'J. B. Stoner, 81, Fervent Racist and Benchmark for Extremism, Dies'

[checks-n-balances]

April 29, 2005
J. B. Stoner, 81, Fervent Racist and Benchmark for Extremism, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

. B. Stoner, an unapologetic racist whose conviction for bombing a church, divisive political campaigns and vituperations about Jews and blacks made him a benchmark for racial extremism in the United States, died on Saturday at a nursing home in La Fayette, Ga. He was 81.

snip

Mr. Stoner's views were so immoderate that Lester Maddox, an avowedly segregationist governor of Georgia, once refused to share the same stage with him. Mr. Stoner was convicted in 1980 of the 1958 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., and was suspected by prosecutors in as many as a dozen others.

snip

Jesse Benjamin Stoner Jr. was born in 1924 in Walker County, Ga., near Chattanooga. He contracted polio at 2 and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. He told The Journal that no black or Jew ever personally harmed him, but that he began to suspect and fear a conspiracy to encourage racial intermarriage.

At 18, he re-chartered a dormant chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga. His philosophy, according to Taylor Branch in his 1998 book "Pillar of Fire," derived from a California fundamentalist, Wesley Swift, who saw Anglo-Saxons as God's chosen people...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/national/29stoner.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Side note:

In recent DU thread, "Georgia Erases Jim Crow Laws," one poster noted the irony of Gov. Sonny Purdue (who made returning to the "Southern Heritage" state flag an issue in the governor's race) taking that action the day after Stoner's death:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1431111&mesg_id=1431189

[hector459]

1. We hardly knew him and certainly won't miss him.

eom