The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (44 page)

Myrtis Hendricks denied the substance of her allegation when contacted by the committee. While admitting that she had worked for Nix, she said she was afraid of her former boyfriend, Thomas McGee, but refused to elaborate further. The committee’s attempt to interview FBI informants who had furnished relevant information was unsuccessful. The informants were either unavailable or uncooperative.

The Committee did note, however, that “Laurel, Miss., the scene of the alleged activities, lies between New Orleans and Birmingham. James Earl Ray traveled between these two cities in March 1968.”

More recently, two other pieces of information have surfaced to tie the KKK to MLK’s death. According to a 1993 report in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, rogue government agents in the South recruited KKK members for local ops during the sixties – and some of these Klan stooges were in Memphis on the day of King’s assassination. And, FBI records turned up by researchers Larry J. Hancock and Stuart Wexler show that Ray knew of a $100,000 bounty being offered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi to kill Martin Luther King Jr before Ray escaped from a Missouri prison prior to reaching Memphis.

In his definitive book of the King assassination,
Killing the Dream,
historian Gerald Posner speculates that “there was a conspiracy [to kill King], but on a very low level. Someone, I’d guess part of a racist group, probably agreed to pay him [Ray] maybe $25,000 or $50,000.” Posner, it should be said, is no paranoid conspiracy loon. He thinks JFK
was
murdered by a lone nut.

The KKK’s connection to Timothy McVeigh, the bomber who brought down the Alfred P. Murrah building in downtown Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995 is straightforward. When the FBI raided McVeigh’s house they found overwhelming evidence that he was a member of the KKK, which he probably joined in 1992. That said, he seems to have been a disaffected, inactive member who was more committed to other far right organizations, specifically the Aryan Republican Army, a group of Midwest bank robbers and racists, whose explosive kit he seems to have borrowed. Or been supplied with.

The Klan’s own take on McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is a convoluted scheme whereby the Feds committed the outrage to blacken the Klan. Why, the FBI would go to such efforts to discredit such small political fry is unclear. Following paramilitarization in the 1970s, the Klan had split into some one hundred autonomous or semi-autonomous fragments, and declined until its main variant had no more than 2,000 members. The Klan’s place on the racist right of the US has long been taken by the militias and neo-Nazi groups.

As for the KKK running major companies with a view to lacing their products with drugs to make black men impotent, this is a plain and simple urban myth. Kentucky Fried Chicken is the favourite target of the legend, with the Colonel reputed to put saltpetre in with the spices, and have 10 per cent of profits put in the Klan coffers. Actually, the Colonel is long dead, and 10 per cent of KFC’s profits, even 10 per cent of the Colonel’s will – if it did a have a pro-Klan clause, which it didn’t – would leave a public paper trail wider than a four-lane black top. Marlboro (you get three K shapes from the chevrons on the packet!), Kools and Coors have all been the target of similar rumours that they are tools of the Klan. They are not.

Indisputably, the Klan has been involved in numerous local terrorist conspiracies over the years. As for the MLK assassination, there is no evidence to tie the Klan as an organization to the crime, but it is not beyond possibility that Klan individuals were involved.

Further Reading

Wyn Wade,
The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America
, 1987

Worth H. Weller and Brad Thompson,
Under the Hood: Unmasking the Modern Ku Klux Klan
, 1998

www.snopes.com/business/alliance/sanders.asp

KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS

The Knights of Columbus society was founded by Father Michael McGivney, an Irish Catholic priest, in Connecticut in 1882. Catholics in America were excluded from many labour unions and fraternal benefit societies, and McGivney hoped his society would be a mutual help society based on the Church of Rome’s teachings. Like other clubs of the time, it adopted arcane rituals and promises, but ensured these not so onerous that they conflicted with the Papal ban on secret orders. Only Catholics were, and are, allowed.

The KoC is invariably and robustly right wing, and in the 1950s supported Joe McCarthy’s anti-Red witch-hunts. Nonetheless, it is lauded for its charitable works, funded through such exciting means as pasta nights. So popular has the KoC become, that it has spread throughout the USA and to Canada and Mexico. An Irish facsimile, the Knights of St Columbanus was founded in Eire in 1915, and remains active.

It may come as a surprise to the KoC members and their families attending the pasta night, but the KoC is actually nothing but a front for the
Society of Jesus
/the
Bavarian Illuminati
(take your pick) and is conspiring to overthrow the Protestant faith. Aside from swearing the Bloody Oath, which is the same one the Jesuits promise to obey (allegedly; see p. 492), members of the KoC, like the Jesuits, perform their initiation under the symbol INRI. According to www.biblebelievers.org.au, INRI stands for “
Iustum, Necar, Reges, Impious
”, meaning “It is just to exterminate or annihilate impious or heretical Kings, Governments, or Rulers”.

Er, actually INRI is the abbreviation for the Latin “
Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm
”. This means “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”.

Still, never let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy. Or indeed let logic be a bar. One internet site seeking to expose the Knights of Columbus reaches the exemplar in non sequiturs: “The capital of the United States is Washington D.C. which stands for ‘District of Columbia’. America was discovered by a man named Columbus. The Fraternal order Knights of Columbus have been exposed aided [sic] the drug trade in Colombia the country.”

KoC members have brought successful libel actions against parties proclaiming they uphold the Bloody Oath.

Further Reading

Christopher Kauffman,
Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus
, 1982

KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

Founded in 1854 by Dr George W. L. Bickley, the Knights were initially a ginger group for an expansion of the US southwards by which it would make a “Golden Circle” around the Gulf of Mexico. Bickley’s project had a particular lure for southerners, because the acquired lands were deemed wholly suitable for slave-worked plantations. And in this newly expanded US the South would dominate the abolitionist North.

When the geographical Golden Circle failed to materialize, the Knights turned to cheerleading for Southern independence. With the coming of the Civil War in 1861, the Knights thickened the plot by working behind enemy lines (i.e. in the North), where their castles (lodges) tried to sabotage the Union military effort. Especially active in the Midwest, the Knights opposed the draft, spread anti-war propaganda, organized politically to stymie the Republican party of Lincoln, ran contraband goods to Confederate capital Richmond, ran escaped Confederate POWs home, and assisted Confederate spies. Joseph Holt, United States Judge Advocate General, warned in a report to Congress that the KGC was involved in the “Northwest Conspiracy” to remove this part of the Union from Washington’s control.

But the KGC’s real claim to infamy came with the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln
. Northern politicians immediately rushed into ink to damn the Knights for their role in Lincoln’s murder. They had lots of suspicions, but little evidence. However, a century later, in 1966, the Northern accusation was retrospectively aided by the publication of a diary by John H. Surratt, one of those implicated in the plot to kill the president. A Confederate spy, Surratt was also a member of the KGC. Aside from an intoxicating account of the Masonic-like initiation ceremony of the KGC (see Document, p.308), Surratt drops tantalizing mentions of another KGC member throughout his diary – one John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s undisputed assassin. Although Surratt was quite happy to claim a role in a plot to kidnap Lincoln, he was at pains to proclaim his innocence in Lincoln’s murder most foul. Thus he writes:

November 8, 1864. – The election returns are in, at least enough to decide that McClellan is defeated. To save the South, Lincoln must be removed before the 4th of March. He shall never again be inaugurated. Booth wants his life, but I shall oppose anything like murder. It would serve our turn quite as well to capture the despot, and keep him for a while in Libby Prison. I reckon the South would then gain the day.

Surratt’s diary is not as damning as it seems; it was largely authored by its editor Dion Haco, who was not beyond exaggeration in the interests of a good sell. Which is not to say that the “Fifth Columnist” Knights of the Golden Circle did not aid John Wilkes Booth; it is merely to note that the “proof ” is not beyond reasonable doubt. The KGC certainly had the appetite for bumping off Lincoln. When Clement Vallandigham, the Knights’ titular head, ran a failed campaign for the governorship of Ohio, large numbers of despairing Knights departed for the Order of American Knights (OAK) – and
they
advocated the plain and simple armed overthrow of the North. Vallandigham himself took the office of Supreme Commander of the OAK.

Like numerous other political secret societies, the Knights went under a bewildering number of pseudonyms, all intended to put Fed agents off their trail. They were known as the Knights of the Mighty Host, the Circle of Honor, the Circle (not to be confused with
Le Cercle
), the Peace Organization, and the Mutual Protection Society. Northerners dismissively nicknamed them “Copperheads”, after the poisonous snake. Although the Knights – however named – ceased to be an active potent force after the surrender of the Confederate armies at Appomattox in 1865, they are reputed to have lingered on until 1916, by which time they were old or dead men, and the bitter torch of antiblack politics had passed to the Ku Klux Klan.

Further Reading

Dion Haco,
The Private Journal and Diary of John H. Surratt, The Conspirator
, 1966

Joseph Holt,
Report of the Judge Advocate General on “The Order of American Knights”, alias “The Sons of Liberty”. A Western Conspiracy in aid of the Southern Rebellion
, Washington, DC: Union Congressional Committee, 1864

DOCUMENT: INITIATION INTO THE KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE: JOHN H. SURRATT, c. 1860

It might have been an hour, or only twenty minutes, that I had waited alone in that room; but, as I took no account of the time, it seemed almost an age. Every feature of the apartment had been examined, and I could have described every color therein, from the paper on the walls, and the hangings of the windows to the uniforms of the revolutionary heroes, and the background of the portraits. Still no one came, and the solitude became painful.