White supremacist J. B. Stoner dead at 81

[Rob E Dangerously 0]

I was checking in on my J. B. Stoner page on Wikipeda and I found that he died.

 

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/0405...stonerobit.html

 

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, a demagogue who made a career of unvarnished, unashamed racial and anti-Semitic hatred, has died. He was 81.

 

Mr. Stoner, who spent his last years at a nursing home in Walker County 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 the Forest Hills Cemetery in Chattanooga, Mr. Ragon said.

 

Recently, 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 told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year.

 

Charles Wittenstein, who tracked Mr. 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 three-and-a-half years in Alabama's St. Clair Prison for the June 1958 bombing of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The explosion caused no casualties, but Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley called Mr. Stoner "the most hardnosed guy of all" among Southern violent opponents of civil rights.

 

Mr. Stoner was national chairman of the National States Rights Party, a white supremacist, anti-Semitic organization. Its symbol was a single bolt of lightning, reminiscent of the twin-lightning flashes of uniform patch of Hitler's Schutzstaffel, the SS security corps. The party published a newspaper called the Thunderbolt.

 

Mr. Stoner hated Jews and the Federal Bureau of Investigation the most, he said. Blacks, who he said never should have been brought to the American continent, rated a poor third.

 

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."

 

Mr. Stoner, an attorney who was later disbarred, defended Klan members and other whites charged in race crimes. He briefly represented James Earl Ray, the confessed killer of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Ray's brother, Jerry Ray, was a bodyguard and errand-runner for Mr. Stoner.

 

Convicted in 1980, Mr. Stoner appealed his case and in 1983 was a fugitive for four months until he was apprehended.

 

Before his conviction, Mr. Stoner ran various races for the Democratic nomination for governor, lieutenant governor and U.S. senator, all unsuccessful. In 1974, he got 73,000 votes for lieutenant governor of Georgia.

 

In 1990, he announced another bid for the lieutenant governor's office.

 

Political analysts considered Mr. Stoner's ballot totals a gauge of how many Georgians, in the privacy of the voting booth, shared his views.

 

In his last political bid a quarter-century later in 1990, also for lieutenant governor, Mr. Stoner garnered a 31,000 votes, or 3 percent of the total.

 

Jesse Benjamin Stoner Jr. was born April 13, 1924, in Walker County in north Georgia, at the foot of Lookout Mountain. He was the son of Jesse Benjamin Stoner Sr. and Minerva Pogue Stoner.

 

His father was a conductor of the incline railroad train that traveled the historic mountain, scene of a major Civil War battle.

 

The young Mr. Stoner's childhood was marred by illness and death. At 2, he was stricken with polio that left him crippled for life. At 5, he lost his father in an accident. At 17, his mother died of cancer.

 

Mr. Stoner attended McCallie, a prestigious Chattanooga prep school, and a public high school, but never graduated. At 16, he was mentioned during World War II on a broadcast by William Joyce, the infamous British propagandist known as "Lord Haw Haw," on Radio Berlin. Mr. Stoner denied he had Nazi sympathies and had written to Radio Berlin in hopes that "a German doctor would be able to cure me."

 

Lord Haw Haw broadcast this message: "Young Mr. Stoner, you are a brave lad. I will try to see to it that you get the services of a German surgeon after the war is over."

 

Joyce was hanged for treason after the war.

 

At 18, Mr. Stoner was an officer of a Ku Klux Klan group in Tennessee. 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 enrolled at Atlanta Law School. He graduated in 1952, and afterwards worked as an insurance claims adjuster in Savannah and Dublin.

 

He was seen frequently at the South's civil rights battlegrounds of the '50s and '60s -- Birmingham, St. Augustine, Fla.; Bogalusa, La. Mr. Stoner made speeches inciting whites to carry out illegal acts, according to federal agents.

 

The FBI and Alabama law enforcement officials suspected Mr. Stoner of involvement in church and synagogue bombings during the '50s and '60s.

 

Mr. Stoner returned to metro Atlanta in 1971. He operated the National States Rights Party with his colleague Edward R. Fields, a onetime chiropractor, from a red-brick, two-story home on Cherokee Street in Marietta. A chain link fence surrounded the property, and German shepherd dogs roamed the yard.

 

In September 1977, a Birmingham grand jury indicted Mr. Stoner in the Bethel Church bombing. A dynamite device had exploded without casualties in the parking lot of the church.

 

Mr. Stoner, who insisted he had been in Georgia at the time of the bombing, fought extradition to Alabama for three years. The case came to trial in May 1980.

 

A former police undercover agent testified that Mr. Stoner bragged "he had boys, explosive experts" who would bomb Bethel Baptist for $2,000.

 

After the explosion, Mr. Stoner demanded payment, retired Lt. Tom Cook told the jury, insisting that he could not "go back to his boys without the money, because they would think he had pocketed it."

 

Mr. Stoner testified that he was set up, and had never agreed to the bombing. 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 Prosecutor John Yun.

 

When asked if he had made an especially venomous quote, 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.

 

Mr. Stoner fought his conviction through appeals, saying he feared he would be killed by black inmates if he went to prison. When his appeals ran out in January 1983, Mr. Stoner vanished.

 

Rumors placed him in South Africa, Mexico, and the basement of his Marietta headquarters. The end of the road came June 2, 1983, with an arranged surrender at a motel near the state Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. As he was led before a magistrate, Mr. Stoner said, "We white people will overcome."

 

Mr. Stoner once occupied a prison hospital cell with former Klansman Robert E. "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, at the time the only person convicted of the deadly 16th Street Church explosion in Birmingham. Mr. Chambliss died in 1985.

 

Mr. Stoner, a pudgy lawyer with a crewcut and a penchant for bow ties, was scrupulously polite, even courtly, to Caucasians who were gentile in appearance.

 

A lifelong bachelor, Mr. Stoner once told an interviewer that any woman "would be too dumb" for him. However, his friend Jerry Ray said Mr. Stoner had several girlfriends around the region.

 

Mr. Stoner's outlets, according to Mr. Ray, were relaxing at Florida beaches and enjoying an occasional beer.

 

In a letter from prison, Mr. Stoner wrote that his months on the run were a "pleasant vacation" enjoying the relative comforts of motel beds and restaurant food. "The FBI was never close to finding me," he boasted.

 

He was a secretive man who said even the basic facts about his early background were nobody's business. He once ended an interview with a curt declaration that, "The public doesn't care who I am. The only ones who do are the newspapers and the Jews."

 

A student audience at Georgia State University once filled every seat and the aisles to hear Mr. Stoner at his worst. Some of the students virtually screamed him down. The crippled lawyer stood there, a smile on his red face, basking in an ocean of outrage.

 

He is survived by two sisters.

 

The article doesn't mention Stoner's ads for one of his candidacy that went to the FCC.

 

(source)

 

J.B. Stoner, a white supremacist, ran for U.S. Senate from Georgia, using spots that called blacks "niggers" and accused them of coveting white women. The mayor of Atlanta feared violence, and that city's chapter of the NAACP asked the FCC to advise stations that they could decline to run Stoner's spots and not violate Section 315.49  The Commission refused, citing the no censorship provision, and noting, "A contrary conclusion here would permit anyone to prevent a candidate from exercising his rights under Section 315 by threatening a violent reaction."

 

Either way.. evil is swept off of this planet in the snap of a finger.

[Carnival 0]

Mr. Stoner hated Jews and the Federal Bureau of Investigation the most, he said. Blacks, who he said never should have been brought to the American continent, rated a poor third.

 

Blacks only get 3rd on the hate list. They better step up their game.

[nl5xsk1 0]

Stoner Christian Anti-Jewish Party

You'd think that if your name was Stoner, you wouldn't use it in the title of your Jew-hating group ... it kind of brings up too much of a DeadHead 420 kind of vibe.

[Slayer 0]

Another one off the list

For one that dies, two more shall take his place

[Your Paragon of Virtue 0]

Mr. Stoner was national chairman of the National States Rights Party, a white supremacist, anti-Semitic organization.

 

"Hey the war wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights!"

[Rob E Dangerously 0]

Mr. Stoner was national chairman of the National States Rights Party, a white supremacist, anti-Semitic organization.

 

National States Rights Party is a bit of an oxymoron, headed by a moron too

 

For one that dies, two more shall take his place

 

William Pierce and Richard Butler have both died recently. When it comes to the "White Supremacist Death Pool", after Willis Carto and maybe Zundel, I don't know who to pick. Unless you suspect someone is going to get Matt Hale in prison.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Another one off the list

For one that dies, two more shall take his place

*Steps up to the plate.*

 

...the NAACP asked the FCC to advise stations that they could decline to run Stoner's spots and not violate Section 315.49  The Commission refused, citing the no censorship provision, and noting, "A contrary conclusion here would permit anyone to prevent a candidate from exercising his rights under Section 315 by threatening a violent reaction."

 

Well, he probably wasn't going to show any boobs in his ad...

[Guest CronoT]

Mr. Stoner was national chairman of the National States Rights Party, a white supremacist, anti-Semitic organization.

 

National States Rights Party is a bit of an oxymoron, headed by a moron too

 

For one that dies, two more shall take his place

 

William Pierce and Richard Butler have both died recently. When it comes to the "White Supremacist Death Pool", after Willis Carto and maybe Zundel, I don't know who to pick. Unless you suspect someone is going to get Matt Hale in prison.

Don't worry. Bob Jones University will just keep cranking them out like a German sausage grinder.