Samuel Bowers
| Samuel Bowers | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Samuel Holloway Bowers August 25, 1924 New Orleans, Louisiana |
| Died | November 5, 2006 (aged 82) Mississippi State Penitentiary Sunflower County, Mississippi |
| Known for | Founding the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan |
Samuel Holloway Bowers (August 25, 1924 – November 5, 2006) was a leading white supremacist activist in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement. In response to this movement, he co-founded a reactionary organization, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Bowers committed two notorious murders of civil rights activists in southern Mississippi: the 1964 triple murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney near Philadelphia, for which he served six years in federal prison; and the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, for which he was sentenced to life in prison 32 years after the crime. He also was accused of bombings of Jewish targets in the cities of Jackson and Meridian in 1967 and 1968 (according to the man who was convicted of some of the bombings, Thomas A. Tarrants III). He died in prison at the age of 82.
Bowers was born on August 25, 1924, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Sam Bowers Sr., a salesman, and his wife Evangeline Peyton, daughter of a well-to-do planter. On both sides of his family he was deeply rooted in the southern Mississippi—New Orleans area. His mother's father had a plantation, while his father's father, Eaton J. Bowers, was a four-term Congressman from Mississippi's Gulf Coast. Representative Bowers was an explicitly virulent opponent of equality for African Americans. In a speech to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1904, during his freshman term, he said: "Let me say to the gentleman from Massachusetts that it is evident that we have at least two theories as to how the negro should be dealt with. One may be termed his idea of the development by higher education, social equality, and the like, while the other might be dominated [sic] the Southern idea of the absolute segregation of the two races, the fitting the negro for that sphere and station which, based upon an experience born of more than a century's knowledge of him as a slave and nearly forty years' experience with him as a freedman, we believe he can acceptably and worthily fill, with absolute denial of social intercourse and with every restriction on his participation in political affairs and government that is permissible under the Federal Constitution. . . . The restriction of suffrage was the wisest statesmanship ever exhibited in that proud Commonwealth . . . . We have disfranchised not only the ignorant and vicious black, but the ignorant and vicious white as well . . . ."
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