By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 28, 2005
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.
He also headed a neo-Nazi organization he called the Stoner Christian Anti-Jewish Party. According to the Journal-Constitution, a 1946 newspaper article quoted Mr. Stoner as saying that "being a Jew [should] be a crime punishable by death."
He moved to Atlanta in the early 1950s, and in 1952, he received a law degree from Atlanta Law School.
He was an attorney for numerous Klan members and other whites charged with race crimes. He also worked as an insurance claims adjuster in Savannah and Dublin, Ga., but he spent most of his time traveling the South as a rabble-rousing crusader against integration, often showing up in the turbulent wake of civil rights demonstrations.
In 1964, he arrived in St. Augustine, Fla., to organize a counter-demonstration shortly after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been there. His incendiary rhetoric set off a riot in which roaming mobs of white people attacked black people.
The FBI considered Mr. Stoner a suspect in King's death and in the bombings of synagogues and black churches during the 1950s and 1960s.
He became the appeals attorney for King's assassin, James Earl Ray, and spent years trying to get the case against Ray overturned. Mr. Stoner was disbarred after his conviction.
He ran for governor of Georgia in 1970, a race won by Jimmy Carter. Two years later, he ran for the U.S. Senate. In that race, he won a ruling from the Federal Communications Commission allowing him to say a racial epithet in TV ads. Two years later, he won nearly 10 percent of the vote in the race for lieutenant governor.
In 1990, he again ran for lieutenant governor after being paroled. He got 3 percent of the vote.
Mr. Stoner described himself as a "soldier of Christ" in the Journal-Constitution interview. "I guess God will put his hand on my head and bless me," he said.
Survivors include two sisters.
