America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States by Stuart Wexler

Author:Stuart Wexler [Wexler, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Terrorism, Religion, True Crime
ISBN: 9781619025585
Google: 7ljooQEACAAJ
Amazon: B010GEE0P0
Goodreads: 23281532
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2015-06-08T23:00:00+00:00

10

THE END OF AN AGE

the FRAGMENTATION of the RADICAL RIGHT in the 1970S

“Now this is a long fight. It is a hard fight,” said J.B. Stoner in June of 1969 as he addressed the national convention of the National States Rights Party as its newly elected chairman. Ostensibly, he was referring to the campaign for elected offices in the coming years. But Stoner spoke to a much longer struggle as well. “The Jews have been conspiring and carrying on their campaign on top of the world for centuries . . . and they still don’t have it. . . . The Lord Jesus Christ himself called the children of the Jews the children of the devil and that is what they are, the children of the devil. . . . They are Satan’s kids. Now they have been fighting for a long time so we have to fight for quite a while. We can’t expect to win the fight in a few weeks or few months when the Jews have been after it for centuries.”1

In many ways, Stoner’s speech sounded like a rationale as much as a rallying cry. Despite the riots from the previous year, despite the chaos at the Democratic National Convention the previous summer, the race war so many saw as imminent had yet to materialize.

Yet tensions persisted through 1968 and into 1969. The number of urban riots diminished dramatically, but violence spread into other political arenas. A radical offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground became the latest New Left group to embrace violence as a form of political protest. With the ongoing activity of groups like the Minutemen, police estimated that America experienced an average of twenty bombings per week in 1969. So the religious radicals in the NSRP had not yet given up hope.

One speaker at the convention, identified only as Stephens, insisted to the NSRP delegates:

The battle is yet to be won. You and I will wind up being the soldiers that carry the forefront through the line to win the fight. So if we leave this fight out against the Jewish, nigger revolution that we are in, and it is a revolution, they sort of proclaim it to be a revolution, you and I are going to end this revolution. When the battle starts, you and I will be the first ones there. We will be on the front lines, and when this smoke does clear away from this battle, then we should see nothing but white faces left in our nation.2

Stephens’s words echoed the horrific sermon delivered by the Reverend Connie Lynch in Saint Augustine in 1964. “There’s gonna be a bloody race riot all over this country,” Lynch insisted. “The stage is being set for a bloodbath. When the smoke clears, there ain’t gonna be nothing left but white faces.”

Lynch escaped incitement charges in 1964 even though a white mob sent nineteen blacks to local hospitals after his speech. But Stoner’s rabble-rousing friend finally went to prison for instigating racial violence in Baltimore in 1966; he was not at the 1969 convention.

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