No remorse: An old bigot wastes away
J.B. Stoner, preacher of hate, has little left but memories/ By BILL TORPY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
J.B. Stoner lies in bed staring at the ceiling of his nursing home room. He has forgotten he granted an interview but says, "I'm glad you've come."
J.B. Stoner, shown in 1999, is bedridden in a Walker County nursing home.
The 80-year-old white supremacist doesn't get many visitors, and, bedridden, he doesn't get out. He weighs maybe 110 pounds. His left side is partially paralyzed from a stroke he suffered three years ago. And his sharp, jackhammer voice, which once incited crowds to hatred, is now just a raspy whisper.
"You bring me a pistol so I could shoot myself?" he asks with a grin, his piercing blue eyes flashing underneath bushy eyebrows. A hawklike nose juts from his pinched, ruddy face.
An afternoon in the room of the ailing segregationist is not an audience with a repentant man. He doesn't want pity. He doesn't want old enemies to think his resolve has wavered.
"If I was active, I'd still be the same," he said. "I'd like to go out and make a speech."
Stoner ? anti-Semite and white supremacist, convicted church bomber and perpetual political candidate ? spent his life battling the inevitable tides of history. He was an intractable, unapologetic racist who spewed an angry creed of separation at a time when his sermon was devoured by many in the South.
Stoner stood far to the right of mainstream Southern politicians.
He became the best-known leader of the National States' Rights Party, which used a lightning bolt as a symbol, reminiscent of Hitler's SS. During one campaign, even avowed segregationist Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox refused to share a stage with Stoner, saying he was too extreme.
Now time has confined Stoner to a nursing home in his native Walker County in northwest Georgia and society has relegated him to being a historical footnote.
"Some thought coming into this institution would change me," said Stoner, jabbing a bony index finger to make a point. "But a person isn't supposed to apologize for being right."
Stoner was one of the angriest voices in opposition to the civil rights movement. And while he remains defiant, he admits his side lost.
"History is written by the victors; you win, you write it," he said. "Society has changed. It was changed by defeat ? defeat of the white people against race-mixing."
'A tragic story'
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a friend and colleague of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was surprised to hear Stoner is still alive.
"Is he repentant?" Lowery asks.
No, Lowery is told. Several times during a nearly four-hour interview, Lowery is told, Stoner had expressed disdain for "Jewsandniggers," which he uses as if one word.
Lowery guffaws. "That boy is determined to go to hell, isn't he?" he says.
Stoner, scrupulously polite in conversation, doesn't see it that way. He views himself as a "soldier of Christ."
"I guess God will put his hand on my head and bless me," said Stoner, who was raised a Methodist.
Stoner's second cousin, the Rev. Ronald Ragon, has kidded Stoner that one day he'll discover God is "a black Jew." Stoner dismisses that as blasphemy. "God's not a black Jew," he said. "God is a spirit. And Jesus is a white man."
Ragon, a Presbyterian pastor in Chattanooga and Stoner's legal guardian, has tried to move him to a nursing home closer to Chattanooga. But whenever nursing home operators hear Stoner's name, "then suddenly, they are full," Ragon said.
Stoner never married and has two sisters in their 80s. He said he wishes he had had children but his work prevented that. The family has always had "great theological differences" with Stoner, Ragon said, yet he remains "a loved relative."
"It's a tragic story," Ragon said, "his whole life."
An enigma
It's a mystery how Jesse Benjamin Stoner Jr. became J.B. Stoner, symbol of a reactionary South. Stoner always has maintained secrecy about his background. He refuses to explain the genesis of his views. Even his family remains mystified, Ragon said.
Stoner suffered polio at age 2, damaging his left leg. He walked with a limp the rest of his life.
He came from a prosperous family. His father built a sightseeing company with buses and rail cars at Lookout Mountain and in Chattanooga. But his father died when Stoner was 5. Stoner said his mother, Minnie, was "good-natured and sweet." She died when he was 17.
Classmates recalled an unremarkable boy who dressed like he was older and always carried a briefcase.
Stoner said he had "Confederate heroes" and admired Theodore Bilbo, a fire-breathing segregationist U.S. senator from Mississippi. "I was a white racist when I was a teenager," he said. He grew active in white supremacist groups and went to Washington in support of Bilbo.
Ragon believes polio played a part in forming Stoner's views because members of racist organizations paid the young, fatherless Stoner attention and gave him a social framework. Later, Stoner gained admiration and stature from espousing that viewpoint.
"It's part of his whole self-identity," said Ragon.
His lame leg left Stoner unfit for duty in World War II. But he sought his own fight after the war when he rechartered a dormant chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga. A newspaper article in 1946, just a year after Nazi death camps were discovered, quoted Stoner suggesting that "being a Jew [should] be a crime punishable by death."
He was mostly viewed as a curiosity until the 1950s, when African-Americans started marching for civil rights and courts started agreeing with them. White fear and rage needed a voice, and Stoner gladly lent his.
Stoner almost always appeared in public dressed in his trademark jacket and bow tie. He refused to have his photograph taken recently, preferring to be pictured as he was. He earned a law degree from Atlanta Law School, which gave him even more stature in the white racist circles.
"He was a hell of a fire-and-brimstone speaker and could hold a crowd's attention for a long time," said Edward Fields, a longtime friend who was active in the States' Rights Party and who still publishes an anti-Jewish newspaper from Marietta.
Stoner was "probably the most active person in opposing integration," Fields said. "At that time you could get spontaneous rallies with passing out fliers against school integration. People were up in arms anyway. It didn't take much to get them going."
In 1964, Stoner arrived in St. Augustine, Fla., on the heels of King to organize a counter-demonstration. Stoner's rhetoric inflamed passions, which led to roaming mobs of white people attacking black people.
Stoner later became the appeals attorney for King's assassin, James Earl Ray, and long tried to get his case overturned.
Stoner initially was investigated by the FBI in King's death and many bombings of black churches. Stoner still spits out the term "FBI" like he's trying to spew a rotten egg from his mouth.
In 1970, Stoner ran for governor, in a race Jimmy Carter eventually won. In 1972, Stoner, running for the U.S. Senate, won a Federal Communications Commission ruling allowing him to say the word "nigger" in TV ads. In 1974, he drew 73,000 votes, nearly 10 percent, in his bid for lieutenant governor.
"In a reverse kind of way, he was a catalyst of change," said Lowery. "Stoner and his ilk pulled the cover off the ugliness and sinister nature of racial oppression. The majority of people, when put in the crucible of agonizing choices, will come down on the side of right."
In 1977, Stoner was indicted in the 1958 bombing of an empty church in Birmingham. Former Alabama Attorney General William Baxley, who indicted Stoner, said he was involved in several other bombings. Stoner was convicted in 1980 and went on the lam three years later when his appeals ran out. He was a fugitive for four months before surrendering.
Stoner was paroled from an Alabama prison in 1986 at age 62 and tried to inject himself back into the social and political scene. He ran for lieutenant governor in 1990 and got nearly 31,000 votes, or 3 percent of the total.
At a tumultuous counter-protest to a civil rights rally in Forsyth County in 1987, Stoner passed out fliers saying "Praise God for AIDS."
'Everything's OK'
Stoner leans forward in his bed and sips on a carton of milk through a straw. His lunch remains untouched. Asked if he liked the food, Stoner smiles, saying, "I'll take the Fifth."
The nursing home's staff, he said, is cordial and kind.
Later, while recalling his career, Stoner matter-of-factly states, "I hope the white race will come out as the only race" in America.
At that moment, a black nurse's aide walks in to deliver a pitcher of water. She leaves the room wordlessly, as if she heard nothing.
As the afternoon progresses, an old man with a blank stare wanders into Stoner's room and starts rooting about in a drawer. Stoner lurches forward in bed, irritated but helpless. He barks at the man to leave and presses the attendant call button.
The black woman who earlier brought him water enters the room. She sweeps her arm around Stoner's confused neighbor and ushers him toward the door. She turns to Stoner. "Everything's OK," she says.
Stoner thanks the woman and places his head back on his pillow. He looks at the ceiling in relief.
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Here lies beantownjim in 40 years
IT WILL BE A RAINBOW COALITION HOUSE PAINTED ALL THE COLORS OF THE RAINBOW.LIKE I STATED BEFORE IF KERRY BECOMES PRESIDENT BEANTOWNJIM WILL BE MOVING TO THE U.S.S.R. (I AM BACK IN THE USSR)
