Stoner, Jesse Benjamin, 1924-2005

Jesse Benjamin Stoner, Jr. was born in 1924 in north Georgia. As a strong proponent of white supremacy and racial segregation during the civil rights era, Stoner revived a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga, Tennessee when he was eighteen. He later founded several anti-Semitic political parties, ran for high political offices in Georgia as an avowed white supremacist, and served on the legal team for James Earl Ray, who was convicted of the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. In 1977, Stoner was indicted, and was later convicted and imprisoned, for the 1958 bombing of an African American church in Birmingham, Alabama. He died on April 23, 2005 at Lafayette, Georgia.

From the guide to the J. B. Stoner gubernatorial campaign collection, 1970, (University of Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library Wilcox Collection, Kansas Collection)

...