← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Sertorius
Thread ID: 17988 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2005-04-27
2005-04-27 13:14 | User Profile
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
White supremacist J.B. Stoner dead at 81
By SAEED AHMED, BILL MONTGOMERY The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 04/27/05
J.B. Stoner ââ¬â convicted church bomber, perpetual candidate and white supremacist whose unvarnished racial and anti-Semitic demagoguery was so extreme that even avowed segregationist Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox distanced himself ââ¬â has died. He was 81.
Mr. Stoner, who spent his last years at a nursing home in LaFayette in northwest Georgia, died of complications from pneumonia Saturday night, two weeks after celebrating his 81st birthday, said Ronald Ragon, his second cousin and legal guardian.
He was buried Tuesday at Forest Hills Cemetery in Chattanooga, Mr. Ragon said.
In his last years, the sharp jackhammer voice that once incited crowds to hatred turned to a raspy whisper, but Mr. Stoner remained unapologetic for his angry creed of separation, viewing himself as a "soldier of Christ."
"I guess God will put his hand on my head and bless me," Mr. Stoner, who was raised as a Methodist, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year.
Charles Wittenstein, who tracked Stoner as Southern civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League, called him "a professional bigot [who] made a career of hating Jews and blacks and inciting other people to do the same.
"If he had any redeeming features, I didn't see them," Mr. Wittenstein of Dunwoody said.
In person, Mr. Stoner was "very much a Southern gentleman with a good sense of humor," Mr. Ragon said. "We just didn't talk about the stuff we wouldn't agree on."
Mr. Stoner served 3 1/2 years in Alabama's St. Clair Prison for the June 1958 bombing of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham. The explosion caused no casualties, but Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley called Mr. Stoner "the most hard-nosed guy of all" among violent Southern opponents of civil rights.
Mr. Stoner was national chairman of the National States Rights Party, a white supremacist, anti-Semitic organization. As an attorney, he defended Ku Klux Klan members and other white people charged in race crimes before he was disbarred.
A perpetual political candidate, Mr. Stoner ran at various times for the Democratic nominations for governor, lieutenant governor and U.S. senator, all unsuccessfully.
In 1974, he got 73,000 votes for lieutenant governor of Georgia. In his last political bid, a quarter-century later in 1990, also for lieutenant governor, Mr. Stoner got nearly 31,000 votes, or 3 percent.
During one campaign appearance, the late Gov. Maddox refused to share a stage with Mr. Stoner, saying he was too extreme.
The late Gov. Marvin Griffin, who also opposed desegregation, said Mr. Stoner's rhetoric reminded him of an old joke about a drunk's last words aboard the sinking Titanic: "I ordered ice, but this is ridiculous."
Playing on racial fear
Jesse Benjamin Stoner Jr. was born April 13, 1924, in Walker County, at the foot of Lookout Mountain. He was the son of Jesse Benjamin Stoner Sr. and Minerva Pogue Stoner.
At 2, he was stricken with polio, which left him crippled for life. At 5, he lost his father in an accident. When he was 17, his mother died of cancer.
At 18, Mr. Stoner rechartered a dormant chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga. In his early 20s, he headed a neo-Nazi organization, the Stoner Christian Anti-Jewish Party, whose platform suggested that "being a Jew be a crime punishable by death."
Mr. Stoner moved to Atlanta in the early 1950s and graduated from Atlanta Law School in 1952.
He mostly was viewed as a curiosity until the 1950s, when African-Americans started marching for civil rights and courts started agreeing with them. White fear and rage needed a voice, and Mr. Stoner gladly lent his.
In 1964, Mr. Stoner arrived in St. Augustine, Fla., on the heels of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to organize a counterdemonstration. Mr. Stoner's rhetoric inflamed passions, which led to roaming mobs of white people attacking black people. Mr. Stoner later became the appeals attorney for the Rev. King's assassin, James Earl Ray.
In 1970, Mr. Stoner ran for governor, in a race Jimmy Carter eventually won.
He returned to metro Atlanta in 1971, where he operated the National States Rights Party with his colleague Edward R. Fields, a one-time chiropractor, from a home on Cherokee Street in Marietta.
Prison sentence
In 1977, Mr. Stoner was indicted in the 1958 bombing of an empty church in Birmingham. Mr. Stoner, who insisted he had been in Georgia at the time of the bombing, fought extradition to Alabama for three years.
He testified in the May 1980 trial that he was set up, and lawyers on both sides agreed that what clinched the guilty verdict was a litany of Mr. Stoner's choicest quotations over the years, fed back to him and the largely white jury by prosecutors. When asked if he had made an especially venomous statement, read from an old newspaper clipping, Mr. Stoner replied: "I don't think I said that, but I wish I had." The jury deliberated just 90 minutes.
"He was a showman," said Richard Barrett, lead counsel for a Mississippi-based white supremacist organization, the Nationalist Movement. "He was too radical for some, but he always added mirth and fervor in the fight against the intolerable conditions of integration."
Mr. Stoner never married. He is survived by two sisters.
ââ¬â Staff writers Bill Torpy, Steve Visser and researcher Nisa Asokan contributed to this article.
Find this article at: [url]http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/0405/275stonerobit.html[/url]
Stoner used to provide a lot of comedic relief during election time with his comments. He used to really get into it with people like Hosea Williams. RIP.
2005-04-27 15:33 | User Profile
Posted on Wed, Apr. 27, 2005
White supremacist J.B. Stoner, convicted of church bombing, dies
Associated Press
LaFAYETTE, Ga. - J.B. Stoner, an anti-Semite and white supremacist convicted of a church bombing in the civil rights era, died Saturday at a northwest Georgia nursing home. He was 81.
Stoner died of complications of pneumonia, said a relative, Judith Ragon.
A Georgia native, Stoner was one of the angriest voices in opposition to the civil rights movement. He revived a dormant chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga, Tenn., at age 18. A few years later he headed the Stoner Christian Anti-Jewish Party.
Stoner was a suspect in the 1958 bombing of an empty Birmingham, Ala., church. Stoner wasn't indicted for the crime until 1977, and he fought extradition to Alabama for three years. At his trial, he was convicted in part on the basis of venomous quotes he'd made at the time. When asked if he made one hateful quote from an old newspaper clipping, Stoner replied, "I don't think I said that, but I wish I had." A mostly white jury found him guilty in 90 minutes.
But Stoner appealed the verdict and went missing for several months in 1983 when his appeals ran out. Stoner ultimately turned himself in at a motel in Montgomery, Ala., and served 3 1/2 years in prison.
It was the end of a long career fighting integration.
In 1964, Stoner arrived in St. Augustine, Fla., on the heels of Martin Luther King Jr. to organize a counter-demonstration. His rhetoric inflamed passions, which led to mobs of whites attacking blacks.
Stoner later became the appeals attorney for James Earl Ray, King's assassin, and long tried to get his case reversed.
In 1970, Stoner ran unsuccessfully for Georgia governor in a race Jimmy Carter eventually won. In 1972, he ran for the U.S. Senate. In 1974, he drew 73,000 votes, almost 10 percent, in a race for lieutenant governor.
In 1986, he was paroled from an Alabama prison at the age of 62. He ran for lieutenant governor in 1990 and got 31,000 votes, or 3 percent of the total.
Stoner suffered a stroke in 2001. He never married, once telling an interviewer any woman "would be too dumb" for him. He is survived by two sisters in their 80s.
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year, Stoner remained unapologetic for his separatist views. "I guess God will put his hand on my head and bless me," he said.
Stoner was buried Tuesday at Forest Hills Cemetery in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ragon said.
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Sert, I recall that a public appearance by JB on his "Praise God for AIDS" tour sparked a violent riot in Los Angeles in the late '80's...didn't he once publish The Thunderbolt tabloid?
Copies were everywhere in South Boston during the busing troubles...
2005-04-27 16:20 | User Profile
At his trial, he was convicted in part on the basis of venomous quotes he'd made at the time.
And on what basis would they have been admitted into evidence?
2005-04-27 16:40 | User Profile
Howard,
That he did. He and Ed Fields had a falling out over something and the paper was published by Fields from then on.
I best remember him for the Senate race one year where he really got into it with the others running. He made a lot of good points, particularly about Israel. To this day I still don't believe he was involved in that bombing.
2005-04-28 00:24 | User Profile
Its an odd coincidence that Mr. Stoner will be buried in the same cemetery, Forest Hills, in Chattanooga, Tennessee as the recently departed Dr. Samuel Francis. I cannot imagine two radically different men, using two completely different approaches, both fighting for the rights of whites.
2005-04-28 05:36 | User Profile
He was a credit to the White Race. RIP, Mr. Stoner. This northern White man salutes you!
2005-04-28 12:42 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]He never married, once telling an interviewer any woman "would be too dumb" for him. He is survived by two sisters in their 80s...
Mr. Stoner never married. He is survived by two sisters [/QUOTE]Yeah, what a fine example of a White man. The WN 'movement' in the US is chock full of similar examples of fine, upstanding White men.:dry:
Pretty pathetic, really.