ONCE UPON A TIME IN 1950s Mobile, Alabama, there lived a boy named James Clayton Vaughn. His father left when he was eight, but he had a mother and two sisters and a brother and a house near a woods of loblolly pine.
Vaughn lived in the Birdville neighborhood, close to the air force base and the water of Mobile Bay and a stone’s throw from the new interstate they were building through town. Most of the homes in Birdville had gone up fast during the Second World War to give temporary shelter to military personnel, and when the officers and their families left, you could rent them for cheap. Later they would become a public housing complex, which still stands today.
Nearly half of Mobile was black then, but only 275 black residents were registered to vote out of a total of 19,000 voters. Alabama had passed onerous provisions in 1901 requiring voters to own property, be able to read and write an article of the US Constitution, have been employed for at least one year, and have not been convicted of any crime, including vagrancy and public intoxication. This eliminated nearly all black residents of Mobile and many whites too, including Vaughn’s family.
Because poor communities have their own kind of logic outside middle-class rules, Vaughn’s Birdville was more or less integrated; poor black and poor white kids tossed balls back and forth and hit each other with friendly sticks. Yet if Vaughn left his neighborhood even for a moment, the reality of white supremacy and black dispossession was everywhere. It was in the whites-only restaurants and stores and schools of course, but it was also in the crosses that burned on Highway 90 and 42 and 45 and 43—the only roads into or out of Mobile. A Klansman ran for city commission in 1957 on the slogan “the Negro will be kept in his place” and promoted his candidacy with buttons depicting two black men hanging from a tree.
Vaughn’s father was mostly gone. His mother starved and beat him and sent him to sleep under the loblolly pines. For reasons that were never clear, Vaughn took the brunt of his mother’s rage. By his teenage years, he was blind in his right eye, and his skull was cracked many times over.
When he was seventeen, Vaughn stole a copy of Mein Kampf from the Mobile public library and took to carrying it around his house and to the loblolly pines when he was forced to go there. Now instead of waiting for the sky to turn light, he had something to read. He read of Hitler’s poverty and hunger and gobbled the words into his mind. “Our own painful struggle for existence,” Hitler wrote, “destroys our feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind.” To be a poor white boy with the same amount of power as a poor black boy—none—it seemed, was to have the lowest kind of human life.
Vaughn started looking at Birdville with new eyes. He stopped playing with his black friends. One of his neighbors, a black woman, had always been kind to him, sometimes giving him food while he sat under the loblolly pine; now he pretended he didn’t know her. Vaughn kept reading Hitler and joined the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
As soon as he was old enough to drive, Vaughn dropped out of high school and took off for points north and east, where, under various fake names, he worked in construction, at a real estate firm, and in a shoe store. At twenty years old, he started hurling insults at interracial couples on the street, then at interracial couples idling in cars. He became transfixed by the philosophy Charles Manson called “helter skelter”—a vague collection of ideas involving anger at being rejected by the world of the rich and powerful, as well as promoting violence designed to create an apocalyptic war between blacks and whites that would end the world as we know it.
When he visited his sister in Mobile in 1973, he could not stop shaking and yelling when he saw that she had a black woman working in her house as a maid. “He got so upset that it was almost necessary for her to call the police in order to get him to leave,” his FBI case notes read. In Maryland, he worked as a maintenance man at a building complex. It seemed as if he had calmed down emotionally during this time, his other sister told the FBI. But she was wrong. That year, in Atlanta, Vaughn followed a black man with a white woman date, then sprayed them with mace. Then he changed his name, reinventing himself forever. The name he took was Joseph Paul Franklin—Joseph for Goebbels’s efficiency; Franklin for Ben’s ingenuity.
Bombs came next. In July 1977, and within days of each other, Franklin used a sophisticated electrical detonator to blow a hole through the front of the home of Morris Amitay, the face of pro-Israel politics in Washington, and then pushed fifty pounds of water gel explosives and five sticks of dynamite into a crawl space in a small Orthodox synagogue in Chattanooga. The synagogue was flattened to the ground, but its Torah survived.
In the month following his bombings, Franklin got it in mind to drive to Wisconsin to kill a judge who had released two black men accused of raping a white woman. But on his way there, in a shopping mall in Madison, he was driving through a parking lot when a car driven by a black man with a white woman passenger, both twenty-three years old, backed out in front of him. Franklin honked and honked his horn until the man opened his door to see what the hell. Franklin shot the man as he approached, then pulled up alongside the car, got out, and shot the woman. He never forgot this first couple, Franklin said. The look the man got in his eyes when he knew he would die and the way the woman turned away and covered her face with her hands. He remembered the bad smell of gunpowder, too, and the way their blood had gotten on his clothes.
From 1977 to 1980, thanks to the expansion of the interstate highway system that offered travelers much greater speed and anonymity, Franklin roamed American cities large and small and murdered black men, black men and their white girlfriends or white women who might become their girlfriends, and Jews. He kept handguns around but mostly used a sniper rifle to kill, robbing banks to cover his constant need for fresh cars, guns, and bullets.
He shot and killed a Jewish worshipper exiting a temple in a suburb of St. Louis. He shot a black man and his pregnant white girlfriend as they walked down the sidewalk near their home in northeast Atlanta, killing the man and paralyzing the woman from the waist down. Outside the Georgia courtroom where Hustler publisher Larry Flynt’s famous obscenity trial took place, Franklin tried to kill Flynt because his photographs depicted interracial sex, but he failed, leaving Flynt partially paralyzed and using a wheelchair. In Chattanooga, Franklin waited in the grass outside a Pizza Hut, where a white woman who dated a black man worked, then shot them both in the parking lot. The man, a junior varsity basketball player at the University of Tennessee, was shot first, but he managed before he died to shout a warning to his girlfriend. She lived.
Franklin grew more associative. He shot and killed the manager of a Taco Bell in Doraville, Georgia, because the manager was black and waited on white women. He shot and killed a twenty-eight-year-old black man for no reason at all, through a plate-glass window of a restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia. He shot another interracial couple outside a grocery store in Oklahoma City, leaving the woman’s ten-year-old son alive. Franklin had sex with a fifteen-year-old white sex worker and then killed her when she said she had had sex with a black man. He killed a twenty-two-year-old black man who was standing at the counter of a fried chicken carryout restaurant in north Indianapolis in early January 1980 and a nineteen-year-old black man who was buying extermination spray at a convenience store on January 14 in the same city. He killed a white college student hitchhiking her way home from college in an isolated state park in Wisconsin who said she had, or would consider having, sex with a black man. He shot but failed to kill civil rights leader Vernon Jordan outside a Marriott Inn in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
In Cincinnati, he camped out on a railroad trestle with his sniper rifle waiting for an interracial couple to come out of a motel. When they didn’t, he got bored and shot two black children at random instead—cousins, age thirteen and fourteen, on their way to split a dollar at the candy store. They both died. In June 1980, he killed a twenty-two-year-old black man and his white girlfriend as they walked over the Washington Street Bridge in downtown Johnstown, Pennsylvania. That August, Franklin drove around Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park, a bustling public park where teenagers of all races came to roller-skate and flirt and listen to music. When he spotted two black boys, age eighteen and twenty, jogging with two white girls, both fifteen, Franklin opened fire, dropping the two boys to the pavement, where they bled to death. The two girls came away with shrapnel in their skin but alive. Then, as ever, Franklin packed up his rifle, put it back in the trunk, and drove on.