Peering into segregationist state of mind

Willing to kill
Greer called violent members of the Klan “crazy fools” who had their own ideas.

Using the Bible, Bowers was able to whip his disciples into enough of a frenzy that they were willing to kill for him, Marsh writes, adding that Bowers was believed to have orchestrated nine murders, 75 bombings at black churches and 300 more assaults and other violent acts in four years as leader of the White Knights, starting in 1964.

He is believed to have called for an attack on civil rights workers and others sympathetic to the movement the day after Seale and a handful of Klansmen allegedly abducted Dee and Moore, beat them, chained them to heavy metal objects and dumped them still alive into the Mississippi River.

Bowers was convicted nine years ago of conspiracy in the 1966 firebombing death of Hattiesburg NAACP activist Vernon Dahmer. Until his death in prison last November, Bowers remained adamant that God was on his side.

Seale, too, cast anti-integration as a moral cause in his 1964 letter: “The time is here and passing fast for the people of this great nation to fight and die for what is right. If you choose to live and die under communism dictatorship, may God have mercy on your souls.”

Striking a chord with the poor
Ideas pushed by Seale and Bowers struck a chord with the mostly poor, blue-collar membership of the Klan in the South, Greer said. To many Klansmen, a burgeoning black population seemed a threat on many levels. Many white Mississippians, still harboring resentment over the South’s treatment during and after the Civil War, saw the civil rights movement as another attack on their way of life.

“(T)hey want to eat in the white cafe, sleep in the white hotel or motel, swim in the white pool, go to the white church, go to the white school,” Seale wrote. “In short, they want to marry your white daughter, or live with her, the only thing they know.

“They don’t want equal rights, they want 100 percent integration.”

Greer said people like him and Seale were products of their place and time.

A matter of upbringing
“I was a Mississippi boy, and this makes a difference where you were raised, how you were raised and what your beliefs were,” Greer said. “You’ve got to consider that. I thought that of course all that was right, that these people were brought here out of the jungles and just didn’t deserve to be equal to us.”

Greer, who is now retired and lives in Natchez, left the Klan soon after the upheavals of 1964 and his father convinced him he’d chosen the wrong path. He said if men like Seale had lifted their voices, instead of their fists, they might have had some success in stalling the civil rights movement.

“You had too many idiots in the Klan,” he said. “There were some good people in the Klan, some people that maybe would have made a difference. At any rate, the Klan wouldn’t have been looked down on. But then you’ve got this wild bunch of crazy fools, and it don’t take but a few.”

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