Legacy of Secrecy (99 page)

the South. Mississippi was still rife with racial violence in 1967: In Merid-

ian alone that year, five black churches were torched and the house of a

Head Start teacher was shot up; National States Rights Party members

were suspected by the FBI in all the attacks. Klan bombings were becom-

ing more common, with six in Mississippi in the fall of 1967.12

However, the Klan as an organization was in decline and splinter-

ing, and thus was of little use to Joseph Milteer as a resource for finding

someone to assassinate Martin Luther King. The Klan’s violent reputa-

tion and the FBI’s slow but increasing progress in bringing its members

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to justice were eroding its membership. In the 1950s, Klan membership

in the South numbered in the tens of thousands, but it had declined

dramatically by 1967. That year, a Memphis newspaper noted that one

of the largest Klan groups had lost almost half of its members in less

than a year. Even the Klan stronghold of Mississippi had only about five

hundred active members, and unlike the White Citizens’ Councils, most

of them were no longer prominent businessmen or officials.13

The Klan could still muster an occasional large crowd for the televi-

sion cameras, such as its July 6, 1967, rally in support of the Vietnam

War at Stone Mountain, just east of Atlanta. The event attracted over

three thousand people, including two thousand in Klan robes. But due

to disinterest, infighting, and a desire to avoid FBI surveillance and

infiltrators, the Klan was no longer one massive organization, but an

increasingly fragmented number of smaller ones. The two largest Klan

groups in Georgia were run by attorney James Venable and Calvin Craig.

Much smaller, but more violent, was Joseph Milteer’s Dixie Klan of

Georgia.14

In 1963, Milteer’s Dixie Klan had been described in a Miami police

intelligence report as “an underground organization [and] offshoot of

[the] hardcore membership of the KKK, John Birch, White Citizens’

Council, and other groups.” The report noted an informant’s statement

that in terms of “assassinations through rifles, dynamite, and other types

of devices, this is the worst outfit he has ever come across.” The orga-

nizations Milteer was connected to were also fervently anticommunist

and especially anti-Castro, a fact that in 1963 had brought those groups

into contact with CIA-backed Cuban exiles like John Martino. Milteer

had been in contact with Guy Banister in 1963, when both Martino and

Banister were documented associates of Carlos Marcello.15

However, by 1967 Milteer’s Dixie Klan and the other Southern

Klan groups were on the wane, even as Milteer’s hardcore supporters

increased their pressure on him to fulfill his promises to take lethal action

against Martin Luther King. The demands were all the greater because

the contributors to Milteer’s four-man clique were based in Atlanta.

Nationally, Dr. King’s power and influence were being diluted as other

black leaders emerged—a natural result as the civil rights movement

matured. These figures ranged from newly elected African American

senator Edward Brooke, of Massachusetts, to Cleveland’s Carl Stokes

(running to become the first black mayor of a major American city) to

the leaders of more radical groups like the Black Panthers. While those

leaders were increasingly in the news and the targets of racist anger

(and for some, of FBI surveillance and operations), in Atlanta Dr. King

was still the major focus. King and his actions made news locally as well

as nationally, and rarely did a week go by that Atlanta TV stations and

newspapers didn’t feature stories about King.

The plot to kill Martin Luther King was spawned in Atlanta in 1967

because of factors that were also at work in other parts of the country,

but were especially polarizing in Atlanta at that particular time. As the

South’s first large city to be integrated, Atlanta became a lightning rod

for racist demagogues. Atlanta was a center for African American higher

education, business, and organizations such as the SCLC—but that also

made it a hotbed for those looking to exploit racial tensions.16

Atlanta’s moderate leadership brought the city attention, business,

and professional sports franchises, like the Braves and the Falcons, that

bastions of segregation (such as Birmingham) lacked. Suddenly, white

Atlantans who had never socialized with black people were with them

at the integrated stadium or at Atlanta’s huge new Six Flags amusement

park. In just a few years, Atlanta appeared to transition from apartheid-

like conditions to a degree of integration unheard of in the South—but

simmering racial tensions remained. The more progress the city made,

the more racist leaders could exploit those advances. Georgia switched

from voting for JFK in 1960 to backing Barry Goldwater in 1964, and

would soon back the even more extreme George Wallace in the 1968

presidential race.

By 1967, several factors were causing the racial situation in Atlanta to

reach a critical point. Though the city was not known for racial violence,

it occasionally flared and a racial killing occurred in Atlanta in January

1967: As the
New York Times
reported, unknown assailants shot dead the

wife of a preacher, following an attempt to burn down their church.17

From the perspective of black pride and civil rights, King’s proclama-

tion of the new slogan “Black is beautiful” at the August 1967 confer-

ence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta was a

landmark event. However, the BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL signs that began

to appear in the city also created more opportunities for racist leaders

to exploit the angst of some white Atlanta citizens.

Like many other cities, Atlanta was in the midst of a major transition

in education and housing that racists from Milteer to Georgia gover-

nor Lester Maddox exploited to their advantage. Restaurants had been

integrated only recently, and Maddox’s stand against that change had

propelled him to the governorship.18 Metro Atlanta schools had only

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just been desegregated by 1967, so many white students in the area were

attending schools with black students for the first time, something most

of their parents had never done.

As in cities across America, many of Atlanta’s major real estate firms

and speculators engaged in blockbusting, using scare tactics to panic

middle-class whites into selling their Atlanta homes and fleeing to the

suburbs. They essentially carved up the city, designating certain areas

for blockbusting, while even black professionals were informally kept

out of the more affluent areas that were home to real estate–firm owners

and prominent Atlanta businessmen.19

In just a few years, Atlanta went from being majority white to major-

ity black, while Milteer and his three partners exploited the strains of

transition. They particularly targeted the General Motors plant in the

Lakewood area of southeast Atlanta. The neighborhoods around the

plant, where many of its workers lived, were hit especially hard by

blockbusting. Depending on the number of shifts, the plant employed

between 7,500 and 9,000 union workers, all members of the United Auto

Workers (UAW). Union locals of that size, and the high-paying jobs they

generated, were relatively rare in the South. Since the Great Depres-

sion, conservative Southern governors and legislatures had generally

been hostile to unions. Organizing in industries like textiles had largely

ground to a halt after the National Guard and state police fired on strik-

ing workers and their families in the mid-1930s. However, the economic

boom of World War II and its aftermath brought a new wave of industry

to the South, and Atlanta’s more moderate leadership welcomed three

huge auto plants. In addition to Lakewood, another General Motors

plant had gone up in northeast Atlanta, and a Ford plant had been built

near the growing Atlanta airport on the south side; the UAW repre-

sented all of them.

The UAW plants were among the relatively few places where Atlanta

workers with a high school education or less could earn very high wages

and exceptional benefits. Some workers traveled from as far away as

Alabama, driving an hour and a half each way for the type of lucra-

tive union jobs that were largely unavailable in eastern Alabama. Most

workers lived much closer, many in the almost all white middle-class

neighborhoods near each of the three Atlanta auto plants.

Ironically, the workers who lived in, or had moved to Atlanta from,

the more depressed rural areas of Alabama and Georgia were some

of the people most likely to support Milteer and his Citizens’ Council

associates, even though the Citizens Council had a long history of being

anti-union and anti-labor. Yet many of those more rural, less educated

workers had grown up under the sway of racist politicians like 1930s

and ’40s Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge (father of Georgia Senator

Herman Talmadge), who had for years reportedly received a kickback

on every Klan uniform sold in Georgia.20 Those raised in such a racist

atmosphere resented having to work alongside blacks at the integrated

plants, since the UAW was an integrated union. Yet most workers had

no other alternative that could provide nearly as well for themselves

and their families.

Most UAW members in Atlanta had never worked with, lived beside,

or gone to school with blacks—something racist leaders began exploit-

ing in the mid-1950s, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to inte-

grate schools and the resulting tumult in cities like Little Rock, Arkansas.

According to labor historian John Barnard, “white racist organizations

actively recruited and agitated in some southern plants and [UAW]

locals,” and “80 percent of the white members, including half of the

officers of Local 988 in Memphis, joined the White Citizens’ Council. In

Atlanta, perhaps as many as 5,000 members in three large locals joined

the Ku Klux Klan, which underwent a revival throughout the South

in the mid-1950s, and a member of Local 34 [at the Lakewood General

Motors Plant] was the Georgia Klan’s Imperial Wizard.”21

However, it’s important to remember that even those figures rep-

resented just a small percentage of the overall workforce at all three

Atlanta auto plants. By 1967, those Klan membership figures would

have been just a fraction of their 1950s totals, mirroring the group’s

membership decline in the rest of the South. However, the integration

of housing and schools that started in the mid-1960s had brought a new

wave of resentment to some of the workers. While it was no longer fash-

ionable to join the Klan, Milteer and his two associates in the local White

Citizens’ Council had found a new way to tap into the fears of some of

the workers. Taking advantage of the worries being stoked by conser-

vative state politicians and real estate firms, they gave the workers a

way to fight back—by donating money from their substantial weekly

paychecks to fight civil rights.

Milteer used a longtime auto-assembly worker at the Lakewood

General Motors plant, Hugh R. Spake, as his front man for talking up

Milteer’s plans and helping collect the money each Friday. Spake had

been a decorated veteran during World War II, but his friends and fam-

ily had noticed a marked change in him after the death of his first wife.

He became bitter at the world and focused his energy on the extreme

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conservative and racist causes he shared with Joseph Milteer. The two

were joined in their activities at the Lakewood auto plant by a prominent

Atlanta attorney and a local dentist, both members of the White Citizens’

Council, though they were acting for themselves in their dealings with

Milteer and Spake, not for the Council.22

There were several reasons why the Atlanta auto plants in general,

and Lakewood in particular, were ripe for Milteer’s efforts by 1967. The

day-shift workers at Lakewood, those Milteer targeted most, had the

greatest seniority. Most were children of the Depression, many were

veterans, and they didn’t mind the grueling assembly-line work because

it allowed them to provide a good life for their families. But by 1967,

their world was in flux on every front. Minorities were moving into their

neighborhoods and schools, and the Democratic Party, which domi-

nated Georgia, was changing from segregationist to pro–civil rights. At

home, divorce was becoming more common, and their children were

experimenting with interracial dating, drugs, and antiwar protests that

had been unthinkable only a few years earlier. Milteer and his part-

ners were ready to channel all of their anger and confusion into hating

minorities.

Most of the Lakewood workers had originally lived in more rural