Happy Deathday, J. B. Stoner ...

My friends over at Liberty & Power are wishing Herbert Spencer a Happy Birthday. Spencer's a taste I haven't acquired, but I don't mind joining in good wishes to the deceased. And, while I'm at it, I want to wish a Happy Deathday to J. B. Stoner. It's an odd -- a needlessly uncharitable-sounding -- thing to say. Though J. B. Stoner was a hard man to be charitable about, I don't really mean it that way. I simply mean that I hope that J. B. is delivered in death from the crippling hatreds of his life.

Jesse Benjamin Stoner, Jr., was born in 1924 at the foot of Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, the scene of an epic Civil War battle. At two, polio left him crippled for life. His father died when he was five and his mother, when he was 17. Stoner denied having sympathy with the Nazis, but the young man wrote to Radio Berlin's Lord Haw Haw, in hopes of finding a German doctor who could heal his affliction. The Nazi propagandist promised to help him once Germany had won the war. In the meantime, the young man revived a branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga. Like Senator Robert Byrd, J. B. Stoner was a World War II-era klansman and an admirer of Mississippi's Senator Theodore Bilbo. By 1946, he had founded the"Stoner Christian Anti-Jewish Party." Its platform held that"being Jewish [should] be a crime punishable by death."

In 1950, Stoner moved to Atlanta, earned a degree at the Atlanta Law School, and worked as an insurance claims adjuster. But as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the latter part of the decade, he became one of its most inflammatory opponents, often urging embittered white crowds to violent opposition to desegregation. During the 1960s, he gained attention as chairman of the National States Rights Party. Stoner was so extreme that pro-segregation politicians like Georgia governors Marvin Griffin and Lester Maddox distanced themselves from him. Repeatedly, he ran for public office in Georgia. In 1970, Jimmy Carter won a race for governor against Stoner and Maddox. In 1974, Stoner won about 10% of the votes in a Democratic primary for lieutenant governor.

But the FBI was on Stoner's trail and, in 1977, he was indicted in the 1958 bombing of an African American church in Birmingham. When the appeals of his conviction ran out, Stoner served three and a half years in prison for his role in the bombing. Released from prison in 1986, his career in hatred was largely over. But J. B. Stoner was certain that his cause was a righteous one to the day of his death last Saturday. What do you say at the end of a life so given over to violent hatreds? I wish him a Happy Deathday.