Mississippi Burning Killings: Religious Terrorism?

[SecularMotion]

Samuel Holloway Bowers, the first Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi and the mastermind behind the slayings of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, 50 years ago, did not fit the caricature of a backwards racist. College educated as an engineer at the University of Southern California and at Tulane University, associates described him as an ideologically driven strategist.

"He is very intelligent. I have no question about that," Thomas Tarrants, once the self-described chief terrorist for Bowers, told journalist Patsy Sims for her book The Klan. "And I believe he was like I was, indoctrinated, brainwashed... Absorbed into an ideology that took on the awe of a holy cause and blinded his mind to everything else. I think Sam believes what he is doing is right and has the sanction of God."

Tarrants later renounced racism and is currently an ordained, evangelical minister. But at one time he saw himself as occupying the same unique space as Bowers in the counter-revolution against integration and desegregation: that of a holy warrior. As Bowers described it, in 1994, to theologian Charles Marsh:

"There are two really powerful figures in the world: the priest and the preacher. I think I came here as a priest, though not a preacher. A priest is interested in visible, public power relations; this is what makes him powerful as a warrior. A preacher is an evangelist; he will tell people what to do. But the priest will arrange the means and operations to implement this into concrete action. When the priest sees the heretic, he can do only one thing: he eliminates him."

http://www.clarionledger.com/story/journeytojustice/2014/07/09/sam-bowers-mississippi-burning-christian-identity/12394409/

[pinto]

1. Good historical background. I agree with the author's statement -

Scholars of terrorism often group terrorists into two groups: nationalist-secular terrorists, who have a limited set of practical, political goals, and ideological terrorists (including religious terrorists), who have a more pro-active, far ranging agenda to radically re-shape the world order. Rarely do racist groups fall under the latter category, but the National States' Rights Party clearly did.

[Warpy]

2. Most of the Klan leadership doesn't reflect the stereotype

of the knuckle dragging, snuff juice drooling, ignorant white trash idiot who doesn't have a hope or a prayer outside those stupid Klan parades. The leadership has always been educated and uses religion and fear to control the oafs who fit the stereotype.

I spent part of my kidhood and all of my puberty in the Jim Crow south. I remember those men very clearly, fathers of my playmates who didn't quite put the robes away securely so I saw them. I had always gone to integrated schools, so you can well imagine it was bizarre to find out the white collar daddies were in the Klan.

Those men provided the brains and the planning. The stereotypical Klanners provided most of the muscle.

And they were all part of the reason I left like I was shot out of a cannon as soon as I had the means to do so.