America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States Read Online Free PDF Page B

kill. The perpetrators had actually designed one of the two bombs for a delayed explosion. It appears that the bomb makers intended the first device to lure out spectators and law enforcement; the second explosion could then have killed dozens of police officers and citizens. It was a sheer stroke of luck that no one got injured in the Titusville bombing. If, as Phillip Maybry quoted Stoner as saying, the shrapnel bomb was our “baby,” what motive could explain such a brazen act of attempted terrorism?
    The issue here again involves the differences between rank-and-file segregationists, even violent KKK members, and the men whobelieved in radical, Christian Identity theology. To the former, federal intervention was anathema to their customs and traditions going back to the era of Reconstruction. To the radical religious zealots, that same deep-rooted resentment among the general white population was exactly what stoked a violent response from bystanders at the University of Mississippi in 1962. The provocative riots that triggered the federal intervention in the first place—in Alabama and in Mississippi—developed only when the black community boiled over after major, provocative acts of violence. Thus, for the religious zealot, who as Tommy Tarrants revealed wanted to “polarize the races” in hopes of fomenting a race war, the shrapnel bomb, and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church itself, represented the best hope for accelerating the end-times. Wesley Swift pointed to this idea in his sermon “Armageddon: Local and Worldwide” in May 1963, saying:
    I tell you that here in America we are on the edge of an unusual chain of events, and it may be that the sudden movement of your enemy may be your salvation. Someone said: “there may not be another election but there is going to be deliverance.” You are in one of the most unusual periods in the history of our nation. You are going to see brush fire wars which can break into the big ones and could start anytime. 27
    Any Identity believer observing the tinderbox that was Birmingham in 1963 could have guessed what would happen if someone attacked a target as honored in the black community as the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. After several months of bombings and bombing attempts, the city became known as Bombingham and the neighborhood that included the church was known as Dynamite Hill. The bombing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel room, which coincided with the attack on his brother’s home, on May 11, ignited the first major race riot in the history of the city. In early September, after several months of bombings and other acts of racial violence, President John F. Kennedy prepared for an armed intervention in the city. In just the period from September 1 to September 14, there were three bombings in Birmingham. All the ingredients were present for racial violence on a scale that would impress even Wesley Swift.
    Yet the weight of the evidence suggests that the bomb that went off on September 15 was not intended to kill anyone. The reaction of the suspects after the fact certainly point to that. Hubert Page was furious that the four girls were killed. Robert Shelton wanted nothing to do with those associated with the bombing and may have used a source, Don Luna, to implicate the men to the FBI. But even if the five Swift followers could not have anticipated the killing of the four girls, they still could have known, through someone like Stoner, about the impending attack on the church. Their hope for racial violence and federal intervention on a grand scale would be in the local reaction to the bombing. In the perverted worldview of religious radicals like Swift, the unintended death of four girls presented a unique opportunity.
    The riots that followed the bombing of the church on September 15 could actually have been much worse, with far more violence and casualties. The Reverend Ed King, a white minister