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

4
    THE DESECRATED SANCTUARY
    the 1963 SIXTEENTH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH BOMBING

    O n September 14, 1963, five very dangerous men met in Birmingham, Alabama.
    Traveling farthest was Colonel William Potter Gale, former chief aide and consultant on guerrilla warfare to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines. By 1963 Gale was the paramilitary commander and cofounder of one of the most outspoken white supremacist organizations in his home state of California, the Christian Defense League.
    Joining him was former admiral John Crommelin, a naval hero during World War II, who would soon plot a coup d’état against the American government with fellow senior military veterans. Crommelin, who came to Birmingham from his home near Montgomery, Alabama, by 1963 had already run repeatedly for public office, most recently as a 1962 candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama under the National States Rights Party.
    Three men from Mobile also made the journey. Noah Jefferson (Jeff) Carden, described in military records as having “psychopathic tendencies” and suspected of bombings in his former home state of Florida, joined the two former military officers. So did fellow white supremacist Bob Smith, who was then mentoring a Mobile high school student, Tommy Tarrants, who in a few years would become the chief terrorist for the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. Tarrants did not make the trip, but another one of his mentors became the most important source on the mysterious gathering.
    In interviews with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jack Nelson in 1991, Tarrants described a common house painter and notorious white supremacist named Sidney Crockett Barnes as the most violent person he had ever known. Barnes, like Smith, was in the process of moving from Florida to Alabama, fearful that law enforcementwould become aware of his connections to the wave of anti-integration terrorism then plaguing the Sunshine State.
    All five men who met that day in Birmingham—Gale, Crommelin, Carden, Smith, and Barnes—were identified in FBI documents as loyal followers of the Reverend Wesley Swift. All were either on Swift’s mailing list for tapes or were ordained ministers in the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. During Crommelin’s last Senate campaign, Swift himself had joined four other Christian Identity ministers, including Gordon Winrod, the official pastor for the NSRP, in campaigning for the former admiral.
    It is through Barnes, though, that we know the details of the September meeting in Birmingham. In March 1964, Barnes described the gathering to a friend, Willie Somersett, who was secretly taping their conversation as a Miami police informant. Somersett described additional conversations, which were not taped, relating to the outcome of that meeting as well.
    According to Barnes’s taped conversation, Gale had met with segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace in the summer of 1963 with a plan to stymie the increasingly successful movement to integrate Alabama. But Wallace had rejected Gale’s plan as too radical. Everything that had transpired in places like Birmingham since that time had convinced the five men that Wallace—the man who once defiantly proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—was becoming soft. Barnes told Somersett that in response, he and his associates decided to take measures that would both deal a blow to the civil rights movement and embarrass the populist governor. If the following day’s events were connected with the September 14 meeting, the horrible atrocity did more than just deliver a blow to the psyche of Birmingham’s black community; it shocked the conscience of the entire nation. 1
    United Press International described the dynamite blast that “ripped” through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the Sunday morning of September 15, 1963, injuring “dozens of persons, and at least 20 were