WHITE KNIGHTS, DARK HEARTS : THE HATEFUL SUMMER WHEN THE KLAN LOOSED ITS TERRORISTS ON MISSISSIPPI’S JEWS

A LITTLE PAST 10 P.M., THE SHOCK OF AN ENORmous explosion shook Al Binder’s antebellum home in a fashionable section of Jackson, literally lifting him out of bed. Instantly the young lawyer was wide awake. His synagogue, Temple Beth Israel, was only half a mile away and because of all the Klan threats against the Jewish community he immediately figured it had been bombed. He worried about Rabbi Perry Nussbaum, who often worked late. Binder pulled on his clothes and drove as fast as he could through the empty streets of the Mississippi capital.

Joe Harris, a prominent building contractor, and his wife, Maxine, also were jarred awake. “Joe, something big blew up,” she exclaimed. “You better get up and see what’s going on.” As he struggled to get his clothes on, she turned on the radio. At first there was music, but then a bulletin: their temple had been bombed.

“I knew it,” Joe had said as he hurried out to his car. “The rabbi’s gonna get us all killed.”

Binder was the first to reach the scene. The night was dark, with a warm mist hanging in the air. The smell of dynamite stung his nose. He looked around, but saw no other cars in the parking lot and no lights shining in the synagogue. Maybe the rabbi had not worked late after all.

Police cars, ambulances and firetrucks arrived, sirens screaming. The spotlights of the emergency vehicles illuminated the building. The blast had ripped through the administrative offices and a conference room, torn a hole in the ceiling, blown out windows, ruptured a pipe and buckled a wall. An octagonal structure dominated by a massive roof, Temple Beth Israel had been dedicated only seven months earlier.

Scores of neighborhood residents, some in their bathrobes, were beginning to collect on the lawn. Standing in groups of two and three, everyone spoke in whispers, as though talking aloud would further violate something already defiled. Over and over they asked one another, “Why would anybody do such a thing?”

The crowd opened a path for Rabbi Nussbaum and his wife, Arene. The blast had awaked the Nussbaums, too, and they were already dressing when FBI agent Jim Ingram, in charge of civil rights enforcement in Mississippi, called to confirm their fear that it had come from the temple. Now, nervously surveying piles of shattered glass and plaster, Arene said, “Just think what would have happened if someone had been inside there.”

“This is a fear I’ve been living with,” Nussbaum answered. Turning to a local reporter, he added, “I had intended to do some work in my study tonight, but changed my mind at the last minute and stayed home.”

AS THE TIMES’ ATLANTA BUREAU CHIEF IN THE late 1960s, I often went to Mississippi, where I grew up--my family moved to Biloxi when I was 12. But the Mississippi I covered did not match my innocent memories. It had become a dark and fearful place, violently obsessed with race, a virtual police state. Civil rights advocates were hounded throughout the South, but only in Mississippi did the state government itself maintain a network of surveillance, coercion and control that crushed even the most modest forms of dissent.

Three years after the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney in the town of Philadelphia, a year after the firebomb-assassination of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg and in the dark shadow of other racist outrages in Mississippi during the violent 1960s, a campaign of terror loosed by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan under the fanatical Sam Bowers targeted, for the first time, the Jews of the American South.

With few exceptions, Southern Jews had looked upon themselves as part of the dominant white society and shared its prejudices toward blacks. The Klan’s terrorist campaign forced the Jews to confront their vulnerabilities and evasions, profoundly changed their attitudes on race, and brought many of them around to opposing segregation.

I covered the KKK onslaught, but years later the hate-filled events and the police reaction to them still gnawed at me. In Mississippi, the Klan had murdered blacks and burned their churches by the hundreds with impunity. But when they attacked the tiny Jewish community, FBI and police officials fought fire with fire, drawing me into the story in ways I could not have foreseen.

After I wrote of illegal tactics the FBI and police used against the Klan once it turned its focus from blacks to Jews, sources I had considered friends turned against me. The FBI smeared me as a drunk and a “Jekyll-Hyde” personality.

For years, I was haunted by the question of whether this had been a case where the ends justified the means, where quashing the terrorists meant authorities could violate their rights. To search for the answer, I went back to Mississippi and collected hundreds of FBI and police documents and interviewed scores of witnesses, including individuals I had talked to at the time but now--years later--revealed details they had long kept secret. Many of them found their lives, and in some cases their beliefs, changed by the searing events of 1967 and 1968.

JOE HARRIS WAS NOT THE ONLY JEW IN JACKSON WHO BLAMED THE rabbi for the bombing. Perry Nussbaum did not have many friends in or outside the congregation. Although well educated and highly principled, he was tactless, abrasive, outspoken and headstrong. A medium-sized man with thinning hair, a bristling mustache and horn-rimmed glasses, he had a way of irritating people from the moment he met them. He liked to fire verbal darts that he seemed to think were funny but others found inappropriate or even rude.

Soon after arriving in Jackson from Pittsfield, Mass., in 1954, Nussbaum had sized up the modest, two-bedroom “starter” house that Al Binder lived in then and declared condescendingly, “I guess you’re good for the minimum”--meaning the young lawyer could only afford a $5 weekly contribution to the synagogue. Arene tried to pass off the rabbi’s remarks as “just Perry’s sense of humor,” but Binder did not find it funny.

Nussbaum, 61 at the time of the bombing, not only had a difficult personality, he was still--after more than a decade in Mississippi--seen as an outsider. The rabbi himself had grown fond of the state and its people, an affection that compounded his inner conflicts about the civil rights struggle as it intensified. But he rejected the elaborate strategies that most Jews in the South had developed for dealing with their vulnerable situation. Members of his congregation felt that he did not really understand what it meant to be a Jew in the South.

Jews had lived in Mississippi since before it joined the Union in 1817. They had fought on its side when it left the Union in 1860; many were proud that a Jew, Judah Benjamin, had been an important figure in Jefferson Davis’ Confederate government. Along with other whites, they had supported and prospered from “the peculiar institution” of slavery in its pure form before Emancipation and in its covert form afterward. Yet even when they tried to convince themselves of their acceptance by other Southerners, deep down they knew they were viewed as aliens in this land of uncompromising, militant, fundamentalist Protestantism.

To thrive, many Jews concluded, they had to assimilate into the dominant culture in every way possible. Becoming “200% Southerners,” they submerged their religious and cultural heritage, partly out of a frankly acknowledged appetite for the comfortable life and partly out of fear of the violence that never seemed far below the surface in Mississippi.

All over the South, Jews, especially the dominant, assimilationist German Jews, adopted Southern ways while not completely abandoning tradition. They went to their Reform temples on Friday nights, but they shunned Hebrew chanting and did away with bar mitzvahs. Kosher kitchens survived almost exclusively in the homes of Jews with Eastern European roots, who arrived later. In “The Provincials,” Eli Evans described a not untypical Sabbath celebration in a Reform household in Alabama. “First, Mama blessed the lights. And then, we always had our favorite Sabbath meal--oyster stew, steak, ham or fried chicken; Mama’s homemade biscuits and corn bread too; hoppin john and sweet potato pie for dessert.”

Nussbaum had sought to change all that. He criticized those who put up Christmas trees. He reinstituted bar mitzvahs and other Jewish ceremonies. He embraced Zionism and Israel, both of which Southern Jews had traditionally held at arm’s length. He insisted that Judaism was a distinct religion and not just an earlier, Old Testament form of Christianity--”the Jewish church,” as many people in Jackson often called it. Altogether, in large ways and small, he made the congregation more aware of its Jewishness and he made that Jewishness more conspicuous in the larger community--neither of which the members of Temple Beth Israel welcomed.

Nussbaum’s personal manner and his approach to Judaism compounded what bothered the congregation most about him: For all but a few members, the rabbi was just too liberal on the race issue and much too close to the civil rights movement. They feared that his activities would put a spotlight on the Jewish community, antagonize the Jackson Establishment and disturb the uneasy peace that Jews throughout the South struggled to maintain with the Christians who dominated their society. The worriers were right.

Concerns about his stand on civil rights had surfaced early, moments after he arrived in Jackson for a job interview with temple leaders. That was June of 1954, barely a month after the Supreme Court had handed down its decision outlawing segregation in public schools. National Jewish organizations had hailed the ruling but the reaction among the Temple Beth Israel congregation was solidly opposed, like most of the white Establishment.

Landing at the Jackson Municipal Airport, Nussbaum was met by members of the temple’s selection committee. The temperature was a staggering 103 degrees and humid. They had hardly finished exchanging pleasantries when a member of the delegation got down to business: “What is your position about school desegregation?”

With uncharacteristic restraint, Nussbaum finessed the question. Through most of his early years in Jackson, in fact, Nussbaum kept his views on race relations pretty much to himself, partly at the advice of his wife, a native of Texas, who thought he did not understand Southern race relations and was naive about what he could and could not do about civil rights. But when the Freedom Riders began pouring into Jackson and all across the South in 1961, he could no longer finesse the issue--with his conscience or with his congregation. Soon, quietly and largely behind the scenes, Nussbaum began to defy his congregation by ministering to imprisoned Freedom Riders.

NUSSBAUM KNEW THE PENALTIES FOR FAILING TO EMBRACE SEGREGAtion wholeheartedly. For her defiance of racists, Hazel Brannon Smith, publisher of the Lexington Advertiser north of Jackson, lost her advertising, her county printing contract and all her friends in town. Her insurance was canceled, her husband lost his job as a hospital administrator and a cross was burned on their lawn. Somehow, Smith managed to keep publishing, but most business people were not so resilient.

The main instruments for preserving white supremacy, in addition to the Ku Klux Klan, were the private White Citizens Councils and the state-supported Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. The councils were so effective that even after the school desegregation decision the Klan did not become a major factor in Mississippi until Sam Bowers organized the White Knights in 1964.

In such a climate, everyone was fearful, no one more so than Mississippi’s comfortable but vulnerable Jewish population, which in 1955 numbered about 3,250--roughly 1.5% of the state’s total population. Small wonder that Rabbi Nussbaum tried to hide his true feelings as long as he did.

As word began to spread about his work with the Freedom Riders and other civil rights activities, Nussbaum became increasingly nervous. Writing during the early 1960s in the Journal of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, a Cincinnati-based publication unlikely to be read in Mississippi, he declared: “Sometimes you were sure your phone was tapped. You wondered about some of the mail, delivered and undelivered. Talk about the clergy and mental health! Some of us were chapter and verse in the textbook of the paranoid.”

Nussbaum did have a handful of soul mates in the congregation, but the overwhelming majority of Jews in Jackson and elsewhere held views that were indistinguishable from those of their neighbors. For them, an unwelcome complication was that so many of the demonstrators were Northern Jews--roughly 50% of all the demonstrators and about 70% of the lawyers who represented them were Jewish. It made it much harder for Southern Jews to remain inconspicuous.

The way Joe Harris looked at it, “The outside agitators should have stayed home. Here we have all these people coming down here that are obviously Jewish--Schwerner, Goodman, the Goldbergs and the Levines and the Cohens and all these obvious Jewish names. We’re all sitting here trying to make a living and trying to get along and trying to live in a super-predominant, very, very Christian society and all of a sudden, here they are. And the way it’s looked on down here is that all Jews think alike.”

The summer of ’64 marked a turning point for Nussbaum. Stepping out of the shadows, he took a leading role in organizing the Committee of Concern, a biracial, interdenominational group founded to raise money for rebuilding black churches torched by the Klan. That summer, hundreds of white volunteers flooded into Jackson, Meridian, Hattiesburg and several other cities as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer. The state, from the highest public officials on down, considered itself under siege. The White Knights were engaged in a rampage of violence and destruction. And Nussbaum’s efforts to help the black churches and the Freedom Riders had Sam Bowers ranting about “the Communist-Jewish conspiracy.”

But in the end, a Klan informant told the FBI, Bowers concluded that Mississippi’s Jews faced too many problems of their own to spend much time participating in civil rights activities and decided not to target them at that time. The informant might have added that Bowers’ plate was too full just then to deal with Nussbaum: He and his fellow White Knights were busy planning and carrying out the kidnaping and killing of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.

Bowers did not forget about Nussbaum, however.

IN MARCH OF 1967, THE BETH ISRAEL CONGREGATION HAD ARRIVED AT a momentous point in its 106-year history. A long-planned new temple had at last been completed and ambitious arrangements were being made for the dedication. The first Temple Beth Israel, built in 1861, had been burned by federal troops during the Civil War. A replacement temple, erected in 1867, also fell victim to fire. The third temple, a “beautiful Gothic building” according to a news account of the day, was built in 1875 with solid walnut pews and an elegantly carved altar. It was architecturally indistinguishable from Jackson’s Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal and other Christian churches. A fourth temple also carried on this assimilationist tradition.

Nussbaum changed that with a vengeance: the new temple was unmistakably “Jewish,” with a sprawling roof suggesting the tents occupied by the children of Israel during their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness after the Exodus.

By now, Rabbi Nussbaum seemed at times to be courting controversy. In July of 1967, he played host to a meeting of the Jackson chapter of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations. An FBI report on the meeting reported that of the 130 people who attended, 40% were black. It also pointedly noted that the meeting had been announced in advance on radio and in the newspaper.

Nussbaum’s activities infuriated Bowers, who continued to mastermind Klan violence despite his upcoming federal trial in connection with the slaying of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney and state and federal trials in Vernon Dahmer’s death. Bowers was determined to show authorities that the White Knights remained a potent force.

A new campaign of terror was planned, aimed at selected white and black leaders. Jews would be the prime targets. Aware of FBI surveillance, Bowers and his lieutenants usually met in remote wooded areas and changed meeting places frequently. When they met in buildings, they were so fearful of FBI listening devices that they scribbled messages on notebook paper instead of talking.

Much of this was known to the FBI, which had infiltrated the White Knights with a substantial number of paid informants. But there were no informants within the tiny cell of Klansmen Bowers talked to about specific plans for attacking the Jews. And almost no one except Bowers and two members of his hit squad--Danny Joe Hawkins and Kathy Ainsworth, a pretty, 21-year-old schoolteacher--knew that Thomas Albert Tarrants III, 21, a ruthless but brilliant high school dropout and vicious anti-Semite, had joined the cell.

In early September it was Temple Beth Israel’s time to host the annual meeting of the Mississippi Religious Conference, an interracial and interdenominational organization Nussbaum had helped found.

A number of blacks traveled to Jackson for the conference and several stopped at service stations and food markets in the vicinity to get directions to the temple. Word spread quickly that an integrated meeting was being held at the synagogue. Reports that blacks attended the meeting appeared in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and Daily News. The meeting and the publicity touched off a firestorm of protest within the Beth Israel congregation. At a subsequent meeting, several older members accused Nussbaum of endangering the Jewish community and demanded that he resign.

The attack on Nussbaum was led by John Hart Lewis, a wealthy home builder whose grandfather had settled in Jackson in 1848. Lewis had taken a dislike to Nussbaum when the rabbi, shortly after arriving in Jackson, refused to confirm Lewis’ two sons because their mother was not Jewish--a decision that accorded with Jewish law but not with customs of many Mississippi congregations. Now Lewis warned Nussbaum that if his policy of integrated meetings continued, the rabbi probably would find himself the target of a bomb. In the end, however, a substantial majority of the congregation lined up in support of the rabbi.

Emboldened, Nussbaum declared: “I’ve been in the Jackson area for 14 years and I haven’t been bombed yet.”

“Rabbi,” Lewis replied, “I hope you make it through 15 years.”

SMOKE STILL DRIFTED UP FROM THE WRECKAGE OF THE SYNAGOGUE, mixing with the strong smell of insecticide--the city had been spraying for mosquitoes earlier that night. Scores of police officers and FBI agents swarmed over the damaged building and the grounds around it in search of clues. Tarrants had jimmied open several doors and had planted a box of dynamite near a small bathroom adjacent to Nussbaum’s study. The explosion wrecked the study and would clearly have killed the rabbi if he had been there.

Jim Ingram, the FBI agent, arrived at the scene. He was shocked that the Klan had decided to target the Jewish community because in his view it had done “nothing to incite the wrath of the Klan.”

While police and FBI agents roped off the synagogue and scoured the area for evidence, the Nussbaums drove back to their house. There the rabbi sat down and, in the early morning hours, wrote in his diary:

A few hours ago our synagogue was bombed. I have given up trying to get sleep, or to read. It is nightmarish, this reaction to what for years I have accepted as inevitable. How can a rabbi sleep when the forces of evil attack his cherished House?

I sit here now and wait for the daylight ‘I told you so’s,’ (and the) ‘I warned you that the Temple would be bombed.’ And I wonder! Not afraid! Wonder! How will the majority of my membership react now? Long ago I have been helplessly reconciled to those who reject my concepts of Judaism and the role of the synagogue in Jackson. I have been unable to stop their pursuit of the multitudes for that evil which has afflicted this lovely city and state.

Last night a policeman said to me, ‘I can’t understand how anybody would want to destroy a church!’ My own trauma was too much upon me to remind this well-intentioned sympathizer that over 40 Christian churches have already been destroyed in Mississippi. . . .”

The response of the FBI and Mississippi police agencies to the Beth Israel bombing was extraordinary. The destruction of black churches and the terrorizing of civil rights activists had been commonplace since the summer of 1964, but with few exceptions--the Vernon Dahmer case, the slaying of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney in Neshoba County--there had been little response from law enforcement agencies. And except for the ministers who made up the Committee of Concern, there had been little public outcry against the violence.

But the Temple Beth Israel bombing was different. Within hours, Roy Moore of the Jackson FBI office ordered an around-the-clock investigation and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dispatched a team of demolition experts. Mississippi and Jackson police joined in the massive investigation, helping the FBI check the whereabouts of all known members of the White Knights.

Ten days after the bombing, Hoover responded to pressure from his good friend Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi by ordering the Jackson field office to step up its investigation and write a specific report on what was being done to solve the bombing. Moore sent Hoover a memo outlining how three special groups of agents were conducting a “vigorous, hard-hitting, imaginative” investigation, contacting all known Klansmen and using “any technique that will bring results.” FBI agent Ingram considered many of the Klansmen the bureau was stalking “animals, murderers,” and he ordered his men to “just go out and pound on them until you get some results.” Agents were ordered to keep suspects on edge by interrogating them frequently, to step up efforts to recruit informants and, wherever possible, to create suspicion among Klansmen that other Klansmen were informing on them.

Three weeks after the synagogue bombing, on the night of Oct. 6, a bomb exploded at the campus home of William T. Bush, a dean at predominantly black Tougaloo College near Jackson. Bush was white, and the Klan believed he was living with a black woman. The FBI and other investigative agencies assumed the attack was linked to the synagogue bombing. They were correct. It was the work of the White Knights. But the agents who immediately swarmed into the field in search of the suspects on their list were pursuing Klansmen who had little or no knowledge of Bowers’ role in the terror campaign. The Tougaloo bomb had been planted by Tarrants, who by then had become Bowers’ No. 1 terror bomber.

THE FBI HAD BEEN DOGGING BOWERS’ STEPS FOR YEARS, BUT HE SELdom made the kinds of mistakes that tripped up so many of his followers. He was not like them in temperament or background. Born in 1924 in New Orleans, he grew up in an educated, affluent household. His father, Sam Bowers Sr., was a salesman from Gulfport, Miss. His mother was the daughter of a well-to-do planter. Young Sam’s grandfather, Eaton J. Bowers, a lawyer who served four terms in Congress, from 1903 to 1911, “read and talked constantly to Sam and he used to say he had the most brilliant mind of any child he had ever seen,” young Sam’s doting mother said.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Sam, then 17, joined the Navy against the wishes of his mother, who worried that he was “fanatically patriotic.” Honorably discharged four years later, he passed a high school equivalency test and enrolled at Tulane University. A year after that, he transferred to the University of Southern California, where he studied engineering for almost a year before dropping out. He moved to Laurel, about 75 miles southeast of Jackson, and went into the vending and pinball machine business.

An oddball with fixed routines, Bowers ate three meals a day, seven days a week at the Admiral Ben Bow Snack Bar, an all-night coffee shop in Laurel. It was a favorite Klan hangout and, a former employee said, Bowers would sit at the counter and “make all kinds of scowls and terrible expressions while watching himself in the mirror.”

Bowers sometimes wore swastikas on his arm. He was known to click his heels in front of his old dog and throw stiff Nazi salutes, exclaiming, “Heil Hitler!” He was obsessed with guns and explosives and talked for hours about how to make bombs.

The FBI agents who kept him under surveillance joked that he was “an unasylumed lunatic.” But Bowers saw himself as a moral and intellectual descendant of the Founding Fathers and one of a long line of Southern aristocrats who had risen to defend their society’s most basic legal and religious values.

Bowers exhibited the same boastful, defiant streak when he went on trial in the Philadelphia case. Held in Meridian’s massive granite federal courthouse, the trial played to a packed gallery of reporters and spectators for almost two weeks. U. S. District Judge Harold Cox was no friend to civil rights--he had called blacks “niggers” and “chimpanzees”--but he made it clear that he intended to conduct a dignified proceeding. The government had amassed an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence buttressed by testimony from Klansmen who had direct knowledge of the events leading up to the murders.

Sitting in the press section, reporters had a good view of Bowers and his fellow defendants, including Lawrence Rainey, the sheriff of Neshoba County; Cecil Ray Price, his chief deputy; and Alton Wayne Roberts, the hulking Klansman believed to have fired the shots that killed Schwerner and Goodman.

On Oct. 20, 1967, after three days of deliberations, the jury acquitted Sheriff Rainey and seven other defendants, and it reported itself irreconcilably divided on three other Klansmen. But it found seven of the 18 defendants guilty as charged, including Roberts, Price and Bowers.

Roberts and Bowers received the maximum 10-year prison terms. It was the first time a Mississippi jury had convicted members of the Klan--and a white law enforcement officer as well--for crimes committed against civil rights workers.

The convictions brought cheer to the FBI, leading the bureau to hope that it had finally crushed the White Knights. Although the imperial wizard and some of his most violent followers were now under prison sentences, they remained free on appeal bonds (except for Roberts). Largely because of the convictions, as well as informants, membership in the White Knights declined dramatically.

Bowers, however, was far from neutralized. He was busy planning more violence. And the FBI was still looking in the wrong places for those who had bombed the synagogue, unaware that Bowers had drastically altered his method of operation. Instead of a gang of Klansmen, Bowers was using only one or two people to carry out the new series of attacks he had launched. And two of the key individuals--Tarrants and Ainsworth--either were not known to the populace as White Knights or were living underground in distant “safe houses” beyond the reach of FBI pressure in Jackson.

One of the new attacks came shortly after midnight on Nov. 15, 1967, in Laurel. A bundle of dynamite planted by Tarrants exploded through the brick ranch-style parsonage of the Rev. Allen Johnson, a black Methodist minister and NAACP leader. Four nights later, Tarrants, accompanied by Ainsworth, struck again, this time with a powerful bomb planted on the porch of Robert Kochtitzky, a layman active in civil rights and engaged in religious work with poor people in Jackson. The bomb tore away the porch and ripped through the front wall of the house; miraculously, no one was hurt.

Kochtitzky, a Methodist, had worked with Nussbaum and Johnson on the Committee of Concern. He had urged his minister to speak out against racial violence. And he had been credited in news accounts with originating a “walk of penance” after the Temple Beth Israel bombing. In hindsight, Kochtitzky also concluded that because of his name the Klan may have believed that he was Jewish.

Soon after the Kochtitzky bombing, an FBI agent let Al Binder listen to a chilling tape-recorded conversation involving two Klansmen. Listening to the tape in an FBI car, the lawyer heard one of the Klansmen propose planting a firebomb in the temple’s air-conditioning system, attached to a timing device that would set off the firebomb at 8:30 p.m., when the synagogue would be filled with worshipers. Everyone in the congregation would be suffocated, the Klansman said.

The prospect repelled the other Klansman. It would kill children, he said. “The hell with that,” the first Klansman declared. “Little Jew bastards grow up to be big Jew devils. Kill ‘em while they’re young.”

Binder thought of his own three small children. He vowed to do whatever it took to catch those who were responsible. From that moment on, he and Joe Harris and some of the other young men of the congregation who were meeting periodically to discuss ways to catch the terrorists began carrying pistols to services.

“If the Kluckers come to the temple again,” he told friends, “we’ll shoot first and talk about it later.”

TWO MONTHS AFTER DYNAMITing the Jackson temple, Tarrants and Ainsworth bombed Rabbi Nussbaum’s home. Though he and his wife escaped serious injury, Nussbaum was “shattered and went into a shell,” said FBI agent Ingram. Tarrants then bombed a synagogue in Meridian. Desperately, the FBI and the Meridian police--bankrolled by an alarmed Jewish community--arranged an ambush that killed Ainsworth, critically wounded Tarrants and virtually ended the worst wave of Klan violence in modern times.

Nussbaum, who retired in 1973, died in San Diego in 1987; his widow still lives there. Tarrants survived his wounds and prison to embrace evangelical Christianity and become a popular religious speaker.

Bowers served more than six years in federal prison for the killing of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia. He was never convicted for any of the other murders, bombings and beatings the FBI attributed to him and the other White Knights. He walks the streets of Laurel today, a free man, still a hatemonger railing against Jews.