J.B. Stoner, 81, a convicted church bomber, former Ku Klux Klan member and unreconstructed racist and anti-Semite, died April 23 of complications from pneumonia at a northwest Georgia nursing home.
A Georgia native, Mr. Stoner during the civil rights era was invariably among the loudest, angriest voices preaching hatred of Jews and blacks and fighting to hold back the tide of change in the apartheid South.
Nearly a quarter-century later, Mr. Stoner was still defiant. Bedridden in a nursing home, gaunt and partially paralyzed from a stroke, he told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter in the fall that he would like to march out of his nursing home and make a segregation speech. He had nothing for which to apologize, he said, although he conceded that his side had lost.
"History is written by the victors; you win it, you write it," he said. "Society has changed. It was changed by defeat -- defeat of the white people against race-mixing."
In 1980, an Alabama jury found Mr. Stoner guilty of conspiring to bomb a predominantly black church in Birmingham 22 years earlier. No one was injured in the blast because a night watchman grabbed the bucket of dynamite left outside the Bethel Street Baptist Church, which was unoccupied at the time, and ran with it to the street.
Mr. Stoner was a suspect at the time, but he wasn't indicted until 1977. He was not charged with planting the bomb but with conspiring with others to have the act committed. Prosecutors said he bragged to Alabama undercover officers that he masterminded the bombing.
After the jury sentenced him to 10 years in prison, the minimum it could impose under Alabama law, he disappeared for five months. He said he went into hiding because "I wanted to live a little longer." He served 3 1/2 years in prison.
Jesse Benjamin Stoner Jr. was born in Walker County in north Georgia, at the foot of Lookout Mountain. He contracted polio at age 2 and walked with a limp the rest of his life.
Mr. Stoner was raised in a prosperous family. His father founded a sightseeing company that took buses and rail cars up Lookout Mountain, a Civil War battle site overlooking Chattanooga. His father died in an accident when Mr. Stoner was 5; his mother died of cancer when he was 17.
He attended a Chattanooga prep school and a public high school but never graduated. His limp kept him out of World War II, so he was free, at age 18, to recharter a dormant chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga.
He spent time in Washington as an ardent supporter of Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, another firebrand segregationist.
Mr. Stoner was national chairman of the National States Rights Party, the political arm of the Ku Klux Klan.
