National States Rights Party
National States Rights Party
NSRP MARKS CIVIL RIGHTS BATTLES
DECLINE AND LEGACY OF THE NSRP
From 1958 to the mid-1980s, the National States Rights Party (NSRP) was an influential force in the white supremacist movement in the United States. The party organized protests against the civil rights movement and other perceived enemies, published and distributed racist propaganda, and used intimidation tactics against religious and ethnic minorities. It also effectively networked factions of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations, and other racist and anti-Semitic groups, intertwining these hardcore factions with traditional forms of racism and segregation common in the southern United States. The NSRP was the creation of two extremely active and avowed white supremacists, Edward R. Fields (b. 1932) and Jesse B. Stoner (1924–2005), who led the organization for more than two decades during the most intense period of the civil rights struggle in the United States.
FOUNDING
The NSRP was founded in 1958 in Jefferson, Indiana, as a political party primarily advocating anti-Catholic, antiSemitic, antiblack, and white supremacist ideals. It moved its headquarters briefly to Atlanta, Georgia, and then to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961. It remained in Birmingham until 1971, when it relocated to Marietta, Georgia. Its founders met in 1952 while attending Atlanta Law School, where Fields joined Stoner’s Christian Anti-Jewish Party, which aimed to make being Jewish punishable by death. Stoner earned a law degree, but Fields dropped out and relocated to Davenport, Iowa, where he earned a degree in chiropractics while continuing to promote anti-Semitism. The degrees earned by Fields and Stoner were seen by their typically less-educated following as prestigious, helping them garner wide respect for the NSRP after the two reunited to form the group in 1958. Stoner served as chairman and general counsel for the group, and Fields was secretary and editor of the Thunderbolt, the NSRP newsletter.
NSRP MARKS CIVIL RIGHTS BATTLES
On June 29, 1958, soon after the founding of the NSRP, Stoner placed a dynamite bomb outside of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Because the black church was empty, no casualties resulted from the blast. The FBI, investigating violence against black and Jewish places of worship in the 1960s, suspected that Stoner had participated in at least a dozen bombings of churches and synagogues throughout the southern states. He was only convicted once, however, in 1980, for conspiracy to commit murder in the bombing of Bethel Baptist. Law enforcement agents also suspected that Stoner, due to a distinct limp resulting from childhood polio, resigned himself in the early 1960s to inciting sympathizers to carry out similar attacks in his stead.
In addition to intimidation tactics, the NSRP published the Thunderbolt, in which Fields touted traditional anti-Semitic rhetoric, promoted the ideas of Hitler, and often called for violence. In one piece he opined that racial tension in America would be solved if all Jews were expelled to Madagascar and blacks to Africa. In another, Fields called for the execution of the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The NSRP’s rise to prominence in the white supremacist movement came during a time of passionate opposition to the civil rights movement by segregationists in the southern United States. The NSRP went beyond mere advocacy of segregation and voiced what are still staples of white supremacist ideology. Fields and Stoner’s organization blatantly attacked Jews, whom they believed were behind a conspiracy to eliminate the white race by promoting integration. Decades later, neo-Nazi groups commonly voiced the same theory with regard to Hispanic and Latino immigration to the United States.
By the early 1960s, the NSRP outreach had grown to include some powerful individuals, including the Alabama governor George Wallace and the head of the Alabama State Patrol, Al Lingo. According to a 1993 missive from Fields to the author Dan T. Carter, Fields and his NSRP cohort James Warner met with Lingo, who informed them that if the NSRP were able to manage a “boisterous campaign” against the integration of schools, that the governor would be forced to close such schools.
The NSRP organized demonstrations in several southern states, often resulting in violence. In 1964, an NSRP rally in St. Augustine, Florida, resulted in injuries to forty people after sympathizers attacked civil rights demonstrators. The attack was incited by NSRP member Connie Lynch, who told hundreds of supporters, “I favor violence to preserve the white race … some niggers are going to get killed in this process.” (“Edward Fields,” Anti-Defamation League Internet site).
In 1972, Stoner attempted to enter politics, running for the U.S. Senate in the Georgia Democratic primary on the platform of segregation. Stoner appeared in approximately 120 radio and television campaign advertisements, stating “the niggers want integration because the niggers want our white women,” and urging Georgians to “vote white” (Forster and Epstein 1974, p. 301). Stoner lost the primary but received more than 40,000 votes, which Fields later elated in the Thunderbolt as “sensational.”
DECLINE AND LEGACY OF THE NSRP
The group’s impact on the white supremacist movement waned in 1983, when Stoner was imprisoned for conspiracy to commit murder and Fields was ousted by his own members for diverting NSRP funds. By 1987 the NSRP was defunct. In November 1986, Stoner, fresh from serving an abbreviated ten-year prison sentence for the 1958 bombing, founded the Crusade Against Corruption, which included a public awareness campaign regarding the disease AIDS. Stoner claimed, according to a 1986 article in the Atlanta Constitution, that only blacks were vulnerable to the disease and that whites were immune, unless they were homosexuals. Stoner ran in a primary for lieutenant governor of Georgia in 1990, and though he lost he garnered 31,000 votes. He suffered a stroke in 2001 and died in April 2005.
In the late 1980s, Fields, attempting to increase declining readership for the Thunderbolt, changed the newsletter’s title to The Truth At Last. He still publishes the periodical despite a far lower circulation. In 1993 Fields attempted to resurrect a group similar to the NSRP called the America First Party, co-founded by A. J. Barker, the head of the North Carolina chapter of the ultraconservative Council of Conservative Citizens. Fields, in addition to writing racist tracts, continued his activism by occasionally delivering speeches at neo-Nazi gatherings and associating with Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, the Creativity Movement, and the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
In 2005, a small group of white supremacists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, led by Thomas Pou, formed a group with the same name, the National States’ Rights Party. The group materialized during the Philadelphia murder trial of former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, who was convicted of killing three civil rights activists in 1964. While there is not a direct connection between this neo-NSRP and the group founded by Stoner and Fields, the legacy of ideals promoted by the latter are maintained in extreme circles of the far right, including the Philadelphia-based NSRP.
SEE ALSO Neo-Nazis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carter, Dan T. 1995.The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Chalmers, David M. 1965. Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
“Edward Fields.” Anti-Defamation League. Available from http://www.adl.org/learn.
Forster, Arnold, and Benjamin R. Epstein. 1974. The New Anti-Semitism. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Allen Kohlhepp