the American government to the United Nations to the civil rights movement for satanic ends; he referred to this as “the Beast system,” a description of what other Christian Identity followers (and other fundamentalist Christians) believe is the rule of the antichrist implied in the Book of Revelation. The End Times is simply an accelerated period where their true intentions are exposed, and where God ultimately saves his Chosen People, white Europeans. The foot soldiers for the army of Satan, in this scenario, are the subhuman people of color who operate at the whims of the imposter Jews. And the Battle of Armageddon, in essence, is a holy race war.
Another distinctive feature of Christian Identity theology explains why so many of its members, as it will become clear, engaged in provocative acts of violence to incite this holy race war. A large number of conventional fundamentalists believe that faithful Christians will be spared the Tribulation through something known as the Rapture. Devout Christians will literally vanish before the world experiences plagues, earthquakes, and related horrors. But Christian