Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era

Chapter 6. “We Don’t Believe in Tolerance”: Terrorist Responses to Civil Rights Reform

153 I’ve been fighting Jews and niggers full time more or less since starting in 1942.”So declared J. B. Stoner, perhaps the most violently fanatical racist spawned by massive resistance. He was the nexus of a terrorist network that the authorities held responsible for many of the bomb attacks on homes, schools, and houses of worship that occurred during the desegregation struggle.Stoner recruited members, raised finances, and represented suspected criminals in court. Southern segregationists during and after World War II dissociated themselves from the racial doctrines of European fascism , sensing no contradiction between their support of the Allied war effort abroad and the oppression of African Americans at home.Public exposure of Nazi concentration camps shattered the credibility of biological racism, forcing white southerners to emphasize other issues such as states’ rights in their defense of Jim Crow. Not so Stoner. A self-proclaimed fascist, he saw it as his mission to fulfill the promise of the defeated Nazi regime and found a white supremacist order through the relocation or eradication of racial and religious minorities. Adolf Hitler, concluded Stoner, had been too moderate. He would not make the same mistake. In contrast to John Kasper and Bryant Bowles, no observer seems to have doubted that,however repellent,Stoner was completely sincere in his political opinions. The endurance of his 6. “We Don’t Believe in Tolerance” Terrorist Responses to Civil Rights Reform 154 Chapter Six political activism over the course of more than a half century is testimony to his obsessive sense of purpose.Decades after most white southern politicians had bowed to the new realities shaped by the black freedom struggle, Stoner maintained an uncompromising conviction that he could reverse the civil rights revolution. He was an inspiration to a new generation of farright activists who revered him as “the patriarch of the White supremacist movement.” Although Stoner was one of the most active and influential figures on the American far right for more than fifty years, the outrage he still arouses has precluded a rigorous assessment of his political career. When Stoner died, historian Ralph Luker produced a short editorial piece wishing him a “Happy Deathday.” While the tone of moral condemnation was entirely appropriate to the occasion, the passing of time may allow for more methodical analysis. The persistence of hate groups in contemporary politics provides a purpose to our greater understanding of what motivates them and how they attempt to accomplish their aims. A dispassionate consideration of Stoner’s career, specifically his involvement in violence against civil rights activists, is therefore overdue. Jesse Benjamin Stoner, Jr., was born April 13, 1924, in Walker County, Georgia. His father, Jesse, Sr., worked across the state border in Tennessee as owner of Rock City, a tourist attraction that provided visitors with spectacular views from the peak of Lookout Mountain. The family was sufficiently wealthy to enroll their son at the exclusive McCallie School in Chattanooga. Although raised in the comfort of a relatively prosperous household, Jesse endured personal tragedy in childhood. First, at the age of only two-and-a-half years, he suffered an attack of polio that crippled one of his legs. Three years later, his father died. By the time Stoner was seventeen, he had also lost his mother to cancer. These setbacks did not inhibit his ambition and he enthusiastically pursued a career in law, gaining admittance to the Georgia bar in 1951. Most reporters who later met Stoner made little attempt to understand what motivated him.Those who sought an explanation for his racial fanaticism found it in an embittered outlook on life brought on by his physical affliction and the loss of his parents. According to such reasoning, Stoner displaced the responsibility for his personal misfortune onto a convenient scapegoat. As one journalist asserted, “Because of the bad leg, he rarely competed with other boys in athletics,so he tried to excel at something else: fighting blacks and Jews.” “We Don’t Believe in Tolerance” 155 This line of reasoning is far too reductionist. A polio attack does not turn its victims into vengeful adversaries of racial and religious minority groups. More convincing are the explanations that Stoner himself offered for his conversion to the white supremacist cause. Stoner appears to have been unusually self-reflective for a far-right activist. His account of the childhood experiences that...