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Samuel Bowers, 82, Klan Le? J°x Convicted in Fatal Bombing, Dies - N-’«v York Times Page 2 of 2
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Mr. Dahmer was stationed in Riverside, Calif., with the Air Force when he got the phone call about the firebombing. When he arrived at home at 9 a.m. the next day, his father was dead and the house was still smoking.
“His life was taken because he was involved in getting local black folks to register to vote,” said Mr. Dahmer of his father. “He went to his grave and never had the opportunity to vote.”
Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr. was bom in New Orleans on Aug. 6,1924, to Samuel Bowers Sr., a salesman from Gulfport, Miss., and Evangeline Peyton. He was the product of educated, affluent families; one grandfather, Eaton J. Bowers, was a four-term Congressman from Mississippi and the other a Southern planter.
On Feb. 15,1964, he coaxed 200 Klansmen assembled at Brookhaven, Miss., to join him in the founding of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that defined itself in its unhesitating willingness to use violence.
“The main thing about the White Knights was that it was just a terrorist organization, more so than any other Klan that I know about,” said Jack Nelson, a Los Angeles Times journalist who followed Mr. Bowers' activities for decades. The organization grew in strength under the tall, hazel-eyed leader until he was convicted on federal civil rights charges for the Neshoba murders and went to prison in 1970.
After his 1976 release, Mr. Bowers worked as a Sunday school teacher.
He never married.
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