Excerpts from Patsy Sims' The Klan

(2nd ed., Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996)

"During the course of my research, one investigator also observed, 'You know [J. B.] Stoner's part of the conspiracy in [Dr. Martin Luther] King's death, don't you?' Over the years, Stoner had slithered from one right-wing group to another, speaking before meetings and rallies, representing their members in court, sharing offices. His ties were like a bowl of venomous spaghetti. Was there an underground right-wing network that perhaps had plotted King's assassination and other violence? On several occasions, Robert Shelton [head of United Klans of America] and Robert DePugh, former leader of the Minutemen, announced plans for such a network, and a meeting supposedly was held in Kansas City, Missouri, with Shelton and David Duke, among others, present. In 1976, Tony LaRicci also had told the press about the formation of a coalition of right-wing groups in Maryland. The FBI and many law enforcement officials scoffed at the idea of such a network, even in view of the Shelton-DePugh efforts and a coming together of right-wing leaders from around the world at an International Congress convened by Duke in New Orleans in September 1976. Were they concealing information? Was there indeed such a network? And could J. B. Stoner be the knot that tied the pieces together? Was he the key to more than the [Birmingham] bombings? Was he part of a conspiracy? Was his tie to James Earl Ray more than that of attorney and friend of Ray's brother Jerry?

"An overall look at clips and photocopies and newsletters and bits and pieces of information gleaned from interviews and conversations provided grounds for speculation. In an article written less than two months after King's assassination, the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted the FBI as saying Ray had entered into a conspiracy on about March 29 to kill the civil rights leader, the other party being 'an individual whom he (Ray) alleged to be his brother.' The article stated that the FBI had itself injected the word 'conspiracy' into the case on April 17 when it filed its original complaint against Ray, then identified as Eric Starvo Galt, one of at least seven aliases he had been known to use, and noted that 'a day-by-day reconstruction of the movements of James Earl Ray indicates co-conspirators were active both in Memphis, where King was killed, and in Canada, where Ray lived the next month.' (p. 141)


"Soon after his arrest in London on June 8, 1968, law enforcement agencies released a partial breakdown of Ray's movements from the time of his April 1967 escape from a Missouri prison, where he was serving a term for armed robbery, through the April 4, 1968, slaying of King. As a fugitive, he had flitted from Birmingham to New Orleans to Los Angeles and on one occasion had seemed to be in two places simultaneously. The Inquirer article said that Ray first assumed the Galt alias in July 1967 when he turned up in Toronto several days after two men robbed a bank in Alton, Illinois, his hometown. A man legally named Eric St. Vincent Galt lived less than two miles from the apartment rented by Ray. The two were said to be strikingly similar in appearance, including scars on their noses and their right-hand palms. Two years earlier, the real Galt had vacationed in Tennessee. He insisted he had never met Ray, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police could find no connection between the two....

"Ray returned to Canada [from Atlanta, after the assassination] on April 8 and during the month he lived in Toronto before fleeing to London assumed two aliases — both names of actual men who resided in Toronto, bore physical resemblance, and insisted they had neither met nor heard of him...... (p. 142)**


"Toronto seemed to play a key role [in the story of James Earl Ray]. It was also headquarters for the far-right Western Guard and home of John Ross Taylor, the sharp-faced little man I first met at Dale Reusch's West Virginia rally and later in New Orleans at David Duke's International Congress. The Toronto Star described Taylor as 'Canada's High Priest of Hate.' In 1965, the Canadian government terminated use of the mail by him and another man because of their distribution of the Thunderbolt and other anti-Semitic literature......

"Could the Western Guard have lent a helping hand to a fellow right-winger? Could it have aided James Earl Ray in obtaining the falsified passport and his sundry identifications? As for the baffling question of where Ray got money for his extensive travels, Stoner himself had boasted that Thunderbolt subscribers would pick up the tab for his 1970 governor's race. Over the years, the tabloid also had carried letters of appreciation from various recipients, including [Joseph] de la Beckwith, of NSRP [National States Rights Party] defense funds. Could the NSRP also have picked up Ray's financial tab? (p. 143)


"My speculations were bolstered in January 1978 when the House Assassinations Committee indicated it would subpoena Stoner, along with several NSRP associates, to testify in its investigation into the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. An unidentified congressional source...indicated the committee would question Stoner both about his allegations that an FBI informant had offered him twenty-five thousand dollars to have King killed and two thousand dollars to blow up the Birmingham church and about his relationship with James Earl Ray. A month later, the New York Times disclosed that Ray’s brother, Jerry, was acting as bodyguard for Stoner, who announced he would again run for governor of Georgia." (p. 144)


I originally typed out the excerpts above because they were relevant to research efforts I was involved in about a decade ago (see here for background). To some extent, it seemed we were retracing steps that were initially and peripherally taken back in the late 1970s. Sims based her book mostly on interviews with Klan people in the mid-70s, people with a good deal of self-interest in obscuring facts and/or spreading false information. For instance, at the end of a section I omitted (at the point of the double-asterisk), Sims advised that "James Venable had confirmed a tip I had received from still another Klan source that a man fitting the description of Lee Harvey Oswald had visited Venable's Atlanta law office shortly before the [JFK] assassination and requested the names of right-wing leaders" (p. 143). That is the kind of information passed on by Far Right people for the past 50-plus years and highly unlikely to be evidence for a real "Oswald sighting."

Sims was also inaccurate in her references to the Western Guard, at least by name and time frame.
"The Canadian Nazi Party was founded by John Beattie in 1965 and eventually disbanded in 1978. During this period, Beattie organised several neo-Nazi meetings in Toronto, one of which ended in a riot with protestors. After the Canadian Nazi Party disbanded, Beattie teamed up with John Ross Taylor (who led the Western Guard in the late 1970s) to form the short-lived anti-immigrant British People's League....

"Although the Canadian Nazi Party left its mark on the far right scene, the most significant racialist group to appear in Canada during the 1960s was the Edmunde Burke Society, a group self-described as a militant and conservative activist organisation. Established in 1967 by Paul Fromm, Leigh Smith, and Don Andrews, the group grew to more than 1000 members by the early 1970s and organised demonstrations against communist, Black, and radical leftwing groups in Toronto....

"In 1972, the Edmunde Burke Society changed its name to the Western Guard, signalling a change from anti-communism to a more radical and overt pro-Christian and racialist platform...."

[from Matthew Lauder's False perceptions of an inclusive society: A century of racism and hate in Canada]


See also:
Edmund Burke Society
Western Guard


Finally, while Sims should be considered an expert on the Klan, she may not have been so knowledgeable about the ways of intelligence agencies and their planting of stories. The part I omitted in the above excerpt involves an article Sims gave some credence to, from Inside Detective magazine (July 1968), that dealt with one of the Soviet Union's "top spies" (Yuri Nikolayevich Loginov) who'd been arrested by South African authorities in the summer of 1967. During interrogation, he told how he'd planned to go to Canada and pose as a Canadian journalist or tourist to enter the United States, where his "real work....was to do with assassination" -- "not aimed at one particular man...but at a number of big men simultaneously in order to confuse, dismay, and cause panic among the people if a number of their great men died suddenly." The only relevance of her bringing up the subject was that Loginov had allegedly compiled a list of boys born in 1933-34 who died between 1939 and 1941, "the information apparently intended for use in obtaining new identities and passports." (South African authorities "discovered" the list on Loginov's arrest.) Sims also went on to relate that Loginov told South African security agents that the KGB "knew thirty-six hours in advance that John F. Kennedy would be shot in Dallas." She then passed on the story about Venable and the alleged Oswald sighting, and finally picked up where she'd left off by noting the importance that Toronto seemed to have in the stories of both Loginov and James Earl Ray.

So it seems the South African regime could have had some reason to promote a particular Communist angle on US political assassinations of the '60s. But the main point is that Patsy Sims' work suggests that James Earl Ray could have had "facilitating assistance" from friendly Far Right people in his travels through Canada, London, Lisbon, and further destinations interrupted by his arrest.

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See also: Patsy Sims' 2014 Oxford American article, "NO TWANG OF CONSCIENCE WHATEVER"



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