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

who became a leading member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, described the tension in an interview with the author.
    He went to Birmingham to help mourn the girls’ deaths and to lead protest marches against the violence. The activist became concerned when he went outside and noticed “whites with machine gun emplacements a block away from the church. . . . I realized some of them thought there would be a march or a demonstration.” No such event was planned. Then again, no marches had been planned following the funeral for Ed King’s close friend Medgar Evers, but chaos followed in Jackson when local police overreacted to peaceful protests by black Mississippians. In Birmingham, a few months later, thousands of mourners joined the family to pounce. In the marches that followed, Ed King saw moments when misunderstandings could have led to another disaster. In Jackson, “the police panicked . . . in Birmingham I realized the same thing could happen.” Only in Birmingham the police had “machine guns ready, and we could have a massacre. . . . All it would have taken was a bottle breaking that sounded like a gun.” 28 He approached Diane Nash Bevel, a major civil rights activist, then married to one of Martin Luther King’s top lieutenants, James Bevel, with his fears. She patiently convinced the thousands of mourners to go home.
    But if the five Swift followers who had visited Birmingham on the eve of the church bombing had had their way, a bloodbath would have been unavoidable. In his secretly taped conversations with Somersett, Sidney Barnes told the informant that the five men stayed in Birmingham to try to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. after he arrived to deliver the eulogy for the four girls. They followed King in Birmingham—with Noah Carden waiting to shoot the minister with a rifle—but they could not get close enough to take a clear shot.
    One can imagine the impact that killing King would have had on a black population already stirring with anger over the murders of September 15. The attitude among America’s black community, according to Ed King, “was ‘there is nothing the white racist will not do.’ There is nothing Washington will do to protect us. They [the white supremacists] have killed these little girls. This wasn’t voter registration.” “If white police had killed more blacks at a funeral” following an uprising over the assassination of Martin Luther King, “I think there would have been riots in Jackson, in Atlanta, in New Orleans.” 28
    The most obvious interpretation of Barnes’s account is that the Swift followers came to Birmingham with foreknowledge of the church bombing and took advantage of an opportunity to piggyback on the bombing when the unanticipated carnage created horrible riots, bringing Martin Luther King Jr. from his home in Georgia back to Alabama. But it is also the case, as Ed King makes clear, that anyone who followed Martin Luther King’s activities in Birmingham would have anticipated that a bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church would draw him to the city. Either way, whether such an attack resulted in unexpected killings or not, the state of Alabama is very lucky that Barnes’s efforts to kill King failed. Even still, Barnes told Somersett that the assassination plot on King remained active for several more months, but the group never had an opportunity to strike again.
    In fact, according to historian Neil Hamilton, killing Martin Luther King had been a major goal of Swift and Gale since they had founded the Christian Defense League in 1960. Multiple attempts on King’s life can be traced to followers of the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. Stoner, for instance, offered a bounty on King’s life as early as 1958.
    None were more determined to kill King than a new arrival to the white supremacist scene in Mississippi, Samuel Holloway Bowers.