INTERMISSION
The FBI and the Ku Klux Klan. Best Friends Forever?
Photo by W.C. King, used with permission of Chattanooga Times Free Press
Guide to the Racists in this Chapter
Kenneth Adams Klansman from Anniston, Alabama
Raymond Anderson United Klans Tennessee Grand Dragon in the early 1960s
Richard and Robert Bowling Brothers who bombed things for Stoner
W.H. Brough Leader of Florida’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; friend of Roper, enemy of Hendrix
Emmett Carr Middle Tennessee Grand Titan and Pro-Southerners
Asa Carter Alabama renegade Klansman
Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss One of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers in Birmingham
E.S. Dollar Nashville Grand Titan
Eldon Edwards Leader of the United Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Vernon Doyle Ellington United Klans Tennessee Grand Dragon in the late 1960s
Ed Fields Stoner’s sidekick
Thomas Hamilton Leader of the Association of Carolina Klans
Bill Hendrix Leader of Florida’s Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and enemy of Samuel Roper
J. Edgar Hoover Head of FBI
William Hugh Morris Leader of the Federated Klans of Alabama
Thomas Norvell FBI informant during the Hattie Cotton case
Harry William Pyle Memphis Pro-Southerners
Charles Reed Thomas Norvell’s friend
Samuel Roper Leader of the Association of Georgia Klans and nemesis of Bill Hendrix
Gary Rowe FBI informant and Klan infiltrator
M.B. Sherrill Florida White Circle League, Pro-Southerners, and Grand Titan for the eastern coast territory of the Association of Florida Klans
J.B. Stoner Klan, Christian Anti-Jewish Party, National States Rights Party
At the metaphorical heart of this book is a question: Why was the FBI so unhelpful? So, I thought here, at the physical heart of the book, we should take a stab at answering it.
Here, in the months between the Hattie Cotton bombing and the JCC bombing, is when the FBI would have you believe that something fundamental shifted in the approach of these terrorists. When J. Edgar Hoover briefed the National Security Council and the president on November 6, 1958, he told them,
Since January 1, 1957, there have been over 90 bombings, or attempted bombings, in the United States, of these, at least 69 have involved Negro victims and at least eight, Jewish religious and educational facilities. [That part was typed. The next part was handwritten.] [Illegible, possibly “Past”] 3 weeks—90 bomb threats: [Illegible again, and again perhaps “Past”] week—[illegible] Nov 1–4 were 16 such threats. Waves of hysteria allowing actual bombings in Georgia & Tenn [typed] In the early bombings [handwritten] prior to 1958 [typed] there was no evidence to show that these bombings could be attributed to specific organizations. Rather, they were individual acts of terror strictly within the jurisdiction of local authorities. When these outrages occurred, we in the FBI have made immediately available to local authorities our laboratory and finger print facilities here in Washington.
As the bombings directed toward religious and educational facilities continued, the FBI extended its cooperation to cover out-of-state [handwritten] investigative [typed] leads which local authorities could not handle. We extended such assistance to the Jacksonville, Florida, and Birmingham, Alabama, Police Departments in connection with the bombings of a Jewish center and a Negro high school in Jacksonville on April 28, 1958, and the attempted bombing of a Jewish temple in Birmingham on the same day.
Recently, however, there has been some indication of a general interstate pattern to these bombings.100
This is not how local law enforcement felt. We’re going to talk about this at length later, but the FBI was so unhelpful that law enforcement officials in Southern states had to hold a conference themselves to share information on bombings. It’s also obviously not true that the bombings before 1958 were all somehow only local events. We had racists from all over the country in town before Hattie Cotton exploded. Our Klan had ties with Klan groups throughout the South.
Now is probably a good time to talk about those Klan groups.
Detangling The Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan had been somewhat dormant in Nashville and Middle Tennessee during the war years. This may be surprising if you assume every bad thing in the pre-1963 South was done by hooded men by the light of a burning cross. But it’s also important to remember that in a racist society where the justice system can be counted on to keep minorities “in their place,” racists don’t need groups like the Klan. The system does the work the Klan would do.
As we talked about with the Columbia Riots, racists saw growing evidence that the system was not necessarily going to continue to serve racist ends. This “failure” of the system to oppress Black people and keep them “in their place” indicated to white racists that Tennessee once again needed people working outside the system to do what the system would not—keep Black people separate from and in lower social standing to white people.
We needed, they thought, masked vigilantes with secret identities to act outside the law to keep regular folks safe. The fact that the Klan and Batman are motivated by the same impulses is troubling, but it should also help us understand how Klan members saw themselves and the seductive story they told themselves about why their activities were important and necessary. They were superheroes in their own minds.101
If some “bad guys” got hurt along the way? Well, who weeps for the Joker?
An important thing to keep in mind when we’re discussing the Klan of the 1950s is that there wasn’t “The” Klan. Just like we see on the far right today, these groups were constantly beset with infighting and people breaking off to form new, “truer” groups and then rejoining old groups or not doing anything official, but still hanging out with people from the old groups. Obviously, people who found crosses burning in their yards didn’t run out and grab the nearest white-hooded figure and ask him specifically which racist group he belonged to, they just referred to The Klan. But it might be more clarifying to think of “A Klan,” since not everybody who was a Klan member belonged to the same organization or even recognized other Klans as legitimate.
But by the mid-1950s, we had an active Klan in Davidson County, led by Middle Tennessee Grand Titan Emmett Carr. The news coverage at the time indicates that right below Carr in that Klan was E.S. Dollar, the Nashville Grand Titan. When crosses were burned at Fort Negley—the site of a Union Civil War fort that sits on a hill just south of downtown—these were probably the guys who organized it. Figuring out the structures above them is difficult. Klansmen were petty and liked to bicker and there was infighting and convoluted feuds. A great deal of this next part could be reduced to “Boo-hoo-hoo. You hurt my racist feelings and I’m not going to be in the Klan with you,” but I think it’s important to try to understand.
At the start of the 1950s, there were four main Klans in the Southeast—Thomas Hamilton’s Association of Carolina Klans, Bill Hendrix’s Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan out of Florida, William Hugh Morris’s Federated Klans of Alabama, and Samuel Roper’s Association of Georgia Klans. The first three had an alliance, of sorts, but newspaper reports make it clear that Roper and Hendrix never could get on the same page and, thus, the Association of Georgia Klans was perceived as being in some state of exile because they were too violent or their approach and philosophies were too radical. There may be some hint of truth there, but I think it’s also important to note that this is mostly mythologizing to give a petty, personal fight some outsized importance.
The Klan mentioned in Nashville in the early 1950s was the Federated Ku Klux Klan, Inc., which (based again on news stories) seemed to be at least loosely affiliated with the Federated Klans of Alabama. In 1950, William Hugh Morris (of the Federated Klans of Alabama) was claiming he had a Klavern here in Nashville, though he refused to believe they could be involved with a rash of cross burnings in town.102
In 1951, the Florida Klan split. Hendrix continued to lead the Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and W.H. Brough started the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Brough’s group aligned with the Association of Georgia Klans—the Klan of Samuel Roper, Hendrix’s nemesis.103
On Christmas Day, 1951, a bomb exploded under the house of Harry and Harriett Moore, Florida NAACP leaders who lived in Mims, just sound of Jacksonville and east of Orlando. The Moores died. Four Klansmen were implicated in their deaths: Earl Brooklyn—who had been kicked out of the Georgia Klan for “being too violent”—Tillman Belvin, Joseph Cox, and Edward Spivey. They were never convicted, and Brooklyn, Belvin, and Cox died shortly after the bombing. There’s still some controversy about whether they were in Hendrix’s group or Brough’s. Frankly, I don’t understand enough about the Florida situation to say with certainty. For our purposes, it’s worth noting that by 1951, Florida Klansmen had figured out how to blow things up and kill people with dynamite and get away with it, and that our Klan had meaningful ties to Florida Klansmen (and may have had opinions on and chosen sides in the Hendrix-Brough feud).
In 1952, Hendrix and Hamilton had a falling out and the Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Association of Carolina Klans broke their alliance. Meanwhile, Hendrix and Morris seemed to be getting buddy-buddy.104
In 1953, Hendrix and other Klan leaders started the United Klans, intending to bring all the small Klans they weren’t fighting with together into a group that would focus on segregation-related activism and avoid worrying about religion.105 This group quickly morphed into the United Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan106 with Eldon Edwards from Atlanta heading it up.107 From newspaper coverage, it’s clear that this is the same group as the US Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which, by the end of the era we’re looking at, would be headed up by Alabaman Robert Shelton.108
In the middle of May 1954, M.B. Sherrill was passing out racist literature in Florida that came from the White Circle League of America, a segregationist outfit out of Chicago devoted to keeping white neighborhoods white. An informant told the FBI that Sherrill had been fighting with the Northern leaders of the League, so he broke away from them and was forming an organization known as the Pro-Southerners. This would be just like the White Circle League, but Sherrill “felt it would be more successful in the south inasmuch as it would be an all Southern organization rather than an organization with headquarters in the north.”109 Sherrill’s partner in this venture was Harry William Pyle, from Memphis, Tennessee.
In July 1954, the Pro-Southerners in Florida had reached out to at least one member of the Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and asked him to join, but Bill Hendrix told the Klansman not to go.
Hendrix and Sherrill had been in the Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan together, but after the big break-up back in 1951 Hendrix stayed with the Southern Knights and Sherrill, as well as starting up the Pro-Southerners, became the Grand Titan for the eastern coast territory of Florida for the Association of Florida Klans, a group that included the aforementioned Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.110
When Emmett Carr was waffling about whether he still wanted to be in the Tennessee Klan in the mid-1950s, he was the leader of the Pro-Southerners group here in Nashville.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
The Christian Anti-Jewish Party
On October 27, 1958, Life ran a photo (photo pg. 108) that had been taken in Chattanooga in December 1954. The picture shows a rally thrown by the Christian Anti-Jewish Party—Stoner and Fields’s first foray into publicly hating Jews together. Neither one of them lived in Chattanooga at the time. The original photo was destroyed when the Chattanooga Times and the Chattanooga Free-Press merged, so other than Stoner (who is instantly recognizable in his bowtie) and the two Bowling brothers (who are identified in the caption), the identities of the other people on the stage are still something of a mystery.
But many of Stoner and Fields’s associates are known. After Stoner and Fields folded the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, but before they started the National States Rights Party, they briefly organized the United White Party in 1957. Since it quickly morphed into the National States Rights Party the next year, it’s barely worth remarking on, except that it has a known founding membership list: Emory Burke, Dan Kurtz (member of the Christian Front in New York, and the National Renaissance Party, later active in the NSRP), Wallace Allen, John Kasper, Ned Dupes (a Knoxville businessman and supporter of John Kasper), Matt Koehl (member of the National Renaissance Party, worked on one of Admiral Crommelin’s political campaigns, member and eventual leader of the American Nazi Party), Ed Fields, and J.B. Stoner.
AP Photo/Horace Court
I imagine some of these men are in that 1954 picture. I am confident I recognize two of them. I think that’s Asa Carter in the middle (compare with his photo in Chapter 3) and Kenneth Adams on the right of the group on the right.
We’ve already talked some about Carter, since he was in Nashville in the weeks leading up to the Hattie Cotton bombing, but we’ve not talked about his friend and fellow Anniston, Alabama, Klansman—Kenneth Adams. As far as I can tell, Kenneth Adams is only tangentially related to our story. However, it is one hell of a tangent. H. Brant Ayers, the publisher of the Anniston Star, Adams’s hometown paper, described Adams as “a personable psychopath,” and said Adams was responsible for a lot of racial violence that happened in Anniston.111 Adams was one of the men arrested for attacking Nat King Cole during a performance. He was among the men who organized the attack on the Freedom Riders in Anniston in 1961. According to the Anniston Star, “these episodes were only two of the more than a dozen brutal shootings and beatings he inflicted upon black residents in and around Anniston over a fifteen-year rampage.”112 You will be unsurprised to learn that a few years ago the Anniston Star discovered in FBI files that Adams had (back in the 1960s) been plotting to bomb the paper as well as the home of an integrationist pastor. The FBI had not communicated word of those plots at the time. And Adams was affiliated with the Dixie Knights.
AP Photo/Horace Court
Here, then, is the core of the network I’ve been looking at. Men who facilitated and perpetrated some of the worst crimes of the civil rights era and got away with it. And they’re not hiding—not their faces, not that they knew each other.
If I’m right about that being Asa Carter and Kenneth Adams, then five of the ten men on that stage in 1954 went on to be racist bombers—the Bowling brothers, Stoner, Carter, and Adams. And we’re likely looking at three faces I know were in town in the weeks before the Hattie Cotton bombing: J.B. Stoner, Ed Fields, and Asa Carter. Stoner was already a known Klansman, a known pen pal of a Nazi, and a known supporter of the white nationalist group the Columbians, as well as leading the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, by the time he got to Nashville. He’d already been kicked out of the Chattanooga Klan twice for being “too violent.” Ed Fields had already been a Columbian. He was already Stoner’s partner in crime. Carter’s men had already attacked Nat King Cole. Carter had already become a national figure with his rants about the evils of rock ‘n’ roll. He’d already started his renegade Klan group. All that before Hattie Cotton exploded.
Three incredibly violent men with a known track record for inciting others to violence with ties to incredibly violent Klan groups that had either splintered off or were on the verge of splintering off from the larger Klan, men who knew each other and had organized together in the past, men who were all in town in the weeks before the Hattie Cotton bombing—and yet, as far as the public knew, the police could not find any decent bombing suspects.
Throughout the writing of this book, I have thought, “If only people had seen that these weren’t isolated incidents, that there was an association of terrorists who all knew and helped each other, they could have stopped them before all of the murders in the ’60s.” But this picture ran in LIFE in 1958. People knew.
But in that great American way of ours, we deliberately chose to not know it. Our ability to forget our past (almost as soon as it happens) cost us, and continues to cost us, dearly.
The FBI Joins the Klan
That great American Unknowing was in this case facilitated by the myth the FBI was making up. Are you going to trust this photo from 1954, which appears to show that many of the worst of the worst violent racists knew each other and organized together, or are you going to trust the FBI, who claimed that we didn’t see interstate planning until 1958?
Elsewhere in the FBI file, there’s a memo from Hoover dated September 2, 1965,113 addressed to the attorney general, stating,
As you know, this Bureau has solved a number of cases involving racial violence in the South. In this regard, public attention particularly was focused on the FBI’s role in the solution of the brutal murders of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel A. Penn, and the three civil rights workers in Mississippi. However, we have achieved a number of other tangible accomplishments, most of which are not publicly known, and I thought you might be interested in them.114
He goes on: “Particularly significant has been the high-level penetration we have achieved of Klan organizations. At the present time, there are 14 Klan groups in existence. We have penetrated every one of them through informants and currently are operating informants in top-level positions of leadership in seven of them.” One of those men penetrating the Klan was Gary Rowe. At the FBI’s behest, Rowe infiltrated Eastview Klavern 13 (one of the most violent Klan groups in Alabama) and was involved in attacking the Freedom Riders, probably bombing Martin Luther King Jr.’s motel room, and possibly murdering civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo (he was at least in the car with the person who shot her).115 Robert Chambliss claimed Rowe actually planted the dynamite at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Much later, Rowe told authorities he’d shot and killed a Black man in a Birmingham riot in 1963 and that the FBI had covered it up.116
This whole thing is pretty bad—from the FBI protecting violent racist informants to bragging that it has control of half of the Klans in the nation in 1965—but it’s about to get worse. Hoover says,
In one southern state, for example, the governor, on one occasion, expressed his great concern and fear of an outbreak of racial violence because of the tense situation. But the head of the Klan organization in that state is our informant, and we have had him warn every member of his organization that he will not tolerate violence in any form. As a result, we have been successful to date in holding Klan violence in the entire state to an absolute minimum.117
Do I even have to tell you what state he’s talking about?
In 1967, Hoover put out a secret report titled “Ku Klux Klan Investigations FBI Accomplishments.” In it he gives more detail about how things worked in Tennessee:
In the early stages of Klan growth in the State of Tennessee, we were able to develop as a Bureau informant the Grand Dragon of the United Klans of America, Realm of Tennessee. Through this high-level source we were able to control the expansion of the Klan. More importantly, we were able to discourage violence throughout the state. The Klan in Tennessee has not expanded to the proportions it has in other states and its lack of success can be attributed to our highly placed informant.118
For as long as I’ve been working on this project, I’ve heard rumors that the FBI ran the West Tennessee Klan. Until I saw this file, though, I was unable to substantiate it.
Toward the end of his Counterpoint article, “The Troubling Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.,” historian David Garrow names who he thinks this Grand Dragon is: “The evidence points to ME 313-E being former UKA Grand Dragon V. Doyle Ellington, now aged 80, who lives in Brownsville and is on Facebook.”119
I don’t think this is right.
Here’s my reasoning: the early stages of Klan growth in Tennessee were the 1950s. Vernon Doyle Ellington was 20 in 1958. And we know that at that point the Grand Dragon of Tennessee was George Compton of Maryville. He would have been a member of the United Klans of America. In August 1963, Highlander Center leader Aimee Horton wrote a letter to the editor of the Knoxville Journal about a Klan rally in the area:
The meeting was attended not only by local citizenry and the curious, but by various outside higher officers in the Ku Klux movement, including certain higher officials from Georgia. As a result of this meeting, it was determined that one Raymond Anderson, who acted as master of ceremonies at the meetings, was the apparent local president or grand dragon of the klan.120
I didn’t find a lot of information about Anderson other than that he was a private detective.121 In August 1965, the Commercial Appeal reported that “Raymond Anderson of Maryville, the Ku Klux Klan’s grand dragon for Tennessee claims that much of the credit for the fact that a mass civil rights demonstration at Brownsville on Saturday of last week went off without incident is due to the klan.” That takes some hutzpah, but it’s actually what Grand Dragon Anderson told the Commercial Appeal that I find more interesting: “And a number of state Highway Patrol members, sheriff’s officers and FBI agents came up and told me they appreciated what we did to keep down trouble.”122
It makes sense that FBI agents were at a big civil rights demonstration. But would they really have been advertising that they were FBI agents? Were they wearing big FBI emblazoned jackets? If not, if they were just there in “random law enforcement bureaucrat” get up, how did Anderson, a guy from East Tennessee, know who the FBI agents in West Tennessee were?
It gets a little weirder. In October 1965, news started coming out about the findings of an investigation the House Un-American Activities Committee had been making into the Ku Klux Klan. A story ran in the Knoxville News-Sentinel stating that HUAC had heard testimony that there were only five major Klan organizations in Tennessee at the time—Klaverns of the United Klans of America. Those Klaverns were in Knoxville, Maryville, Sevierville, Etowah, and Harriman. The investigation found, “no evidence of organized Klaverns in Middle and West Tennessee” and the paper reported that “Raymond R. Anderson of Maryville was named as Grand Dragon for Tennessee and Maryville as the state KKK headquarters.”123
If the FBI was controlling the Grand Dragon of the KKK in 1965, that was Raymond Anderson. But you want further proof? Even though late 1965 was full of news stories about the HUAC investigation into the Klan (and what they were finding out about the Klan here in Tennessee), in February, the Commercial Appeal reported that the HUAC had decided not to call Anderson to testify. The chair of the committee, Edwin Willis, “was told Anderson’s group is small, weak, and under close watch by state and local law enforcement agencies.”124 It goes without saying that this is not how Anderson’s group had been portrayed until this point. It seems more likely that the FBI didn’t want Anderson under oath in front of Congress, for fear of what might come out.
A year later, in February 1967, Anderson had quit being Grand Dragon. The Commercial Appeal reported that “V. Doyle Ellington, Brownsville café owner, told The Commercial Appeal he was elected Grand Dragon of Tennessee for the United Klans of America recently after Raymond Anderson of Maryville resigned for ‘personal reasons.’”125 Being discovered as an FBI informant is a pretty personal reason to want to flee the Klan. Just saying.
I feel fairly confident about this, with two caveats. Hoover was still bragging about the FBI running the Klan in Tennessee way into 1967, months after Anderson resigned. That and Garrow knows what he’s talking about. If Garrow thinks it was Ellington, he likely has good reasons I’m not privy to. But it sure seems like it was Anderson.
Which raises another possibility: What if the FBI didn’t have control of the man, but of the position? What if every man going back to whenever the FBI took control of the Tennessee UKA was expected to be an informant when he rose to power? We just don’t know enough about what the FBI’s relationship with the Tennessee Klan looked like, but it’s clear to me that it was somewhat different than the kinds of infiltration they did in other areas and was unique in the web of informants they used.
Hoover said in 1967 that the FBI had developed the Grand Dragon as an informant back “in the early stages of Klan growth in the State of Tennessee.”126 Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of context clues about when Hoover considered these “early stages” to have been. If the FBI only had control over Anderson, then Hoover is fudging the timeframe and it was not in the actual early stages (the timeframe we’re discussing in this book) but in the early 1960s.
But if the FBI is being honest and they took over United Klan in Tennessee during the rise of the Klan (which would mean they controlled the office of Grand Dragon, not just the man in the office), that had to be in the mid-50s, because that’s when that was. If that’s true, it sure explains a lot that’s been weird in this story up until now. This is how the FBI had someone in the Klan who could tell them that the Klan wasn’t planning on palling around with John Kasper. This is how the FBI knew that Thomas Norvell could be trusted, even when Charles Reed claimed he was lying. This is why the FBI hid Reed and Norvell from the Nashville police. The Klansmen were their boys.
If I’m right about this, then the FBI’s conflict of interest here is so big you can probably see it from Mars. If an FBI informant is running the Klan that the bombers of Hattie Cotton may have belonged to, the FBI cannot let the police’s investigation go far enough to involve, and potentially implicate, their informant. They have to hobble the investigation.
After Hoover told the president of the United States that the FBI’s running the Klan had resulted in Tennessee’s Klan being practically nonviolent, there’s just no way the FBI was ever going to find Klansmen tied to Tennessee bombings. Or, for that matter, tied to Dr. King’s assassination.
A Great Disappointment
Finding out that the FBI was running some Klans has shaken me in ways I honestly don’t know how to process. I think I’m pretty aware of America’s shortcomings and I know we’ve done a lot of evil and lied to ourselves until we believed it was good. I moved around a lot when I was a kid and I have first-hand experience with the ways small towns become corrupt and how dangerous it can be for the people who are not under the protection of those systems.
But I have also had a very core and fundamental belief—one so core that I didn’t even realize I had it until this knowledge violated it—that there is help, that, if you can just hold on and shout loud enough and get word to the good people, they will come to your aid.
But who was coming to help Black people in America in the 1950s and 1960s when the FBI ran the Klan? When the law enforcement arm of the federal government was leading the lawless racists terrorizing them? I feel stupid and naïve for having this belief that there must be good guys somewhere who can do something. But it breaks my heart that it’s not true, that the people who should have been protecting African Americans were literally in charge of the groups that were harming them.
And to what end? Hoover claims it reduced violence among Klan members, but that’s just not true. Klan members who couldn’t be violent in the UKA, because the FBI was influencing it to be more peaceful, joined groups that were plenty violent—like the Dixie Knights or Asa Carter’s crowd or J.B. Stoner’s circle. I think we should consider the evidence that the FBI running the Klan without aiming to shut it down might actually have increased racist violence because it drove violent people into these fringe groups full of deeply radicalized assholes who could gin each other up to actually do the things they’d been talking about.
This left the FBI monitoring the racists most likely to be non-violent, not the violent splinter groups. Clearly, someone like Gary Rowe was supposed to be an answer to that problem. He was willing to be violent and present for violence and he was the FBI’s guy. And while the FBI was running him, he claimed he killed someone; he may have killed Viola Liuzzo; and he beat up the Freedom Riders, among other things. Would those things have happened without Gary Rowe? Sure. Maybe. But it feels deeply disingenuous to argue that the FBI’s infiltration efforts made things less violent when people were being murdered by violent extremists so that the FBI could stay close to violent extremists.
More troubling, and something I think a lot about in the wake of all the “lone wolf” racial terrorism happening as I write this book: is the rise of the one angry white dude who steps into a gathering place and opens fire occurring in part because of the presence of law enforcement in racist groups?
If the way racist terrorists kept the FBI from stopping them was to leave the infiltrated Klan, it seems likely that a response to the FBI figuring out how to infiltrate these smaller violent terror cells would be to not have terror cells at all—to plan acts alone and keep them secret until it’s too late for anyone to stop you.
And I can almost see the logic of the FBI. Maybe they really did believe that taking over the Klan was the way to make it less violent. But it’s tough to argue that it worked. If we want to circle back around to our superhero discussion, we’re deep in the Batman problem. To what extent does the presence of Batman spur the rise of worse and worse villains? Except we have the added twist of learning that Batman was the Joker’s boss all along.
I think our tendency is to try to view this as some great moral conundrum in which our heroes must compromise their good beliefs in small ways in order to advance their good beliefs in large ways, but it’s not really.
You know who runs the Klan? Bad people. It’s that simple.
I would have hoped that the FBI would have recognized that early on. But here we are.