A Hero Passes Away; He Was 82

[3 Ks]

Klansman Bowers dies in Miss. prison
Sun. Nov. 5th, 2006

Imperial Wizard Samuel H. Bowers

JACKSON, Miss. - Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel H. Bowers, who was serving a life sentence for the 1966 bombing death of a civil rights leader, died Sunday in a state penitentiary, officials said. He was 82.

He died of cardio pulmonary arrest, said Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Tara Booth.

Bowers was convicted in August of 1998 of ordering the assassination of Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights activist who had fought for black rights during Mississippi's turbulent struggle for racial equality.

"He was supposed to stay there until he died. I guess he fulfilled that," Vernon Dahmer's
widow, Ellie Dahmer, told The Associated Press on Sunday. "He lived a lot longer than Vernon Dahmer did."

Bowers died at approximately 11:30 a.m. in the Mississippi State Penitentiary Hospital in Parchman, a sprawling prison carved out of the cotton and soybean fields in the impoverished Mississippi Delta, Booth said.

Vernon Dahmer died at the age of 58 after being fire-bombed outside his home.

Two carloads of Klansmen arrived at Dahmer's Hattiesburg-area home in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 10, 1966. Dahmer was able keep the Klansmen at bay with a shotgun while his family fled, according to court testimony during a four-day trial in Forrest County Circuit Court in 1998. He died in his wife's arms about 12 hours after the attack.

During the trial, prosecutors claimed Bowers ordered the Dahmer attack after becoming enraged that Dahmer was trying to register blacks to vote.

Bowers' lawyers claimed he was "sacrificed to the media" to further the political ambitions of then Attorney General Mike
Moore.

Earlier trials for Bowers, including at least two before all-white juries, ended in mistrials. A 1968 state jury split 11-1 in favor of guilty, while a 1969 jury split 10-2 in favor of conviction.

Dahmer's widow said the death brings little closure to a wound she has nursed for decades.

"It won't bring Vernon back," she said. "I lost a wonderful husband and my children lost a father. We lost a community leader. We lost a Christian man who saw good in people."

 

[KLANSMAN]

We lack such white men of courage today...Edgar Ray Killen is still rotting in a Mississppi prison at the age of 80.

Lets not forget these fighters....they deserve our honor, praise and respect.

 

[Tyrone N. Butts]

Bowers dead at 82

Former Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers died behind bars Sunday, but the legacy of hate he and his minions perpetuated will never be forgotten, victims' families say.

"He and his Klansmen destroyed some good people who were trying to do the right thing," said Dennis Dahmer, who watched his father, Vernon Dahmer Sr., die from burns inflicted by Klansmen in a 1966 attack of their home near Hattiesburg.

At 11:30 a.m., the 82-year-old Bowers - who headed the nation's most violent Klan organization and was portrayed in the 1988 fictional film, Mississippi Burning - died of a heart attack at the state Penitentiary at Parchman.

Despite the fact the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi were responsible f
or at least 10 killings, Bowers never had been convicted of murder until 1998, when a jury found him guilty of Dahmer's killing.

A judge sentenced Bowers to life, and the former Klan leader spent most of that sentence in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility before health problems caused officials to move him to Parchman, which has a hospital for inmates.

One of the former FBI agents who investigated Bowers, Jim Ingram, said what was surprising about the one-time imperial wizard was "what a mild-mannered person he was to be such a vicious killer."

Born into a prestigious political family - the grandson of U.S. Rep. Eaton J. Bowers, D-Miss. - Bowers moved to Laurel and evolved from a man who leased pinball machines to businesses to a self-described "criminal lunatic," whose organization was responsible for much of the violence that plagued the state during the civil rights movement, including dozens of church bombings, beatings, drive-by shootings and o
ther violence. Thank you, Mr. Bowers. You stood up to those niggers and outside agitators.

"It was scary back then," said David Sansing, professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi. "It was a period where (historian) Jim Silver said we had a 'closed society,' not so much because you couldn't speak out - it was what could happen to you if you did."

Vernon Dahmer found that out after he allowed African Africans to pay their poll taxes at the grocery store next to his house.

Dahmer's widow, Ellie, still remembers how cold it was when two carloads of Klansmen firebombed their family's home in the early morning hours of Jan. 10, 1966.

Her 58-year-old husband returned fire with his shotgun so she and other family members could escape out a back window.

Flames from the blaze seared his lungs, and he died later that day. Several weeks after his death, Dahmer's family received his voter registration card in the mail
. Dahmer died before he was ever able to cast his first ballot.

Starting in 1968, Bowers went on trial four times for Dahmer's death, but was never convicted. A mistrial was declared each time because the juries could not reach a verdict. After a new witness came forward in 1997, authorities reopened the case, and Bowers was successfully prosecuted.

When Ellie Dahmer learned of the death of her husband's killer, she remarked, "He lived a lot longer than my husband, Vernon Dahmer, had a chance to live. He destroyed our family because he took a husband from me, a devoted father from our children, and a leader and Christian man from his community." Go back to Afreaka, nigger!

Dahmer's son, Vernon Jr., said, "Sam Bowers lived a life consumed with hate for African Americans. He caused a lot of pain, suffering and death for many individuals and families in my race. Now that he has passed from this life, God will be the judge." God will r
eward him for standing up to you evil niggers!

During the 1960s, the ranks of the Klan in Mississippi swelled beyond 10,000, and its sympathizers numbered many more. Some politicians sought the support of the Klan, which felt emboldened to act violently.

Bowers' own words ironically led to the reopening of that case in 1998. The Clarion-Ledger obtained and published a secret interview that Bowers gave in the mid-1980s in which he said he was "quite delighted to be convicted (in 1967) and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man."

Bowers' reference to Edgar Ray Killen prompted families to successfully push for prosecution. On June 21, 2005 a jury convicted Killen of orchestrating the slayings.

In his secret interview, Bowers defended the use of racist violence, including the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and talked of his admiration for Adolf Hitler: "(Jesus) is going to be the ultimate fascist dictator with the
perfect judgment, and I hope to be one of the soldiers in His ranks."

Bowers said citizens "not only have a right but a duty to preserve their culture."

"By taking someone's life, though?" the interviewer asked.

His reply, "If that person wants to put his life on the line in order to destroy that culture, yes."

Unfortunately, Mississippi carries the stigma from those days of hate, Dennis Dahmer said. "That was a burden Bowers put on the state that was unneeded -violence and viciousness toward someone who simply wanted to vote or wanted to go to a restaurant. I hope we never go back to those times." Go back to Afreaka, nigger!

 

[Rasp]

Sam Bowers' papers up for sale

LAUREL - In the early 1990s, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers started a new white supremacist group that targeted top news media people in America, including then-NBC anchor Tom Brokaw.

The revelations are contained in the secret papers of Bowers, whose White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were responsible for at least 10 killings in Mississippi in the 1960s. In 1998, a jury convicted Bowers of ordering the Klan's 1966 murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr. in Hattiesburg. Bowers died in prison in 2006 while serving a life sentence.

"This is a clear indication he did not feel he would ever be held accountable for what he did," said Dahmer's son, Vernon Jr. "He also didn't realize that Mississippi had changed enough that he would not dodge the charges again."

In the 1990s, his family convinced authorities to pursue the case against the Klansmen who killed his father. At the time, Dahmer said, someone remarked Bowers was a fine fellow who deserved to be left alone. The documents show "on the surface" Bowers was that, "but he was still carrying on with his evil empire."

Even while under scrutiny, Bowers created a new white supremacist group called the Invisible Imperium, to take up where his White Knights left off. The Invisible Imperium, with its own government, would publish "indictments in rare, peculiar and unusual cases ... by exposing its indicted felons to the public mandate of execution," the Klan leader wrote.

He blamed the news media for the riots that followed the acquittals of Los Angeles police officers in the 1991 beating of African-American suspect Rodney King. Those riots left 53 dead and caused $1 billion in damages.

The Invisible Imperium returned "indictments" against Brokaw, Ted Turner of CNN and Larry King of CNN. Also "indicted" was Los Angeles' then-mayor, Tom Bradley. (Bowers' papers do not record any attempt to carry out violence against these men.)

Michael Newton, who has written numerous books on the Klan, said what is fascinating is Bowers was doing this at a time when most people presumed Bowers was "laying low."

Bowers' writings are contained in a cache of hundreds of handwritten documents, including unpublished letters, essays, manuals and books.

Handwriting expert Thomas Vastrick of Memphis confirmed the handwriting belongs to Bowers, and the Klan leader's friends confirmed the work is his. The man who owns Bowers' papers asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. (More information can be obtained at bowerspapers@ yahoo.com.)

Bowers' papers include a screenplay treatment called The Rifle (in the Honeysuckle Hedge), "a superficially factual, but fictional story based upon the (1963) assassination of Medgar Evers by quasi-visible public power officers operating out of Washington," the Klan leader wrote.

Bowers alleged the white Citizens' Council, the NAACP and the Chamber of Commerce cooperated in the plot to have Jackson police kill Evers. Byron De La Beckwith, convicted in 1994 of murdering Evers, was a "patsy," Bowers wrote.

"Well, he (Bowers) lied," responded former Jackson police detective Fred Sanders, who investigated the Evers' assassination.

Bowers created a list of casting suggestions: Robert Duval to play the lead and Danny Glover to play Medgar Evers, referred to as "Evans Marlow" in the treatment.

"Medgar was assassinated," said Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams. "He knew he was going to be."

She believes Beckwith was guilty, "but I would not be surprised if anyone else was involved in it," she said. "Sometimes it takes years to find the truth - if you ever do."

Patsy Sims, author of the 1978 book, The Klan, sees these writings as being tremendously valuable. "Universities would pay a lot for that," she said.

She once wrote Bowers a letter, requesting an interview - only to find out he was upset she had contacted him directly.

Bowers' writings made clear his overall targets were the news media, central bankers and academia.

In the Islamic world, he wrote, "several academic presidents have been gunned down in the streets (just like the diseased and mangy intellectual dogs that they are) while others have been kidnapped and held as hostages (although it is hard to understand why an honest Moslem would even want to keep such a corrupt animated piece of ignorant humanoid intellectual filth around him)," Bowers wrote.

Bowers never graduated from college, but his writings are filled with huge words and intellectual phrases - what Greenwood psychologist Michael Whelan sees as an attempt to make himself appear more important.

Even when Bowers used self-deprecating words, he was grandiose, Whelan said. He pointed to Bowers comparing himself to the president in his 1991 essay, "America the Beautiful, and Bush, the Nerd."

In a letter he wrote under the pseudonym, J. Worthington Bancroft, Bowers praised veteran journalist Bill Minor for his 1995 column on the funeral of former Klan leader L.E. Matthews, saying what he wrote was a "small step in the right direction, especially, for an essentially corrupt whore, working out of the media brothel and madhouse."

Upon hearing the quote, Minor laughed.

Bowers "thought he was a genius, but his mind obviously slipped a cog," Minor said.

In contrast with other Klansmen, Bowers "struck me as a dandy," Minor said. "He was so much better dressed than the others."

Minor was stunned to find out Bowers had attended Tulane University, where Minor graduated in 1943.

In his archives interview, Bowers referred to himself as "a criminal and a lunatic."

In an undated letter to an unnamed protege, the Klan leader wrote about the diagnoses by psychiatrists when he was in prison from 1970 to 1976 on federal conspiracy charges related to the Klan's 1964 killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

Psychiatrists concluded he was a "classic Jekyll-Hyde individual" suffering from delusions and a "monstrosity of high deceptive capacity," he wrote. "The prognosis is, in a word, that Bowers is an extremely dangerous animal who should be permanently caged, regardless of whether or not any reliable evidence of criminal activity can be presented against him."

Bowers is exaggerating when he claims he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and manic depressive with multiple personalities, Whelan said.

But Bowers apparently did suffer from mental illness, most likely "a personality disorder with a paranoid and narcissistic personality," he said. "It's the same personality as cult leaders like Jim Jones."

In 1978, Jones convinced more than 900 followers to commit suicide in Guyana.

The Rev. Ken Dean, a civil rights activist who ministers to Klansmen, said Bowers seemed rational in the hundreds of hours the two men spoke together prior to Bowers' 1998 conviction in the Dahmer killing.

Bowers shared some of his writings with him, he said. "I thought the writings were reflective of a Sam I really didn't know because they were gobbledygook, but they weren't gobbledygook to him."