Rev. Edgar Ray Killen and 1964 Mississippi Murders

The Gospel According to the Klan The Rev. Edgar Ray Killen and the 1964 Mississippi Burning Murders In the 2005 trial of Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood called two elderly women to the stand: Fannie Lee Chaney, 83-year-old mother of James, and Carolyn Goodman, 89-year-old mother of Andrew. At first glance, it seemed a gratuitous move, given that neither woman had any specific knowledge about the planning or execution of their sons’ murders. But it was integral to Hood’s strategy in the case, which did not involve presenting new evidence so much as persuading a dozen Neshoba County jurors that they had an historic opportunity to redeem the reputation of their community. Crucial to that strategy was portraying “the three civil rights workers” differently from how generations of Neshobans had been taught to see them – not as “outsiders” who had come to Mississippi “looking for trouble,” but as flesh and blood human beings, whose deaths had torn a terrible hole in the lives of their loved ones, including these two aged mothers. Neither woman testified for long, but their appearances did the work that Hood hoped. They identified themselves. They examined photographs of their sons and recounted the last times they saw them. Jurors listened intently. The only surprise came at the end of Fannie Lee Chaney’s testimony. Dismissed by the court, she initially refused to leave the stand, insisting that she had a question of her own. “They asked her all the general questions about her son, but when they were finished, they were finished,” her daughter Barbara recalled. “But they didn’t ask her … did she have anything to say about the person who did it, did she want to say anything to him. They didn’t let her. Her first and last question was ‘Why did you kill my son? What did he do to you?’” After an awkward standoff, the judge summoned Barbara “to come get her off the stand, because she wasn’t moving.” Caroline Goodman’s testimony was less dramatic but equally poignant, especially for those who knew her. The luminous spirit that had burned so long and brightly had begun to flicker. She struggled to remember details, though she certainly recognized the photo of her son. She made no attempt to address the defendant, seated a few feet away, though I know for a fact that she would have liked to, since she told me so on several occasions. “If there were some way this man could be educated,” she mused, “if he could learn that what he did was self-destructive more than other destructive, wouldn’t that be remarkable?” She said much the same thing in a Los Angeles Times interview a few months before the trial, telling a reporter that “she would like to be alone in a room with Killen, to ask what was on his mind that evening when her son died. ‘All these years, I’ve been trying to understand what caused him to be part of a group of people who murdered three innocent young men,’ she said. ‘Could he tell me?’” Over the years, I have often found myself returning to the court testimony of the two mothers, which also served as their final testaments; both died a short time later. Clearly their interest in confronting Killen expressed something of their individual characters, but it also seems to me to bespeak something broader and more universal – a basic human hunger for meaning, our desire not simply to know what happened in the past but also somehow to make sense of it. More than four decades after the murders of their sons, both women wanted to look into the eyes of one of the killers and ask, “Why?” In retrospect, I am glad that neither got the opportunity, because I know for a virtual certainty how Killen would have responded. Over the last half century of his life, he was often asked about the murders and he never really changed his story, resorting again and again to the same propositions, each more unbelievable than the last: that he had had absolutely nothing to do with murders, but that whoever was responsible deserved praise rather than condemnation; that the murdered men were not, in fact, civil rights workers but Jew Communist, Christ-killing, n****r-loving invaders bent on the destruction of Christian civilization; that all the talk of voter registration and Freedom Schools was a smokescreen for the real purpose of the 1964 Summer Project, which was to recruit Black men to rape white women, breeding an inferior mongrel race ripe for conquest by the Anti-Christ. Fannie Lee Chaney and Carolyn Goodman endured a great deal of anguish in their lives, but hearing those words from the mouth of a murderer might have been too much even for them. Figures like Killen pose a problem not only for those they victimize but also for historians. If there is a single impulse that aminates the historical enterprise, it is empathy. We seek not only to reconstruct what people in other times did but also to understand why they did it, to recover the contexts and cultural logics that made actions that might appear strange, outlandish, even abhorrent to us seem ordinary, reasonable, even righteous to them. Exercising historical empathy does not, I hasten to add, mean suspending all judgment or somehow checking one’s values at the door; my desire to understand the rise of Hitler does not mean excusing the Holocaust. But exercise it often enough and you may become more circumspect in your judgments and you will certainly become more self-reflective about your values. Mark Twain’s observation that “travel is fatal to prejudice” pertains as much to traveling in time as in space. The problem with figures like Killen is that their beliefs are so fantastic, so hateful and palpably irrational, that they threaten to overwhelm our capacity to comprehend. A Civil Rights rape project? The simplest solution is to give up, to accept that there are things in the world, forms of radical evil, that remain fundamentally beyond our ken. This is the approach, more or less, that most people today take with the Holocaust, which has become the great singularity of modern history -- “the ultimate event,” in Elie Wiesel’s words, “the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted.” Yet this solution brings problems of its own, as philosopher Lewis Hyde, himself a former Freedom Summer volunteer, has warned. When “evil becomes transcendent,” Hyde writes, in a gentle rejoinder to Wiesel, when we allow it to “stand free from human cause and effect,” we not only abdicate our responsibility as historians, but also diminish our capacity to recognize and combat it when it reappears in new contexts and incarnations. Edgar Ray Killen’s apocalyptic pronouncements about the 1964 Summer Project may seem fantastic, even ridiculous, to us, but they clearly did not seem so to him or to at least some of the others involved in the murder plot. And I am not sure that they are any more outlandish -- or any less murderous -- than the dark, conspiratorial mutterings that circulate in many quarters of American politics today. All of which provides some context for the chapter that follows, a chapter I never imagined myself writing. Put simply, it seeks to retell the story of the Neshoba murders from the standpoint of the man who orchestrated them. Though centered on the figure of Killen, it is less a straightforward biography than a study of a set of ideas, a body of prophecy belief emerging within American Protestantism in the aftermath of World War I and still prevalent in many quarters today. It is also a study of the organization to which Killen belonged, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, and of the man who founded it, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. “What was on his mind?” Carolyn Goodman asked. Here is my attempt at an answer. ****** Families like Killen’s – rural poor, subsisting in remote corners of remote counties – leave few footprints in the archive. And Killen himself was an unreliable source (to put it mildly). Yet we are not without resources for reconstructing his life. In addition to scattered documents, we have various interviews that he gave over the years, some with sympathizers, most with people who found his views abhorrent. We also have a trio of “authorized” biographies published in the immediate aftermath of his death in 2018, all based on information that he shared during his final years in prison, two of them written by fellow inmates. Hardly a bounteous source base, but historians have made do with less. Killen was a notoriously cantankerous man and he hated journalists. “[You] have to be a newspaper reporter or a n****r if [you] want to have any rights,” he complained in a characteristic lament. Wheeled in and out of the courtroom during his 2005 trial, he literally snarled at news crews, slapping away their microphones and cameras. A British reporter who went to his home in hopes of securing an interview was assaulted. Yet Killen could also be courtly, and he loved attention. In 1976, for example, he agreed to speak with Patsy Sims, a free-lance journalist writing a book of profiles of Klan leaders. Arriving for the interview in a Stetson and baggy suit, complete with a Shriner lapel pin and George Wallace tie clip, he settled comfortably into the role of rough-hewn southern storyteller, recounting his rural childhood, waxing fondly about the “n****r children” he grew up with on his grandfather’s farm. He also spoke gleefully of outwitting federal prosecutors and the hapless agents of the FBI, even as he continued to deny any knowledge of the murders. “It will break their heart, but they never did get to lock me up,” he laughed. Unable to get him to rise to questions about the killings, Sims asked if “he had ever done anything he regretted.” He did not miss a beat. “No ma’am, no twang of conscience whatever.” As Sims’s experience suggests, Killen enjoyed needling interviewers, especially those he knew to disapprove his beliefs. In 1998, he consented to an interview with David Oshinsky, a Jewish historian from New York University, who was writing a piece on the possible reopening of the Neshoba case for The New York Times Magazine. Sitting in a living room “crammed with religious items,” Oshinsky listened as Killen declared his devotion to Christ and the Constitution, defended slavery, denounced Martin Luther King, Jr. as a homosexual, and disclaimed any sympathy for the murdered trio. "Those boys were Communists who went to a Communist training school,” he said. “I'm sorry they got themselves killed. But I can't show remorse for something I didn't do." A year later, Killen sat down for an interview with Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter with the Jackson Clarion Ledger who had spent the previous decade trying to put him behind bars. Over a catfish dinner with all the trimmings, he asked Mitchell if he could name Dr. King’s assassin. When the reporter asked why, he smiled broadly: “Man, I just want to shake his hand.” With his belated indictment in January, 2005, Killen once again found himself in the spotlight. While he rejected most media requests, he accepted a few. He appeared on WJTV, the CBS affiliate in Jackson, and sat for an interview with avowed white supremacist Richard Barrett, founder of the neo-Nazi, Mississippi-based “Nationalist Movement.” Barrett, who first gained public visibility as national chairman of “Democrats for Reagan,” was so moved by Killen’s heroic struggle to “keep Communists out of Mississippi” that he announced plans for a booth at the Mississippi State Fair where the Preacher’s admirers could get autographs and shake his hand. The plan fell through after a protracted legal battle, but Barrett was unbowed. In the wake of Killen’s conviction, he announced plans for a ”Killen Appreciation Day” to be held on Philadelphia’s Courthouse square, setting off yet another legal wrangle. Yet even as he trafficked with Barrett (with whom he subsequently fell out), Killen accepted the invitation of two filmmakers, Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano, to appear in their documentary film “Neshoba.” It is hard to imagine people whose politics were more removed from Killen’s than Dickoff and Pagano, whose project was supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Andrew Goodman Memorial Foundation. But when the filmmakers approached him for an interview, he welcomed them and their camera into his home. The conversations continued for months, right through the trial and sentencing, yet the filmmakers’ hopes of gaining new insight into the murder conspiracy proved unavailing. If anything, the Preacher simply used the film as a bully pulpit, discoursing on the perils of Judaism, Communism, and integration while proudly displaying the Ten Commandments tablet he had erected in his yard. Killen’s willingness to share his story increased during his years in prison, reflecting not only his sense of approaching mortality but also his desire to provide a legacy for his wife, Betty Jo, who had been left penniless by the legal fees accrued during his trial and ensuing appeal. Between 2007 and 2017, he conferred exclusive rights to his life story to not one, not two, but three different authors. The trio was the very definition of a motley crew. The first, Larry Ellis, was a jailhouse scrivener and habitual offender – he spent more than half his sixty years behind bars -- who met Killen in 2007, when they were briefly assigned adjacent cells in Parchman’s “Old Max” section. Informed of Ellis’s literary skills by another inmate, Killen immediately recruited him as a biographer. The two men spent the next month whispering to one another through an air vent, producing an “autobiography” that Killen proposed titling “Getting the Last Word In.” James Stern, who shared a cell with Killen in 2011, was an even less likely chronicler, given that he was African American, but the men bonded over their shared Christianity (like Killen, Stern was an ordained minister), as well as their shared hatred of Attorney General Jim Hood, who both accused of railroading them. The final author, Brian Boney, was not a prisoner but a retired policeman, who reached out to Killen in 2017, just months before his death. In contrast to Ellis and Stern, both of whom had decidedly mixed feelings about their subject, Boney was an unalloyed admirer, who saw his book as a way to “clear the name and reputation of a truly great man.” In pitching his life story to the authors, Killen conjured visions of a “New York Times bestseller,” with a lucrative “movie deal” to follow. “Just my Aryan family will buy a hundred thousand copies,” he assured Ellis. In the event, no publisher was willing to touch the project. Nonetheless, all three manuscripts did eventually find their way into print, thanks to the selfpublishing industry. Ellis’s book, which was ultimately titled Killer Killen: Autobiography of Edgar Ray Killen and the Genuine Truth About Mississippi Burning, and Boney’s A Race Against the Clock: The Authorized Biography of Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen both appeared in 2018. Stern’s Mississippi Still Burning: From Hoods to Suits was published a year later, complete with an appendix with more than two dozen letters that Killen sent to him over the course of their unlikely partnership. Written in pencil on prison issue paper, the letters veered wildly in topic and tone, reflecting not only Killen’s emotional volatility (an abiding element of his character) but also his accelerating cognitive decline. “What I impowered you with I dought your brain can rap around it,” he wrote in one letter. “[N]****rs are smart but they have no morals, values were never mint for a n****r, at best you are a animal in a circuse, you follow orders well, point and c[h]ase, no white man would have indored the treatment you have from me … no matter how fund I am of you like my pet your still a n****r…” In other letters, however, Killen extolled Stern as a true “friend” and “Christian,” “the most intelligent black man I have met,” a “man worthy to carry my secrets.” In several of the letters, he explained how Stern, with his tutelage and endorsement, could rise to become the first African American to hold office in the Ku Klux Klan – a real life Black Klansman. All of which is to say that people approaching the available sources expecting to find a clear window into Killen’s mind will be disappointed. Nor will they find much information about the murders themselves, though Killen did, in one of his final letters to Stern, offer an apparent confession: “James with no apologies I did take part in killing those 3 son of a bitches in 1964, those communist bastards got what they had comming.” What they will find is a skein of baroque conspiracy theories -- the “real” truth about everything from the Kennedy assassination to Vietnam to the death of Marilyn Monroe -- interwoven with all manner of selfaggrandizing tall tales. Like Robin Hood (to whom he sometimes compared himself), Killen was nowhere and everywhere at once: completely disconnected from any Klan activity in Neshoba County, yet standing “just feet away” from Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was assassinated in Memphis, working “undercover” in Los Angeles when Watts went up in flames, sneaking into the Pentagon with his “life long best friend and mentor, the late Senator James O. Eastland,” for top-secret briefings on “Russia’s Cold War battle plans.” And like Jesus Christ (to whom he also compared himself), he was destined to suffer at the hands of his enemies – Communist Jews and the perverted mass media they controlled – only to be vindicated in the end. “[T]hree days after I’m dead, my spirit will rise and all will remember me through history,” he boasted to Ellis. “They’ll make my birthday like they did Martin Luther King.” Faced with such palpable irrationality, it is tempting, again, just to throw up one’s hands. Yet scattered amidst the dross are nuggets of verifiable truth, as well as glimmers of insight into Killen’s upbringing, religious beliefs, and work in the Klan. Though he doubtless exaggerated their intimacy, Killen did know Senator James Eastland, as he certainly knew other state leaders, including Governor Ross Barnett (who named him to his personal staff as an “Honorary Colonel of Mississippi” in 1960) and Governor Paul Johnson, on whose campaign he worked in 1963. His claim that J. Edgar Hoover had a secret file identifying Mickey Schwerner as an “active agent of the Communist Party” was accurate, even if the accusation itself was not. Even when Killen’s stories bore no relationship to anything resembling reality, they could, in their very fervor and extremity, be profoundly illuminating. A story does not need to be true to reveal truth. ****** Any account of Edgar Ray Killen must start with Neshoba County, where he lived for the first eighty years of his life, right up to his imprisonment in 2005. Neshoba was established in 1833, two years after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and sixteen years after Mississippi’s admission to the United States. The first white settlers were mostly Scots-Irish, chiefly from the Carolinas. A substantial minority owned slaves. Drawn by the promise of fresh land, they were disappointed with what they found – clay hills and pine bottoms better suited for timbering and cattle grazing than cotton production. As the cotton frontier moved west, the county became a backwater and so it remained. Few families left – you still find the surnames of those first settlers everywhere in the county today, among Black and white people alike – but even fewer arrived. As late as the 1920s, at the end of the great age of European immigration, there were only five non-native born people in the entire county, all naturalized, and even fewer Yankees. While a few families prospered, the vast majority of Neshoba residents, Black, white, and Choctaw, lived threadbare lives, eking out a subsistence as smallholders, tenants, and sharecroppers. Those who managed to produce a marketable surplus faced a daunting two-day wagon ride to Meridian, the nearest substantial town, over makeshift “corduroy” roads – clay tracks cross-laid with saplings – that were impassable for much of the year. The county acquired its first gravel road only in 1931, and its first tarred road only after the Second World War. Electricity arrived, compliments of Franklin Roosevelt’s TVA, in 1937, though it would take another decade or more to connect houses in the countryside to the grid. Piped water and sewerage came still later. Even by the formidable standards of Mississippi, Neshoba County was an extremely isolated, insular place. Edgar Ray Killen was a sixth-generation Neshoban. William Killen, the founder of the line, arrived in the newly independent United States as a teenager, apparently from Belfast. He appeared in the first U.S. census in 1790, residing in Cumberland County, North Carolina. By the 1820 census, he had made his way to Wayne County, Mississippi, where he lived with several sons and half a dozen enslaved African Americans. Henry Killen, his son, was literally the first white man to settle in what became Neshoba County, arriving in the late 1820s, several years before the land was ceded by the Choctaw. He put down roots in the southeastern corner of the county, an area variously known in census records as Union, Mogulusha, and House, where he owned a small plantation and also served as probate judge, the county’s first public official. In the 1840 census, the first in which Neshoba County appeared, Henry Killen was recorded as head of a household containing seventeen people, eight of whom were enslaved. Thus William begat Henry. And Henry begat David, who begat Christopher Columbus, who begat Dionysius Eugene, who begat Lonnie Ray, who begat Edgar Ray, the eldest of his eight children, in 1925. By that time there were nearly a hundred Killens living in Neshoba County, and countless other kinfolk with different surnames. (Arthur Winstead, who represented the district in the U.S. House of a Representatives in 1964, was a cousin.) Most of the clan continued to live in the House community, within a mile or two of where Henry Killen had settled a century before. Little is known about Killen’s father, Lonnie Ray, and still less about his mother, Mary Etta Hitt, who also grew up in House. They were church-goers. They were not well educated. (Lonnie Ray apparently left school after the eighth grade.) They were poor, and doubtless got poorer as the family grew and the Great Depression deepened. In one interview, Killen remembered his father toiling on a road crew – perhaps on that first gravel road from Philadelphia to Meridian, which ran past House and later became Highway 19, the route the three civil rights workers followed on the night of their deaths. With no land of its own, the family squatted on the farm of Killen’s maternal grandfather and namesake, Edgar Hitt, until it too fell under the auctioneer’s hammer. At some point in the 1930s, Lonnie Ray acquired an interest in a small sawmill, where his eldest son soon joined him. By the time he was thirteen or fourteen, Edgar Ray Killen had found the calling he would pursue for the rest of his life, cutting, hauling, and sawing timber. The years on his grandfather’s farm are of particular interest because they afforded Killen his first sustained contact with African Americans, many of whom lived there as tenants and sharecroppers. Recollecting the experience in his 1976 interview with Patsy Sims, he expressed nothing but fondness for his Black neighbors. “I can remember going to the colored – and to be frank we called them n****rs, and they didn’t resent it – but we would go as small children and I can remember the old mammy cooking and feeding us at the kitchen table with her kids and we didn’t know any difference,” he said. “We thought a lot of those n****r children. If any of the ol’ ones livin’ now, if I see ‘em, it’s still the same feelin’ … Maybe we missed that in bein’ educated, but we didn’t even think about race.” It is easy enough to poke holes in such colorblind reveries, but we ought not dismiss them too quickly. The close proximity between poor white and poor Black people in rural Mississippi, both spatially and economically, set the stage for all manner of racist cruelty and boundary drawing, but it also fostered familiarity and moments of genuine neighborliness, especially among children, who were not yet fully subject to the strictures of segregation. But the real significance of the story lay less in its validity than in what it conjured for Killen: a sepia-toned vision of an old racial order, before the Civil Rights movement, in which Black and white people knew their respective places and lived contentedly within them. To be clear, Killen was a racist, by every conceivable definition. He believed that God had endowed Black people with strong bodies (“made to handle labor”) and small, undeveloped brains (“a step above a primate, but far inferior to the white man, red and yellow man, and the sand n****r of India”). The idea of racial intermixture provoked in him not just revulsion but rage. But that did not mean, as he insisted to numerous interviewers, that he hated Black people. “I’m not prejudiced against a donkey because it’s not intelligent,” he explained to biographer Larry Ellis. “I call it a good donkey…” The real target of his hatred – his venomous, volcanic hatred – were the “outsiders” who preyed upon Black people’s ignorance and credulity, the “Jew Communist scum” who “used” them as weapons in their war “to destroy democracy and Christianity.” Details of Killen’s education are hazy. He attended school in House – Neshoba County was the last county in Mississippi to consolidate its school system – graduating high school in 1943. (His classmates included Wallace Miller, a distant cousin who became one of his first recruits into the Klan and, later, a witness against him in federal court.) Unlike most contemporaries, Killen was not drafted for military service – it is not clear why not – but instead enrolled at the newly opened Ross Collins Technical School in Meridian, where, depending on which version of the story he was telling at the time, he studied agriculture or ship fitting. Over the years, Killen would burnish his resume with other academic credentials as well – “five degrees” in forestry, coursework in business administration at Mississippi State University, theological training at Southern Baptist Seminary in New Orleans, and several years of private legal study, abandoned just “two weeks” before he was scheduled to take the bar exam – but there are no records to verify his claims. Whatever his educational attainments may have been, he mostly made his living cutting timber. In 1944, at the age of nineteen, he wed seventeenyear-old Lucille Apperson, also from the House community, to whom he remained married until her death in 1997. The couple had no children, though Killen later acquired two stepchildren through his second wife, Betty Jo, whom he married a few months after Lucille’s passing. ****** Accounts of the Neshoba murders invariably make reference to the fact that Killen was a preacher – an ordained Baptist minister. Very few, however, pursue the matter, treating the fact itself as sufficient proof of his hypocrisy and corruption. Yet if we wish to make sense of Killen we must confront the fact of his Christianity, which was, by all available evidence, sincere and abiding. While documentary records are few and far between, Killen seems to have grown into his faith at Pine Grove Baptist Church, a small, wood-frame meetinghouse on the edge of the House community. It was there that he was first called to preach and it was there that he was eventually laid to rest, not far from the graves of his parents. According to a statement that his mother made in 1964, Killen received the call when he was seventeen, still in high school, though he initially resisted answering it. “He fought it until he finally came round to the Lord,” she said. Killen himself put the matter more bluntly: “God knocked me on my butt and woke me up.” By his early twenties, he had begun to preach in churches in the area. In 1950, at the age of twenty-five, he was examined and formally accepted into the ministry in a service at Pine Grove. The ordination certificate is still in the Killen family, with the words “Set for the Defence of the Gospel” emblazoned across the top. Killen preached for the rest of his life, continuing through his initial arrest in 1964, his trials in 1967 and 2005, and his final decade in Parchman Penitentiary. He worked mostly as a “jackleg” preacher, a term for ministers who do not hold regular pulpits but fill in for congregations without pastors of their own, of which there was no shortage in rural Mississippi. He served in dozens of congregations over the years, including Southern, Primitive, and Missionary Baptist churches, mostly without salary or remuneration. He baptized and married hundreds of people, and sent hundreds of others to their rest, including the parents of Marcus Gordon, the judge who later sentenced him to prison. For a time, he had his own Sunday morning radio program, though no recordings survive. He also occasionally contributed short “sermonettes” to the “Churches” page of the Neshoba Democrat. To anticipate a question, Killen’s role in the Neshoba murders does not seem to have affected his local standing as a preacher. Those churches that disinvited him from their pulpits – and there were a few – appear to have been moved not by his masterminding of a triple homicide but by allegations of misconduct with female congregants. At least some of those allegations appear to have had merit: in 1975, Killen served five months in jail for threatening to kill the husband of a congregant with whom he was having an affair, a threat caught on tape. Confined in an adjacent cell in Parchman in 2007, biographer Larry Ellis experienced Killen’s preaching first hand. In the midst of an ordinary conversation, the tone and register of his voice would change, and he would speak earnestly of the saving mercy of Jesus Christ, underscoring the message with Biblical passages recited by heart. Yet minutes later his tone would change again, and he would launch into a cell-rattling tirade against blood-sucking Jew Communists. A Christian himself, Ellis found the juxtaposition unsettling, even terrifying; Killen had “less self-control over these hate emotions than anyone of any age I ever met,” he later wrote. On several occasions, he asked him to explain the contradiction, but Killen never provided an answer – or even seemed fully to grasp the question. In the end, Ellis was left to speculate that he suffered from multiple personalities, perhaps even “demonic possession.” ****** The answer to Ellis’s question may less in the realm of psychology than of history. Killen’s came of age at a formative moment in the history of American Protestantism, a period distinguished not only by the rise of militant Fundamentalism, but also by an unprecedented convergence of evangelical Christianity and right-wing politics. Long before the emergence of organizations such as the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition, a cohort of nationally prominent evangelical ministers began to weave together the precepts of Fundamentalist Protestantism – scriptural inerrancy, virgin birth, the atonement and imminent return of Jesus Christ – with right-wing causes such as Prohibition, immigration restriction, white supremacy, and opposition to the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools. Fundamentalism was, in its nature, a conservative creed – the “old-time religion,” adherents called it – but in the context of the political and cultural upheavals of the 1920s and ‘30s it acquired a distinctly reactionary temper, a revanchist rejectionism against not only the “liberal theology” infiltrating mainstream Protestant seminaries but also the many modernist evils that it allegedly encouraged, including Darwinism, race-mixing, homosexuality, women’s suffrage, birth control, “free love,” pornography, and, above all, communism, which served as a kind of condensation symbol for all things alien, dark, and dangerous. The rise of right-wing Fundamentalism, and of Fundamentalist anti-communism, in particular, fueled a corresponding upsurge in the venerable tradition of anti-Semitism. Indeed, so closely were the figures of the communist and the Jew associated in the period that the terms were routinely used interchangeably. The crucial source text here was the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, first published in Tsarist Russia in 1903. Purported to be a record of a secret Zionist Congress in Basel, the Protocols laid out a systematic plan for Jewish global domination, starting with control of banks and mass media and culminating with the total destruction of Christian civilization. Needless to say, the text was a fabrication; indeed, vast swaths were plagiarized wholesale from a satirical pamphlet, “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesqieu,” published in France in the 1860s. But the Protocols were widely accepted as authentic in Tsarist Russia, and, once translated, in many other countries as well, providing readers living through tumultuous times with a compelling explanation – and a convenient scapegoat – for all manner of fears and discontents. In a neat illustration of the dynamics of conspiratorial thinking, the proliferation of articles and learned essays exposing the text as a fraud served only to increase its credibility among adherents. As Adolph Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, the fact that the “Frankfurter Zeitung moans every week” about the Protocols’ fraudulence offered “the best proof that they are authentic.” The first American editions of the Protocols began appearing at the end of World War I, just after the Bolshevik Revolution and just in time for the Red Scare. Among the most important popularizers was Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which launched a series on “the International Jew” in 1920. Though published under the automaker’s byline, the series was actually written by the paper’s editor, William J. Cameron, who also served as Ford’s director of public relations. For 91 straight weeks, Cameron hurled every conceivable anti- Semitic accusation, blaming Jews not only for killing Christ but also for the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the immiseration of American farmers, the demoralization of American youth, even the bane of jazz music. The series provoked fierce protest, but it also found an eager audience, swelling the Dearborn Independent’s circulation from about 70,000 to over 700,000, briefly establishing it as the second widest circulating newspaper in the United States. A four-volume book version of “The International Jew,” also published under Ford’s byline, became a national bestseller. William Cameron would play a doubly important role in the history of right-wing extremism in the United States, not only as a popularizer of the Protocols but also as one of the nation’s premier exponents of British-Israelism. A tradition born in England in the late eighteenth century, British-Israelism was a complicated business, a mélange of amateur philology, folklore, and scriptural exegesis, seasoned with various arcana about astrology, sacred stones, and pyramids (which adherents regarded as prophetic clocks counting down to the approaching End Times). But the basic idea was simple enough. The true “Chosen People” of the Bible, the inheritors of God’s covenant with Abraham, were not the Jews but the Anglo Saxons, whose bloodlines traced back to the Biblical patriarch Ephraim, progenitor of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In some versions, Jesus himself was an Anglo-Saxon, who had spent the years before his public ministry living in England. By the late nineteenth century, the tradition had found its way to the United States, where it acquired additional glosses. In the Americanized version, it was white Americans, descended of Ephraim’s brother Manasseh, who were the true keepers of the covenant, a status sealed with the adoption of the divinely inspired U.S. Constitution. Cameron’s singular contribution was to fuse this tradition with the toxic anti-Semitism of the Protocols. In the resulting synthesis, Jews were not simply communists and Christ-killers but imposters, boasting of their place in the unfolding design of Providence even as they conspired against it. In the most extreme versions, they were not even Jews at all, having sacrificed their status as a distinct people by interbreeding with inferior, nonwhite tribes – so-called “Edomites” -- from which union sprang mongrel races like the Tartars, Mongols, and so-called “Khazars,” the savage horde that allegedly birthed Bolshevism. The anti-Semitic ideas swirling through the United States in the 1920s and ’30 attracted adherents from virtually every Christian denomination – Catholics and Christian Scientists, Pentecostals and Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. But they had their most enduring impact among Fundamentalist Protestants, for whom they served not only as a diagnosis of the nation’s moral and political decay but also as a system of prophecy belief, a codex of signs and portents of the fast approaching End Times. One can cite literally hundreds of examples in Fundamentalist writings and sermons from the period, not only from extremists such as the Rev. Gerald Winrod, a Kansas-based Fundamentalist whose anti-Semitic diatribes won him the sobriquet “the Jayhawk Nazi”, but also from establishment figures such as the Rev. William Bell Riley, founder of the World Christian Fundamentals Association and mentor to Billy Graham. By the standards of the time, Riley was somewhat late to discover the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but when he finally read it, it struck him with the force of a revelation; as historian Austin Clements has written, “the Protocols became as inerrant to Riley as the Bible itself.” From that moment forward, he remained not only a dedicated conspiracy theorist but also an ardent anti-Semite, detecting the sinister hand of the eternally cursed, Christ-killing Jew not only in the international communist menace, but also in leading American institutions, including banks, courts of law, universities, and the mass media. As with most conspiracy theories, the prophetic vision of right-wing Fundamentalists proved wonderfully elastic, stretching to accommodate all kinds of fears and grievances. Inevitably, challenges to white supremacy were viewed through a conspiratorial lens. Long before Edgar Ray Killen appeared on the political scene, Fundamentalist clergymen confidently claimed that the militance exhibited by African Americans in the years after World War I was not self-motivated at all, but rather the work of sinister Jewish Bolsheviks intent on undermining the United States. (According to one ubiquitous story, Jews in Russia had created a fund of “seven million gold rubles” for “inciting the negro.”) The recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, some of whose founders were in fact Jewish, served as Exhibit A in the bill of indictment. For the Association’s proliferating critics, the real object of the NAACP was not to ensure equality or end segregation but to encourage “mongrelization,” reducing Americans to a degenerate race of “half-breeds,” ripe for conquest. As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, the conspiratorial web acquired new strands. Having engineered the stock market crash and Great Depression, Jewish Bolsheviks were now using the federal government’s response to the crisis to advance their nefarious plan. The proliferating agencies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were nests of communists, with Roosevelt himself serving as “pawn in chief” of the “Jew-ocracy.” According to Gerald Winrod, Roosevelt was himself a Jew, a fact he had endeavored to hide by changing his surname from the original “Rosenvelt.” “The same forces which crucified Christ nineteen hundred years ago are trying today to crucify his Church,” Winrod warned in his 1935 book, The Jewish Assault on Christianity. “Many Christian leaders have not yet realized it, but Christianity is in the grip of a life and death struggle at the present time. International Jewish Communism, which has already undermined all nationals, firmly expects to exterminate all Christians.” In another book, The NRA in Prophecy and a Discussion of Beast Worship, Winrod went even further, identifying Roosevelt as the Anti-Christ, a conclusion based on Revelation 13:1, which described the “Beast” as having seven heads and ten wings, precisely the number of feathers on the left and right wings of the National Recovery Administration’s ubiquitous Blue Eagle logo. ****** The extravagantly anti-Semitic (and often overtly pro-Nazi) sentiments circulating in right-wing Fundamentalist circles in the 1930s partially subsided in the 1940s, as the United States entered the war against Hitler’s Germany. Winrod, who had campaigned for the U.S. Senate in 1938 as an avowed Fascist, was arrested in 1942 and charged with sedition. But the underlying beliefs and assumptions – the equation of communism with Judaism, and the association of African American demands for equality with both; the vision of the federal government as the agent of an alien, sinister force; the whole reactionary, conspiratorial mindset – did not disappear. With the onset of the Cold War and near simultaneous emergence of the modern Civil Rights movement, all the dark, conspiratorial ideas that had informed right-wing Fundamentalism in the interwar period burst back into the political arena. Not surprisingly, they played a particularly conspicuous role in the Jim Crow South, investing white southerners’ campaign of “Massive Resistance” to Civil Rights not just with scriptural warrant but with an apocalyptic urgency. Again, one could cite any number of texts as examples, from sermons on Jewish control of the Supreme Court to denunciations of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was routinely cast as a false prophet, bankrolled by communist Jews. Probably the best example, certainly the most widely read, was the Rev. Carey Daniels’s “God the Original Segregationist.” Delivered from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of West Dallas just six days after the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case, Daniel’s sermon offered a raft of scriptural references – the Old Testament stories of Noah, Ham, and Nimrod (builder of the ill-fated Tower of Babel), the Gospel of James, Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians – to demonstrate not only the divine roots of segregation, but also the controlling influence of Satan (“the Original Desegregationist”) on the Civil Rights movement. “By following God’s plan of segregation as well as we could within our limited boundaries we have long since worked out a marvelous solution to the Negro problem here in the South,” Daniel declared. “In fact, we HAD no Negro problem in recent years until certain Northern politicians and Communist-inspired pressure groups decided to create one for us here. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THE COMMUNISTS WOULD LOVE MORE THAN A MONGRELIZED AMERICA THAT THEY COULD EASILY ENSLAVE.” The sermon was rushed into publication by the Mississippi-based White Citizens Council, which ultimately printed over a million copies. Had the New York Times bestseller list included publications distributed for free, Daniels’s pamphlet would have stood near the top. Others spun even darker tales. According to the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the Christian Nationalist Crusade and editor of its monthly periodical, The Cross and the Flag, the six million Jews supposedly murdered by the Nazis had not been killed at all but instead secretly transported to the United States, where, under the banner of “Civil Rights,” they were already organizing Black people for the final assault on Christian civilization. J.B. Stoner, self-taught Biblical scholar and founder of the National State’s Rights Party, went still further, arguing in texts such as “The Gospel of Jesus Versus the Jew, as Explained in the Holy Bible” that Judaism was “a crime punishable by death.” As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum in the late 1950s, Stoner sought to execute the sentence he had pronounced, planting bombs in at least half a dozen synagogues and Jewish community centers, as well as in several Black churches. In the years that followed, he became a kind of roving provocateur, organizing violent counterdemonstrations wherever the movement was active, including in Mississippi, where he developed close relationships with members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the group to which Killen belonged. (The chairman of the NSRP’s Meridian chapter, Raymond Roberts, was the brother of Alton Wayne Roberts, who fired the shots that killed Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.) Ultimately, however, the most extreme expression of this apocalyptic anti-Semitic tradition – and the most important for making sense of the Neshoba murders – did not come from the South at all but from Southern California, base of operations for the Rev. Wesley Swift, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian. Born in New Jersey, the son of a prominent Methodist churchman, Swift was ordained in the Methodist Church while still a teen, but his ministry changed radically in 1931, when he moved to Los Angeles to study at the newly opened Kingdom Bible College. Whether he was initially aware of it or not, Kingdom was a clearinghouse for Fundamentalist anti-Semitism, as well as the main West Coast outpost of British-Israelism. Swift quickly embraced the tenets of both. He absorbed other ideas as well, from the charismatic Pentecostalism of Aimee Semple McPherson – he formally converted to Pentecostalism shortly after meeting her – to the fascist forebodings of the Gerald Winrod, the Jayhawk Nazi, who he heard preach at McPherson’s Angelus Temple. The encounter with Winrod led him, in turn, to the even more radically anti-Semitic theology of the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith and the Christian Nationalist Crusade, with whom he worked closely during and after World War II. Persuaded that American democracy was menaced by Satanic Jewish communists, Swift attempted to re-launch the Ku Klux Klan in Southern California, but in the end he would make his mark not as a klansman but as a pastor. In 1946, he founded a church of his own, the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation, later rechristened the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian. The name was telling: in Wesley Swift’s theology, Jesus was not and had never been a Jew. Swift was well versed in the various occultisms of British Israelism – he organized a “Pyramid Club” at the Angelus Temple – but his real strength was scriptural exegesis. In long, spellbinding sermons, he interpreted the unfolding present through the lens of Biblical prophecy, placing current events – the Kennedy assassination, the forced integration of the University of Mississippi, even the invention of the polio vaccine – in the context of the epic struggle of Christ and Anti-Christ, a battle now careering toward a final confrontation on the fields of Armageddon. At the heart of this theology, which came to be known as “Christian Identity,” was the figure of the eternally cursed Jew. Swift trafficked in all the usual antiSemitic tropes – Jews as imposters and apostates, Christ killers and communists – but he added one distinctive, utterly toxic element of his own: in his reading of Genesis, the serpent’s “seduction” of Eve in the Garden was not metaphorical but literal. The fruit of that diabolical coupling was Cain, history’s first murderer and also the original Jew. Expelled to the Land of Nod, East of Eden, Cain had further defiled himself by interbreeding with Edomites and other pre-Adamic “beasts of the field.” There were thus “dual seedlines” to humanity: the pure Adamic line, carried forward by Seth and embodied by the Anglo-Saxon (alternately “Aryan” or simply “White”) race; and the line of Cain, spawn of Satan, embodied by the mongrel Jew. Everything that followed – the rise of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Christ, the corruption of Catholicism, the Russian Revolution, right up to the present assault on the American Constitutional order by Satanic Bolsheviks and their dark minions – was part of the same epic, ineluctably racial story. Thus rendered, Swift’s theology seems almost risible, but it clearly struck a chord with many Americans, including not just the tens of thousands who tuned in to his daily radio broadcasts but also the countless others who heard his sermons on audio tapes, which circulated nationally through a well-organized distribution network. The appeal is not hard to fathom. To borrow a phrase from Arthur Lovejoy, the great historian of ideas, Christian Identity exemplified “the metaphysics of the esoteric,” promising adherents access to the specialized knowledge they needed to see the true nature of things, to ascend to “a plane of insight” unavailable to those constrained by conventional wisdom and “ordinary logic.” In the case of 1960s Mississippi, that knowledge substantiated white supremacist fears about the Civil Rights movement, confirming that there were indeed dark, Satanic forces seeking to dispossess “true” Americans of their birthright. All of which brings us back to Edgar Ray Killen. When Killen cast the murdered civil rights workers as members of the same “demonic cult” that had “tortured and crucified the Savior of the World” and then “spent over 2,000 years boasting of it”; when he portrayed the Civil Rights movement as a conspiracy to transform proud Anglo-Saxons into a degenerate race of “bastard half-breeds” ripe for conquest; when he described those who failed to recognize the conspiracy as “sheep led by the ring in their nose … by a Jew communist media”; when he declared himself a “warrior” and “soldier” for Christ, prepared not only to die but also to kill in His name; when he prophesied the coming battle of Armageddon, in which he himself would “lead a legion of Christ’s soldiers” against Satan and his Jewish minions: when he made these and other pronouncements, he was not just raving but retailing ideas and beliefs that had shaped his ministry from its earliest days. Recognizing this context does not make those ideas and beliefs any less unsettling, but it does perhaps makes them seem less singular and strange. It also helps to explain why Killen never really responded when biographer Larry Ellis pressed him to reconcile his calling as a Christian minister with his murderous rage against Jews and Communists. In his world, such sentiments were not contradictory at all but simply two sides of the same theological coin. ****** If “Preacher” was one of the labels that attached to Edgar Ray Killen, “Klansmen” was the other. Though he routinely denied any connection to the Klan, every one of the informants assembled by the FBI in the course of its investigation of the Neshoba murders confirmed his membership. Indeed, they identified him as a kleagle, or chapter organizer. It was Killen, they said, who recruited them; collected their $10 initiation fees, or “klectokens”; supplied them with their hoods and robes, which also cost $10; and administered the solemn Klan oath. We do not know when Killen was introduced to the Klan, but it is likely that he learned of it in childhood. The year of his birth, 1925, coincided with the highwater mark of the socalled “Second Klan.” Founded by a defrocked Methodist minister named William Simmons, the new organization was vastly larger than the eponymous Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, attracting an estimated four million members. Given the U.S. population at the time, as well as the membership requirements – it was open only to native-born, adult white males who belonged to Protestant churches – about one in six eligible Americans belonged to the Klan at its height. Membership declined precipitously thereafter, as the organization was engulfed in factionalism and financial disputes, as well as a sordid sex scandal involving a prominent national leader. In 1944, the Klan, facing dwindling interest and a lien for back taxes, formally dissolved itself. But chapters survived in many corners of the country, and so did the stew of grievances, fears, and forebodings that had fueled the movement’s meteoric rise. As historian Leonard Moore has observed, “The main forces that drove the Klan – the desire to uphold white Protestant cultural hegemony and an inflamed populist opposition to the growing power of political, economic, and cultural elites – have played a fundamental part in shaping conservative and right-wing movements from that time until the present.” As we have already seen, the Second Klan found fertile ground in Neshoba County, especially among rural Baptists, who approved not only its anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism, but also its commitments to Prohibition and Bible reading in public schools. Whether the Klan reached into the House community or into the Killen household specifically is difficult to say, but there is suggestive evidence. “We grew up faster in lots of ways back then,” Killen said in one of his jailhouse conversations with biographer Ellis. “I was raised in meetings of our community leaders and they shaped me.” It is hard to imagine what meetings he was referring to if not those of the Klan. In another conversation, he alluded to procedures for initiating klansmen “back in my day, the forties and fifties,” but Ellis did not pursue the point. The first direct evidence we have of Killen’s involvement in violent white supremacy comes from the late 1950s, when he joined the campaign against a neighbor, the Rev. Horace Germany, an ordained minister of the Church of God. The conflict began in 1956, when Germany, returning to Mississippi from seminary in Indiana, announced plans to convert his family’s dairy farm, four hundred acres on the border of Newton and Neshoba counties, into a theological college for training Black ministers. Germany obviously held heterodox racial views for a white Mississippian, but he also understood local sensitivities, particularly in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Hoping to pre-empt opposition, he met with the members of the local White Citizens Council, assuring them that he did not support the N.A.A.C.P. and that the planned college would remain racially segregated. But such assurances cut little ice in the fevered circumstances of the time. What followed was a four-year campaign to prevent the school from opening – an effort bearing all the earmarks of later Klan operations, with polite warnings quickly giving way to violent threats, legal harassment, boycott, and arson. The campaign culminated in August, 1960, when four carloads of armed men, some twenty men in all, ambushed the minister and administered a slow, savage beating. Whether Killen was among the assailants is uncertain, but he chaired the public meeting preceding the attack, at which more than a thousand local citizens (including several members of Germany’s own family) unanimously adopted a resolution demanding that he abandon his plan or face the consequences. Killen’s elevation to the status of “Honorary Colonel of Mississippi” came a few months later. As for Germany, he left the state after his release from the hospital. The college eventually opened in Texas. The campaign against Horace Germany was an early squall in a fast gathering storm. As the Civil Rights movement surged, a bevy of Klans arose to stop it – at least eighteen distinct organizations, according to a Congressional investigation, each with multiple klaverns and offshoots. Mississippi alone was home to three different groups. The “Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” the first to arrive, were led by the Rev. Roy Davis, an itinerant Pentecostalist preacher (and thrice-convicted grifter), who had briefly served as one of William Simmons’s lieutenants in the 1920s – hence the term “Original.” The group’s stronghold was the river counties of Louisiana, but it also spread rapidly in southwest Mississippi, including Natchez, where it boasted four separate klaverns, and McComb, where members battled the newly arrived Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Over their short existence, the Original Knights were responsible for scores of assaults, bombings, and arson attacks, as well as at least half a dozen murders. Yet even as the Originals grew, they began to splinter. As so often in Klan history, the schisms were fueled by financial disputes, but they also reflected the frustration of members, many of whom favored an even more aggressive response to the Civil Rights threat. Some of the dissidents, including members of the McComb chapter, found their way into Robert Shelton’s United Klans of America, an Alabama-based organization best known for its role in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The lion’s share, however, enlisted in a new organization, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, under the leadership of a Laurel businessman named Sam Bowers. The most secretive of the various Klans and far and away the most violent, the White Knights were organized over the winter of 1963-64 and formally chartered in February. They announced their existence publicly two months later, when they simultaneously burned crosses in 64 of Mississippi’s 82 counties. The following day, copies of a printed flier appeared across the state, posted on store windows, telephone poles, and bulletin boards, offering “Twenty Reasons WHY you should, if qualified, join, aid and support the White Knights of the KU KLUX KLAN of Mississippi.” The appeal did not fall on deaf ears. By the beginning of Freedom Summer in June, the new organization boasted an estimated 6,000 members, Edgar Ray Killen among them. ****** Samuel Holloway Bowers, Jr., the White Knights founder, was an even more secretive figure than Killen. Through half a dozen criminal trials, countless FBI investigations, and one contentious appearance before the House Un-American Committee, Bowers denied all knowledge of the Ku Klux Klan, when he deigned to answer questions at all. Interview requests from “the Pagan media and Academic Brothel” he rejected with contempt. Unlike Killen, Bowers continued to hold his tongue in prison, including not only the six years he served in federal custody for his role in the Neshoba conspiracy, but also the eight years he spent in state prison, from 1998 until his death in 2006, following his belated conviction for the murder of Vernon Dahmer, a Black voting rights activist whose house was firebombed by White Knights in 1966. But he did open up on a few occasions, most notably in a long, rambling “oral history” recorded by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in the early 1980s – an interview sealed, at Bowers’s insistence, until after his death. That account, together with the testimony of various Klan informants and his own voluminous writing, enable us to piece together a portrait of the man who became Killen’s High Priest. Bowers was cut from a very different cloth from Killen, and indeed from virtually everyone in the Klan that he led. Born in New Orleans in 1924 and raised mostly in Jackson, he was educated, urbane, and unapologetically elitist. “The typical Mississippi red-neck doesn’t have sense enough to know what he is doing,” he once declared. “I have to use him for my own cause and direct every action to fit my plan.” Though estranged from his father, who disowned him in his teens, Bowers styled himself an “aristocrat,” proudly tracing his Old South pedigree back through his paternal grandfather, Eaton, who served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, and great-grandfather, Eaton, Sr., a lawyer and Confederate cavalry officer. (In a bizarre 1965 letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Bowers traced the line still further, presenting himself as the lineal descendant of the first president of the Virginia House of Burgesses.) A Navy veteran – he served in the Pacific during World War II – he attended college under the GI Bill, studying engineering at Tulane University and later at the University of Southern California, though he left without completing a degree. He returned to Mississippi in late 1947, settling in Laurel, in Jones County, where he took over a failing pinball and vending machine company, which he renamed Sambo Amusements. As the foregoing suggests, Bowers was an unlikely figure to lead Mississippi’s most murderous Klan. In his own words, he was “an outlander,” who did not “blend in too well,” and certainly “never socialized,” with the coarse, “low class” folk who constituted the White Knights rank and file, not to mention the customer base of his business. He dressed in well-cut suits and spoke with a honeyed, patrician accent. He disdained alcohol and tobacco and abhorred profanity. (Klansmen caught cursing were subject to fines by klavern chaplains, or “Kludds.”) A “voracious reader,” Bowers was well versed in political philosophy, theology, and history, as well as in more esoteric subjects, including racial theory, para-psychology, guerilla warfare, and the novels of Thomas Dixon, whose “historical romances” of the Reconstruction-era Klan were literally required reading for Klan initiates. Klansmen, Bowers declared in the solemn initiation liturgy he drafted, were not simply rebels or rabble rousers, but “Christian Militants,” defending an ‘organic” social order whose roots “stretch back through Reconstruction, the American Revolution, and the Days of Christian Chivalry in the Middle Ages when Knighthood was in flower.” Bowers also stood out for his unconventional domestic situation. A lifelong bachelor, he was (as one Klan officer turned FBI informant euphemistically put it) “not a lady’s man by habit.” He lived instead with his business partner, a retired Army officer named Robert Larson, who he met in California and with whom he shared a small, cluttered bungalow at the back of Sambo Amusements. Whether their relationship was an intimate one is impossible to know, but it certainly provoked comment from klansmen, who tended to be not only highly conservative on domestic matters but also violently homophobic. (The informant quoted above speculated that it was the teenage Bowers’s budding homosexuality that prompted his father to disown him.) The relationship also attracted the attention of FBI agents, who raised it in interviews with klansmen in hopes of sowing dissension in the ranks. Bowers himself never discussed the matter, but he did obliquely acknowledge the question in his MDAH oral history, drawing a connection between his contempt for “social and cultural norms” and his visionary political leadership. “These things do not appear to me in the same light that they appear to an honest and decent member of society,” he explained. “I grew up with some of the nicest girls in Jackson, Mississippi. I had a fairly decent name in that society. I could have married one of those girls; I could have gotten a fairly decent job there in Jackson, Mississippi; I could have reared a decent family and kept my mouth shut and things of this kind and done an honest day’s work and been a good husband and all that kind, but I just wasn’t fitted for that kind of thing.” However unlikely his pedigree, Bowers was a compelling, charismatic leader, and he commanded the loyalty of rank-and-file klansmen. As one of the agents investigating him put it, “He can get these people to do damn near anything.” “Anything,” in this context, included more than two hundred violent assaults, seventy church burnings and bombings, and at least seven murders, including the three in Neshoba County. By his own account, Bowers was not a committed white supremacist when he returned to Mississippi from California. “I came back with that loose and liberal west coast attitude,” he recalled, a belief that Black people, if not exactly equal to Whites, were at least entitled to fair treatment. He credited his transformation to the tutelage of a local businessman named Walter Johnson, an otherwise obscure figure reputed to have played a leading role in Laurel’s last recorded lynching, the 1942 murder of a Black sharecropper named Howard Wash. Johnson “more or less took me under his wing … and made sure that I had the right attitude as far as the racial question was concerned,” he recalled. “He counseled me that any good white Southerner had to make sure that, even though he didn’t go out his way to mistreat these blacks and so forth, but if they got out of line they had to be put down.” At the same time, Bowers was clearly influenced by the events swirling around him in the 1950s, as white Mississippians girded themselves for renewed combat with federal authorities. He watched the long legal battle over the fate of Willie McGee, a Black man from Laurel whose 1951 execution on a spurious rape charge became a national cause celebre; and he had a front row seat for the struggle at Laurel’s massive Masonite factory, right across the street from Sambo Amusements, where white workers violently resisted enforcement of federal regulations on racial equality in the workplace. “By this time I am beginning to really understand what Mississippi was in a way that I never did really get in Jackson,” Bowers explained. “[M]y tender feelings for the disadvantaged second class race [were] gradually being overcome by the dedication of these simple, disadvantaged low economic people who were standing up on their hind legs and defying the federal government. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is what the Confederacy was really all about.’” As Bowers’s racial thinking changed, so did his attitude toward the Klan. Like his patrician grandfather, he was initially “contemptuous” of the group, dismissing the robes and hoods and torchlight parades as “amusing bits of foolishness.” But as the struggle over Civil Rights intensified, he began to see the organization in a new light. Rather than “just clowning around in a bunch of white sheets,” Klansmen were expressing a “genuine instinct” of race, defending a precious way of life against a reckless, rapacious federal bureaucracy. When exactly Bowers joined the Original Klan is unclear, but he doubtless did. And he clearly led the schism that split the Originals in late 1963, which culminated in the founding of the White Knights and his election as Imperial Wizard in February, 1964. ****** If Bowers’s conversion to violent white supremacy was gradual, his conversion to prophetic Fundamentalism was swift and galvanic. Raised in a mainstream Methodist household, he evinced little interest in religion growing up, regarding it as just one more set of rules to be ignored. “I was a complete heathen, and anti-clerical as I could be,” he confessed. But at some point in the mid-1950s he experienced a spiritual crisis, prompted in part by an embarrassing arrest, reportedly for illegal possession of liquor. Records of the case do not survive and Bowers never discussed it, but he did describe the fallout in an a conversation decades later with Charles Marsh, a professor of theology who was himself a native of Laurel. “I was in despair for all sorts of reasons,” he recalled. “I felt totally crushed by life, and wanted to destroy everything, including myself.” Intent on suicide, he collected a gun and set off on a lonely blacktop road, only to experience a moment of “overwhelming grace.” The experience was not exactly Paul on the road to Damascus; Bowers did not fall to the ground or go blind. The Lord “used his blackjack on Paul a lot more vigorously than he did on Sam,” he quipped. But he felt the presence of the living God, and heard a voice say, “Don’t be afraid; everything will be alright.” What Bowers had experienced, in terms of Protestant theology, was “sanctification,” an infusion of “unmerited grace,” in which the sinner is inwardly transformed by God and set aside – “consecrated” -- for a special purpose. In the months that followed, he endeavored to uncover what that purpose was. He began, in good Protestant fashion, with the Bible, purchasing a copy of the King James Version at Laurel’s Baptist Book House. From the first page, he was transfixed, awed by both the “majesty of language” and the manifest truth of the message, “the empirical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” (Initiates in the White Knights would later be required not only to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible, but also to acknowledge the King James Version as the authoritative “Writ for Americans.”) Though he remained unchurched for another decade, Bowers counted himself a Christian ever after. He also became “a serious student of the Bible,” a vocation that continued during his years in federal prison, where he earned a degree in Theology. The Bible, however, was not the only text that Bowers was reading. As he poured himself into Scripture, he also immersed himself in the racist, radically anti-Semitic currents coursing through right-wing Protestantism at the time. What exactly he read is difficult to say; he left no syllabus, and his personal library, reputedly full of rare manuscripts and first editions, does not survive. But it is possible to draw some inferences. Bowers’s diatribes against “the machinations of the International Banking Cartel,” for example, were straight from the Protocols, while the intricate “Crystallized Logos of Western Civilization” that he explained to Charles Marsh – a sacred genealogy stretching from the Resurrection through the Reformation and birth of common law to the U.S. Constitution – bore the unmistakable stamp of British Israelism. At the same time, his habitual designation of Jesus as “the Galilean” suggests a debt to the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlein, an Anglo-German philosopher and racial theorist who traced Christ’s descent to an ancient Aryan race that purportedly colonized northern Galilee in Mosaic times. Strictly speaking, Chamberlein’s theory (which was embraced by Hitler and the Nazis) was inconsistent with British Israelism, which portrayed Aryans as migrating out of rather than into the Holy Land, but the upshot was the same: Jesus was no Jew. Bowers’s most important theological influence, however, was Wesley Swift, whose tape-recorded sermons he made required listening for members of the White Knights. Whether Bowers ever met Swift in person is unknown, but some in his circle clearly did, including Tommy Tarrants, who would later, under Bowers’s direction, launch a bombing campaign against Jewish homes and synagogues in Meridian and Jackson. The imprint of Swift’s Christian Identity theology was everywhere in Bowers’s writing, from the original “Twenty Reasons Why You Should Join the White Knights” recruiting flier (which explicitly excluded “Turks, Mongols [and] Tartars” from Klan membership, alongside the more familiar Catholics, Jews, and Negroes), to his characterization of international Jewry as “the Synagogue of Satan,” a favorite phrase of Swift’s, from the Book of Revelation. One can also see the Swiftian stamp in the Biblical texts to which he made recurrent reference: not only Revelation but also the Gospel of Matthew, in which Christ drives the money changers from the Temple; the Epistles of John, the only place in the Bible in which the term “Anti-Christ” actually appears; and, most ominously, the First Book of Kings, which tells the story of Elijah slaughtering the “Prophets of Baal” at Kishon Brook. Understanding the sources of Bowers’s theology casts a different light on the “executive lectures” and “encyclicals” that poured from his pen in the Spring of 1964. Alternately professorial and apocalyptic, the texts were intended not simply to rally his troops in advance of the summer “invasion,” but to alert them to the true nature of the enemy and the stakes of the battle. Probably the best example is an essay published in April in the inaugural edition of The Wasp, official organ of the White Knights, in which Bowers peeled back the layers of the Civil Rights movement to reveal its Bolshevik, Jewish, and ultimately Satanic sources. Because Christ’s coming was prophesied in “the Ancient Jewish religion,” he began, all “true, sincere Jews” had accepted him and become Christians. Those who remained were not Jews at all but “frauds” and “heretics.” “The people who compose this brotherhood of sin,” he continued, were “a curious admixture of East and West … derived largely from the savage Mongol and Tartar masses," from whom sprung “Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and most of the other Bolshevik leaders” as well as “most of those who control the large banking and brokerage firms in the United States.” Having secured control of the federal government, these “mongrelized” beasts had now set their sights on Mississippi, mouthing pious words about Civil Rights even as they conspired with the Anti-Christ to destroy Western Civilization. And that was something that the “Christian Soldiers” of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan would never allow. We do not know how or when Bowers first encountered Killen – most likely in the Original Knights – but he knew him well enough by early 1964 to appoint him a kleagle in the newly established White Knights. At first glance, it is difficult to imagine two more different people, one the urbane intellectual and the other a Bible-thumping backwoods preacher. But they shared many attributes. Both were committed white supremacists and zealous Protestants, who imagined themselves personally “called” by God to serve his will. Supremely self-assured, both had strong propensities for conspiratorial thinking, exulting in their ability to discern patterns and processes invisible to ordinary people. Last but not least, both had an extraordinarily high tolerance for violence, which they saw as necessary and righteous. As Bowers put it to Charles Marsh, “Sins can be forgiven; heretics must be eliminated.” ****** Killen proved a very effective kleagle. By late March, scarcely a month after the Knights’ founding, he had organized a klavern in Neshoba County, exceeding the forty-member threshold necessary to secure a charter. The group marked the occasion by burning a dozen crosses across the county on April 4, three weeks before the state-wide cross burning event, by which time the Lauderdale chapter had also secured a charter. Given the secret nature of the organization, we cannot know precisely how many klansmen Killen inducted, but evidence gathered by the FBI suggests that the Neshoba klavern boasted at least 80 members at its peak in the summer of 1964, while the lodge in the more populous Lauderdale County numbered at least 160. (There is evidence that Killen also organized klaverns in Kemper and Newton counties, but little is known of them.) According to Article Six of the Klan “Konstitution” that Bowers drafted, kleagles pocketed half of initiates’ $10 Klectokens, giving Killen a strong financial incentive to recruit new members. But he was motivated by more than money. In his “Executive Lecture #1,” published just days after the White Knights founding, Bowers offered specific instructions on the kinds of people kleagles should approach. He recommended recruiting Masons, for example, on the grounds that they had the habit of secrecy and would not become informers. Killen, who was himself a high ranking Shriner, clearly took the advice to heart. While no precise accounting is possible, the FBI’s roster of suspected klansmen in Neshoba and Lauderdale counties contained many known Masons, including at least four directly involved in the Neshoba murders. Bowers also recommended targeting local law enforcement officers, freeing klansmen to do their work without fear of arrest or punishment. Killen again complied. Though they denied the fact, Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price both joined the White Knights, as did former Sheriffs George Herrington and Hop Barnett, Constable Clayton Livingstone, and at least three, probably four, of the city of Philadelphia’s six patrolmen. The much larger Meridian Police Department boasted at least a dozen klansmen, as well as many other officers – half the force, according to FBI estimates – who were Klan sympathizers. Killen seems to have had less success attracting “prominent” and “influential” people, whose presence Bowers hoped would legitimize the Klan and insulate it from public criticism. He did recruit a few such individuals, including several small business owners, the chief administrator of the Neshoba County Hospital, the owner of a Meridian radio station, three lawyers (one of whom, Clayton Lewis, was a former mayor of Philadelphia), and at least one county supervisor. (Supervisors were particularly valuable to the Klan, since under Mississippi law it was they who assembled jury pools.) The lion’s share of members, however, came from more marginal backgrounds, working as service station attendants, truck drivers, traveling salesmen, auto mechanics, appliance repairmen, factory workers, and so forth. Several were bootleggers. In terms of education, the average member (based on suspect profiles developed by the FBI) appears to have had between ten and eleven years of schooling, a figure more or less consistent with the statewide average for adult white males at the time. (Mississippi was the last state to make childhood education compulsory, enacting a law only in 1982.) Only two or three held college degrees, though at least six others had attended junior college. Killen’s work as a kleagle was clearly aided by his identity as a minister. In the years following his ordination in 1950, he had preached in in literally dozens of area churches, giving him an unrivaled network for identifying prospective klansmen. “You got to remember I was a preacher, just like I am now,” he told Larry Ellis in one of their jailhouse conversations. “I was the one to carry the torch from town to town … I found the true Caucasian, Christian men who could protect our communities.” Again, no precise accounting is possible, but at least two of his initiates were ordained ministers, while several others were deacons or lay preachers. At least four worshipped at Pine Grove Baptist, Killen’s home church, including two of the men present at the killing of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. Perhaps the best example of the “true Caucasian, Christian men” recruited by Killen was Bernard Akin, who owned the Meridian trailer sales lot where the killers rallied on the night of the murders and who also appears to have been the financial sponsor behind Killen’s Sunday morning radio program. A vehement racist, Akin greeted the FBI agents who came to interview him by flourishing a massive Bible, telling them that the only laws he considered binding were those contained in it and in “the Constitution of the United States as originally written.” While the Neshoba Klan proved extremely tight-lipped, the FBI developed several informants in Lauderdale County, enabling us to reconstruct something of Killen’s work as a kleagle. His first Lauderdale recruit – and also the first to be turned by the FBI – was his cousin and former schoolmate Wallace Miller, a sergeant in the Meridian police. According to Miller’s testimony at the 1967 federal trial, Killen approached him at the station in March and “told me there was a strong organization and asked me if I was interested in joining to help keep the colored people from integrating our schools and I told him I was definitely interested.” The conversation continued later that night in Miller’s dining room, where Killen revealed that the organization in question was the Klan. When Miller affirmed his interest, Killen initiated him on the spot. Miller, in turn, introduced Killen to his friends Frank Herndon and James Jordan, a drive-in manager and a service station attendant, who in turn introduced him to Jimmy Arledge, who drove a laundry truck, and Pete Harris, a deliveryman for a local bakery. All four men were later prosecuted for their role in the Neshoba murders. Things mushroomed from there, as new initiates nominated their friends and neighbors. By mid-April, the Lauderdale klavern had outgrown its original meeting place, a trailer behind a local service station, and moved to a large upstairs room at Price’s Salvage, a second-hand store on the edge of the Meridian Naval Air Station. By April 22, the roll had grown to 57, sufficient to secure a charter. Members proposed celebrating the occasion by “whipping a Negro,” but Killen suggested that they instead join the state-wide cross-burning scheduled for two nights later. They did, igniting four crosses in Meridian and several others in the countryside. The Meridian Star carried a photograph of the charred remains of one of them. A uniformed Wallace Miller stood alongside, his right hand casually hitched in his gun belt, three fingers extended in the Klan salute. Among the documents obtained by the FBI in its investigation was the program for the White Knights initiation ceremony. Scripted by Bowers, the candlelit ceremony began with a long exordium, read by the hooded kleagle, followed by a series of questions and answers, clearly modelled on the Christian rite of baptism. It concluded with the solemn Klan oath, sixtyfour distinct clauses, read by the kleagle and repeated back by initiates. Oath completed, the now “naturalized” klansmen were anointed with “the sacred oil of the ancients,” sealing their “Citizenship in the Empire of Chivalry, Honor, Industry and Love.” It was surely a memorable experience, but what informants recalled when interviewed by the FBI was less the liturgy than the lecture that the now unhooded Killen delivered at the end of the ceremony. “He explained that it was an organization of action, no Boy Scout group, that we were here to do business,” the Rev. Delmar Dennis, member #32 in the Lauderdale klavern, testified at the 1967 trial. “He said there would be things that the Klan would need to do and would do and among these would be burning crosses, people would need to be beaten, and occasionally there would have to be an elimination.” What Dennis and his fellow initiates did not yet know was that the first target for elimination had already been chosen. ****** It is easy, in retrospect, to understand why members of the White Knights – and Bowers and Killen, in particular – fastened on the figure of Mickey Schwerner. A Jewish New Yorker with an Ivy League degree; a passionate integrationist; a socialist and self-described atheist: Schwerner was all their apocalyptic prophecies brought to life. He even sported a “beatnik” beard, which by 1964 had become white Mississippians’ universal symbol for the alien horde descending on the state from the North. Though newly arrived in Mississippi, he had already sown chaos, gulling credulous Black people with fantastical notions of freedom and equality, goading them into unprecedented acts of defiance. “Goatee is like the queen bee in the beehive,” Bowers declared in the weeks before the murders, using the nickname the Klan had bestowed on Schwerner. “You eliminate the queen bee and all the workers go away.” Schwerner arrived in Mississippi in January, 1964, accompanied by his wife and fellow activist Rita. They settled in Meridian, where Mickey assumed leadership of the local project of the Congress of Federated Organizations, an umbrella organization of Civil Rights groups working in the state. Though not the first white COFO activists in Mississippi, they were the first posted outside Jackson, and Mickey was the first to hold the rank of project director. They set up shop in an old doctor’s office, five dingy rooms upstairs from a Black-owned pharmacy, which they quickly transformed into a thriving community center, complete with voter registration classes, a game room for teens, and a 10,000 volume lending library, stocked with books donated by northern supporters. Schwerner built the shelves himself, with the help of a local volunteer, twenty-year-old James Chaney. Among COFO members, Meridian had a reputation as a relatively safe place, and so initially it seemed to be. With the state already in a lather about the impending summer “invasion,” the Schwerners were naturally conspicuous, and they endured their share of harassment: shut offs of water and power; overcharging at the grocery store; an interminable wait to get a telephone. But they were not arrested or assaulted, and they moved freely within the city. They introduced themselves to church leaders, white and Black, and canvassed door to door for prospective voting registrants. They posted fliers advertising the community center in neighborhood stores and cafes. When the principal at a Black high school denied them access to school grounds, they bought tickets for a Friday night basketball game and handed out fliers at halftime. Not all the students accepted the invitation, but scores did, becoming the first foot soldiers of a growing local movement. Whatever tolerance the Schwerners enjoyed on arrival soon dissipated, as authorities grasped the scope of their ambition. In early March, they attended Sunday service in a local Methodist Church in company with two young Black women. The visit, inspired by COFO “prayins” in Jackson, had been cleared in advance with the church’s pastor, but it provoked a furious response from congregants, who demanded his dismissal. The Meridian Star published a blistering editorial, decrying outsiders intent on upsetting the harmonious relations between Black and white citizens. Meridian police picked up Mickey for the first time a few days later, though they released him after questioning. More ominously, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission opened a dossier on the couple. Circulated to law enforcement offices throughout the state, the dossier contained not only the Schwerners’ descriptions and home address, but also detailed descriptions of the vehicles they drove, including the blue Ford station wagon in which Mickey and his companions were traveling on the day they were murdered. Tensions escalated further in April, following the launch of a “selective buying” campaign, the Meridian movement’s first foray into large-scale direct action. Modelled on a COFO protest in nearby Canton, the boycott was designed to compel white merchants, who traditionally employed African Americans only for custodial and backroom jobs, to hire Black clerks and cashiers. The larger goal was to persuade members of the Black community, many of whom remained wary of political involvement, of their collective capacity to make change. Recognizing the stakes, Schwerner and his colleagues carefully prepared the ground. They chose the date, a Saturday, traditional shopping day for Black Mississippians, and identified the initial target, a small variety store whose owner declined their invitation to hire a Black cashier, despite his almost complete reliance on Black customers. They selected and trained the picketers, mostly teenagers, outfitting them with matching “Freedom Now” tee shirts. For two straight weeks, they convened nightly mass meetings in a local church, where community members learned about the theory and practice of non-violence and sang freedom songs to build morale. The protest, which began on April 25, went off without a hitch. Police, caught flat footed, arrested Schwerner the next day – the charge was blocking a crosswalk – but the campaign continued, eventually spreading to all the major downtown department stores. Authorities responded more forcefully, arresting dozens of young people (including James Chaney’s eleven-year-old brother, Ben), but the protesters carried on. By fateful coincidence, the Meridian campaign unfolded at precisely the time that Edgar Ray Killen was organizing the local chapter of the White Knights. Indeed, the synchrony between the two movements was almost uncanny. At the very moment that Black Meridianites gathered in historic First Union Baptist Church to sing freedom songs and discuss non-violence, klansmen at Price’s Salvage, just two miles away, recited their oaths and talked murder. The variety store boycott commenced the same week that the Meridian klavern secured its charter, just one day after the statewide cross-burnings, just a few hours after the entire state was blanketed with the White Knights’ “Twenty Reasons” recruiting flier. Schwerner doubtless heard about the crosses and fliers, but he had no way of knowing precisely who was responsible. Klansmen, on the other hand, knew exactly who to blame for what was happening on the streets of Meridian. ****** How the decision to “eliminate” Schwerner came to pass is unknown, but the process was clearly driven by Killen and Bowers. According to the regulations that Bowers himself had drafted, all Klan “projects” required discussion and formal approval of the local klavern; klansmen, after all, were not hooligans but disciplined Christian soldiers. In operations involving a “Number Three” or a “Number Four” – a “burning” or “elimination” – the procedures were even more elaborate, with the sponsoring klavern voting a resolution, which was then carried by the “Exalted Cyclops” – the lodge president – to Bowers, who as Imperial Wizard had sole authority to deny or approve the motion. Bowers even prescribed the manner in which sentences should be enacted. “If it is necessary to eliminate someone,” he wrote, hearkening again to the story of Elijah and the Prophets of Baal, “it should be done with no malice, in complete silence, and in the manner of a Christian act.” In the case of Schwerner, few of the formalities seems to have been followed. Different informants offered slightly different chronologies, but it is clear that by late April Lauderdale klansmen were united in their desire to punish “Goatee,” who they saw as the source of all the trouble in Meridian. But when they proposed a “whipping” – a Number Two -- they were told by Killen that “it would not be necessary,” since his elimination “had already been approved by the State Officers of the Klan and had been made a part of their program and it would be taken care of.” The subject came up at several subsequent meetings as well, with members clamoring for action, one frustrated klansman even demanding to know whether “the Klan was going to sit back and let COFO take over.” But Killen held the line, assuring members that “Schwerner would be taken care of” and warning that “any action against him might possibly interfere with the plan.” The operation, he added, would be undertaken by “another unit” from outside Lauderdale County, in order to throw off investigators. Who precisely Killen had in mind when he referred to “another unit” unclear, but it is possible that he was referring to the Neshoba klavern, his home lodge. By May, Schwerner was also on the radar of the Neshobans, who knew that he and James Chaney had begun holding meetings in the Mt. Zion community. On June 2, members of the Lauderdale and Neshoba klaverns met jointly for the first time, convening in a gymnasium the old Bloomo school, an abandoned rural school a few miles from Longdale. Killen chaired the meeting, and “Goatee” was once again a focus of discussion. The two groups met together again on June 16, the night Mt. Zion Church was burned. In the aftermath of the murders, some claimed that the torching of Mt. Zion Church was a trap, intended to lure Schwerner back to Neshoba County so that he could be captured and killed. According to one klansman, Killen himself was accorded the honor of “strik[ing] the match to the church.” Killen heard the story and he strongly denied them, though in a characteristically backhanded way. “I can assure you that none of my associates or friends that I know of ever made any plans to burn that church, even though [the FBI] spent probably fifty thousand dollars tryin’ to prove that,” he told Patsy Sims in their 1976 interview. “Myself I have always been bitterly opposed to burnin’ a n****r church, for several reasons, and one was, had I burned it, my neighbors would have given ‘em a large brick church back.” Whatever his role in the burning of Mt. Zion, Killen was plainly the ringleader of the murder conspiracy. It was he who conveyed the elimination order from Bowers, who selected the burial site (a pond dam under construction on a member’s farm), and who chose the murder site, an isolated stretch on Rock Cut Road, just a quarter mile from his own house. He even recruited a bulldozer operator to bury the bodies. When he learned that Schwerner and his companions were in custody in the Neshoba County jail, he leapt into action. Whatever specific differences existed in the accounts of informants, all placed Killen at the heart of the events on June 21, and this was also the story told that prosecutors told at the 1967 federal trial, a fact that made the jury’s failure to convict him galling. (Eleven jurors voted for conviction, but Killen was spared by a single holdout, a woman, who refused to believe that a “man of God” was capable of the actions prosecutors described.) Bowers, who was found guilty, took solace from the outcome. “I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man [when] everybody – including the trial judge and prosecutors and everybody else know that that happened,” he said in his posthumously released oral history. “This hurts the imperial authority when they have to stoop to conquer.” Whether Bowers was aware of the murders as they unfolded is unknown, but it seems unlikely; the conspirators avoided the telephone on June 21 and there was no time to drive to Laurel. But he had clearly endorsed the elimination, and in the aftermath of the event he expressed nothing but satisfaction. “[E]verything was well done, it was a job to be proud of,” he told one klansman. Indeed, it was a historic event, he told another, being “the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew.” There is much to ponder in that last statement, but consider for now the singular noun at the end. It represents what may be the most dispiriting answer of all to the question that haunted Fanny Lee Chaney and Carolyn Goodman in their final days. Why did you kill my son? For no particular reason at all. The killers were at best dimly aware of James Chaney, and they knew nothing at all about Andrew Goodman, who had arrived in Mississippi only a day before. But they were in company of Mickey Schwerner, and that was enough to seal their fate. ****** Amidst all the Klan documents and FBI informant reports, one element is conspicuously absent: the idea that the real purpose of the 1964 Summer Project was to recruit Black men to rape and impregnate white women. Klansmen certainly talked about the perils of “mongrelization,” which was also a central tenet of Wesley Swift’s apocalyptic Christian Identity theology. And the figure of the ravening Black rapist was a time-honored trope in southern white supremacy. But the specific idea of a Civil Rights rape conspiracy appears to have been Edgar Ray Killen’s own invention. And he gave every appearance of believing it. The story first surfaces in the documentary record in late 1967, on the opening day of the federal trial in Meridian, during cross-examination of a prosecution witness, a Black minister who had worked with COFO in Meridian. In an obvious play to the prejudices of the all-white jury, the defense attorney honed in on the figure of Mickey Schwerner. Was he an atheist? Had he spent time in Cuba? Did he leave his wife unsupervised in the company of Black men? He then read a question from a note passed to him by a defendant: Had Schwerner endeavored “to get young negro males to sign statements that they would rape one white woman a week during the hot summer of 1964 here in Mississippi?” The suggestion provoked an immediate objection from the prosecution, prompting the presiding judge, Harold Cox, to demand to know the basis of the question. When told it came from “Brother Killen,” the judge read the riot act. “I’m not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial and everybody might as well get that through their heads including every one of these defendants rights now,” he thundered. For most observers in the courtroom, the exchange marked the turning point of the trial. A former college roommate of Senator James Eastland, Harold Cox was (in the words of a fellow federal judge) “the most openly racist judge ever to sit on the federal court bench.” For the better part of three years, he had done everything in his power to shield the accused. He dismissed the indictments multiple times – it ultimately took a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court for the case to proceed – and indulged endless delaying motions and appeals. He even denied prosecutors’ request to exclude an admitted klansman from the jury. But his demeanor changed dramatically after the rape question. As one Neshoba County official ruefully put it, “The judge got mad that first day and stayed mad all the rest of the time.” Killen, however, was unrepentant. To the contrary, he credited himself with getting the allegation on the record. “During the trial, I wrote a note to my lawyer … to bring up the plan by Negroes to rape white women that summer,” he later recalled. “The judge rebuked him for it, but the point got made.” Killen returned to the rape story again and again over the years, insisting on its validity. “[T]hey were recruitin’ them and makin’ ‘em sign a card at these meetin’s they would rape a white woman once a week throughout the long hot summer of nineteen sixty-four,” he told Patsy Ellis in 1976. “I saw some of the cards, I know what I’m talkin’ about.” Sitting in his Parchman cell forty years later, he told biographer Larry Ellis the same story. The murdered civil rights workers “were portrayed by the news media as wanting to organize black people to vote, but their main reason was … to pay n****rs to rape our true young white virgin southern women, putting their mutated and retarded blood with Aryan blood.” He made the same claim repeatedly in his letters to James Stern, his Black cellmate, even adding a leaf to the conspiracy: though initially “hatched” by communists and “demonic Jews,” the rape project had been funded by the federal government, specifically the Department of Justice, in order to foment “racial war” and “pull [the] white race down.” Immune to the lies of the “Jew communist media,” Killen and his brethren had recognized what was happening in Mississippi in 1964 and taken a stand. In the process, they had saved “thousands of white women” from an unspeakable fate and the white race itself from enslavement and extinction. But the enemy endured, the struggle continued, and the final battle drew nigh. This was the “last word” that Killen was determined to get in, the preacher’s final lesson. ****** The wheels of justice often grind slow – especially in Mississippi – but they eventually caught up to Edgar Ray Killen and Sam Bowers, both of whom died in prison. Bowers, who once commanded the loyalty of thousands of violent men, was all but forgotten at the end and his body went unclaimed after his death. Where he ended up is unclear: according to most accounts, he was interred in the potter’s field at Parchman, but there are also reports of an anonymous relative eventually coming forward to collect the remains. (Prison officials are unable, or unwilling, to clarify the matter.) Killen was spared that indignity – he was laid to rest at Pine Grove Baptist Church – but his predictions of a national outpouring of grief following his death or of his birthday becoming a national holiday have not come to pass. In Neshoba County, his passing was practically celebrated, a symbolic turning of the page on a dark chapter of past. “Edgar Ray’s death is a book end for our community, the end of an era in which for a season we were ravaged and stained by evil,” the Neshoba Democrat opined. “What was intended for evil, this community has used for the good so that all may possess a sense of dignity and hope regardless of the color of their skin.” “What the American public always wants,” William Dean Howells famously observed, “is a tragedy with a happy ending.” The Neshoba murders easily lend themselves to the form. Though dealt a grievous blow, the Civil Rights movement took new inspiration from the murdered men’s sacrifice. Freedom Summer unfolded as planned. On July 2, 1964 just ten days after the trio’s disappearance, President Lyndon Johnson signed the epochal Civil Rights Act. A year later, he signed the Voting Rights Act, securing the sacred right that the three men had died to defend. Today, nearly sixty years later, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman stand proudly in the pantheon of American freedom, while their killers molder in ignominy. It is a pretty story to tell. Yet exploring the mind of Edgar Ray Killen – and doing so in the context of our own turbulent political moment – what stands out is less the remoteness than the contemporaneity of his thought. To be sure, much has changed – everything has changed – in the years since 1964, in Mississippi and in the nation as a whole. But Killen would find a great deal of congenial company in American politics today – more perhaps than Schwerner, Chaney, or Goodman. Even by the standards of his time, Killen was a violent, right-wing extremist, and those are the precincts in which his contemporary analogues are most easily found. Like its Civil Rights-era predecessor, today’s so-called “Alt-Right” is less a single movement than an ecosystem, with distinct ecological niches inhabited by a diverse array of specific organizations. Often centered on charismatic individual leaders, these various groups are bound together by certain common ideas, as well as by the power of modern social media, which serve much the same function as the radio broadcasts, tape recorded sermons, and printed fliers of an earlier era, though on a vastly magnified scale. Most bear the clear imprint of Wesley Swift’s Christian Identity theology, which has been passed down not so much by apostolic succession as by metastasis, through organizations such as Aryan Nations, the Posse Comitatus, and Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord to present-day movements such as Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, Q-Anon, and the virtual communities clustered around websites such as Stormfront and VDARE. While differing on many specific issues, virtually all of these movements and organizations are white nationalist in nature and Christian by profession, and most subscribe to the same apocalyptic theology that Killen embraced. At the core of this belief system is a vision of a vast, demonic conspiracy, orchestrated by Jews and abetted by cosmopolitan elites and a captive federal government, to dispossess, displace, and ultimately destroy the white race. Marchers at the deadly “Unite the White” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 wore all manner of costumes and waved all kinds of flags, but they chanted the same slogan: “Jews will not replace us.” How many Americans subscribe to this violent Christian nationalist tradition and how substantial a danger they pose to American democracy are subjects of perennial debate. Over the years, mainstream pundits and politicians have mostly been content to discount the extreme Christian right, except on those occasions – Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City – when it has literally exploded into view. But the calculus has clearly changed in recent years, with the rise of Donald Trump and the effective remaking of one of the nation’s two major political parties in his image. Whether Trumpism represents the dawn of a new political age or merely a final spasm in a long process of racial and cultural reaction only time can tell. Historians are not paid to prophesy, and we generally make fools of themselves when we try. What we can say with confidence is that ideas, beliefs, and habits of mind that animated Edgar Ray Killen and the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi in 1964 – conspiratorialism; rage against an alien, illegitimate federal government; profound distrust of established sources of information and expertise; a pervasive sense of white grievance and victimization; acceptance of violence as a legitimate, even necessary mode of political expression – are alive and abroad in the land.