JFKKK: The Ku Klux Klan and the Killings of November 22, 1963
“You see, I think this thing is building bigger now, of course, than it ever did before, and they are coming on harder now and taking more steps and bringing more people in, and they are getting braver with advocating violence than ever before.” — Willie Somersett, April 19, 1963
“Willie Somersett was an FBI informant who lied for money,” Dr. Edward Fields wrote in a recent letter to me. Fields founded the National States’ Rights Party (NSRP) in 1958. Now 92, he continues to produce literature promoting white supremacy; he occasionally sends me his latest pamphlets. Anyone who wishes to read more about its racist and anti-semitic ideology need only read here.
Fields would have good reason to blast Willie Somersett: as an informant for both the FBI since 1949 and the Miami Police Intelligence Department since 1962, Somersett knew most of Fields’ associates — he was a Ku Klux Klan insider. He was also a NSRP member. In fact, Miami supporters of the white supremacist party planned to murder Somersett.
Somersett’s name and reputation — author Jeffrey Caufield called Somersett an “unsung hero in his efforts against the terrorist campaign of racial violence in the South in the 1950s and 1960s” — has endured a number of ad hominems from JFK assassination researchers who dismiss Somersett’s information as poppycock. But it is thanks to Somersett we have the recording of Georgian Klansman Joseph Milteer boasting of what appears to be the cover story in the assassination of JFK: that he would be shot from an office building with a high-powered rifle and the murder would be quickly pinned on an unsuspecting fall guy. This was two weeks before the president was gunned down in Dallas.
Caufield, in his 2015 book General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy, concedes that while Somersett provides information that cannot be corroborated, he was never shown to be wrong. Consider that in the first week of April 1968 Somersett called Miami Police Lieutenant Charles Sapp to inform him he learned on April 1 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was going to be shot. The next day, King was killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. [What’s both interesting and eerie is that in the latest NSRP literature sent to me by Dr. Fields (dated August 2024), he profiles J.B. Stoner, calling him a “patriot” for supporting segregation. Stoner, a Klansman and lawyer, represented James Earl Ray and was suspected by the FBI of personally being involved in the MLK assassination.]
Milteer not only knew about how the assassination of JFK would be sold to the public, he gave names to Somersett on who did the actual killing. It was the next day, November 23, and Somersett and Milteer were on their way to a Klan meeting in South Carolina. Somersett was careful not to probe too much to arouse suspicion; Milteer was happy but did not want to dwell on the events in Dealey Plaza. He did, however, name three names associated with the hit: Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, who was ostensibly killed by Oswald shortly after JFK was gunned down; Rev. Dr. Theodore R. Jackman; and Rev. Dr. Roy E. Davis.
Somersett’s info per Milteer has been more ridiculed and dismissed by certain factions in the research community than mined for potential clues. Because if one takes this info at face value and explores who exactly these individuals were, two things become apparent:
- The Rosetta Stone of the assassination rests at the scene of the murder of J.D. Tippit;
- The Klan was far more involved in the assassination than most conspiracy theorists or the general public readily acknowledge.
Garrison First Suspected the Far Right
That the radical right in the American South actively sought to overthrow the federal government, with President Kennedy and his integration and disarmament policies directly in their crosshairs, is getting greater exposure today (see “The Best JFK Book You Never Heard Of” and “The CIA Did Not Kill JFK”). This notion flies in the face of the heavily-favored CIA/military-industrial complex theory as advocated by Jim Garrison.
Incredibly, however, before Garrison decided to go that route, his investigative files showed evidence of a radical right operation involving the Klan, John Birch Society, NSRP, the American Nazi Party, and the Minutemen. Caufield wrote:
“Garrison, in spite of his publicly pronounced CIA allegations, fittingly and correctly — at least early on — referred to the conspirators as ‘master-racist authors of the assassination’.”
Caufield was one of a few researchers who was granted access to Garrison’s personal copies of the NOLA DA’s JFK files in 1994, two years after the former DA’s death.
So perhaps Somersett’s information is not to be dismissed so lightly. Perhaps what this Klan insider passed on is the closest to the truth of what transpired on November 22. And we can chip away at the biggest crack in the conspiracy coverup that ultimately backs up Somersett’s claims: the murder of Officer Tippit.
The Murder of J.D. Tippit: The Rosetta Stone of the Assassination
It was David Belin, Warren Commission assistant counsel, who wrote, “The Rosetta Stone to the solution of President Kennedy’s murder is the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit.” As Joseph McBride remarked in his book, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippit, “I came to agree with [Belin’s] description of the Tippit murder, although not for the reasons Belin put forth. […] The extraordinarily obscure nature of this murder was the principal factor in alerting me to how sensitive and significant the Tippit case is to solving the assassination conspiracy.”
Somersett’s information that Tippit was one of the gunmen somewhere in Dealey Plaza is almost unbelievable. That he adds two preachers, one 60 and the other 73, also seems preposterous. On the other hand, how well known is it that a Dallas police officer was shot less than an hour after the president? My own mother, who was a sophomore in high school that day, had never heard of J.D. Tippit when I asked her.
Timeline of the Tippit Killing
The president was shot at 12:30 p.m. At about 1:00 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald, who had left work at the Texas School Book Depository, arrived at his boarding house in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. He changed his shirt and was only there for less than five minutes. The housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, remarked, “Oh, you are in a hurry.” Oswald ignored her.
Roberts testified a police car pulled up to the house during this time. The driver gave two quick honks on the car horn. It is important to note Oswald was registered at the house as O.H. Lee, and only his wife, Marina, and Mrs. Ruth Paine knew the address (1026 North Beckley Avenue). Why would a police vehicle be tooting its horn outside the rooming house of the purported assassin of the president of the United States?
Nine-tenths of a mile from 1026 North Beckley, Oswald was allegedly spotted on foot at Tenth and Patton. Moments later, Officer Tippit is gunned down outside his vehicle, shot four times. The assailant, supposedly Oswald, flees the scene, ducking behind a Texaco service station.
Dallas police later put out a dispatch that the suspect was seen fleeing down an alley behind the Texaco station to the door of a church, the Abundant Life Temple, located at Tenth and Crawford.
Garrison’s investigators later looked into who ran the church, suspecting it served as a pre-arranged safe house of some kind. Eric Tagg, writing in Brush with History, put it this way:
“The Abundant Life Temple takes us into a labyrinth from which we might never re-emerge, so we must hold to the surface as much as possible.”
The New Orleans DA investigators traced the incorporators of the church to something called United Missions of America in an apparent effort to try to find some connection to Jack Ruby, but nothing seems to have developed from that angle.
I personally spoke with Rod Sherrell, son of one of the incorporators, the late George Sherrell. The topic was about the Pentecostal healing preacher who ran the church at the same time as the assassination, Rev. Oscar B. (O.B.) Graham.
What Sherrell revealed does indeed take us into a labyrinth we may never re-emerge, though even Tagg may not have suspected how dark it would get: the labyrinth of Christian Identity, white supremacy, and ultimately, the KKK.
Sherrell revealed information no researcher has yet uncovered, which I will be putting forth here for the first time.
O.B. Graham and the Abundant Temple of Doom
O.B. Graham purchased the church building in Oak Cliff in April 1962. Before then, the rather imposing structure was home to the Oak Cliff Christian Church; Graham’s church was damaged by a fire in February 1962. In 1964, Graham then sold the Tenth and Crawford building and appeared to alternate his time between Dallas and Tulsa — Billy James Hargis’s turf. Graham died in 1974. He was 53.
It is an interesting coincidence that both Graham’s church and the Texas School Book Depository company only recently moved into their respective physical buildings in the months leading up to the assassinations. In Dealey Plaza, the Book Depository had been just across the street at 501 Elm on the first floor of the Dal-Tex Building; in 1962 Graham’s Abundant Life Center relocated from two miles south, at 1730 S. Ewing (which is still a church today, Lighthouse Gospel Center).
What’s further striking is that Graham and the Abundant Life Temple follow Full Gospel Pentecostalism that emphasizes divine healing. This is rather curious, because Somersett’s other names he provided in relation to the hit on JFK — Theodore Jackman and R.E. Davis — are both connected to the Full Gospel tradition: Jackman as one of the first preachers in Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare Church, and R.E. Davis as a well-known healing minister known for his tent revivals. Still more, according to Warren Commission Document 693, preacher John Howard Bowen, who reputedly sat next to Oswald — or someone impersonating him — on Oswald’s bus ride from Texas to Mexico in September 1963 for the all-important trip to Mexico City, was a representative of the Full Gospel church. This information was provided by Bessie White, who had been donating to Bowen’s missionary activity in Mexico.
In any event, having long abandoned my own phobia of ridicule, I have posited O.B. Graham bore a shocking resemblance to Mac Wallace and wondered if he was the man bystander Richard Carr claimed he saw walking briskly down Commerce St. away from the frenzy in Dealey Plaza minutes after the shooting.
In my scenario, O.B. Graham was on the sixth floor of the TSBD. Too far-fetched? Graham was known as “the flying evangelist” because he was a pilot — Graham was a one-time chaplain for the South Carolina wing of the Civil Air Patrol. Did he know the building’s owner, CAP founder D.H. Byrd? Oswald? Ferrie? How about Illinois wing commander Gordon DaCosta?
Where exactly was O.B. Graham on November 22? Who let the purported Tippit assailant into the back of the Abundant Life church? How did the assailant know that door was unlocked?
Enter the Klan
But let’s stay with the facts. Rod Sherrell, in his phone interview with me, revealed that his father was O.B. Graham’s biggest supporter — Graham even made George Sherrell a deacon. However, Sherrell broke with Graham when the flying evangelist partnered with healing revival pastor O.L. Jaggers in 1962 or 1963. Sherrell didn’t approve of the influence Jaggers brought in. Does the Jaggers angle open up any new doors?
Before getting into Jaggers, let’s establish the Klan connection. Not only were Theodore Jackman and R.E. Davis Pentecostal ministers of questionable repute, but they were both linked to the KKK. Davis was long linked to the Klan; he was Imperial Dragon of the Dallas KKK and a seasoned recruiter for the Klan; according to a Congressional report, Davis reactivated the Klan in Louisiana in 1960. Davis himself told the Shreveport Times that he was one of the fifteen men who resurrected the Klan in 1915 on Stone Mountain in Georgia. As author John Collins noted in his book, Preacher Behind the White Hoods, Davis (and Georgian Congressman William Upshaw) “were using their evangelism to promote Ku Klux Klan agenda, and the Klan-published newsletters painted them as heroes.” Still more, “Davis testified that he was present when the Constitution and Laws of the Ku Klux Klan were written. The Klan promoted themselves as a ‘Christian’ organization.”
At this same time, about 1921, while Davis was preaching Klan values like white supremacy while holding Klan rallies in his church, he put out a church newsletter, The Progress. Davis used The Progress to spout anti-Catholic conspiracy theories; in their pursuit for WASP white supremacy, animosity was especially geared towards Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and anyone born outside the U.S.
In 1955, Davis ministered the first service at a new Church of Christ at the Odd Fellows Hall less than half a mile from where J.D. Tippit was gunned down eight years later. In July 1956, Davis was elected chaplain of the Odd Fellows in Oak Cliff. Dallas DA Henry Wade gave a speech at the location. Wade later announced during Oswald’s Kafkaesque midnight press conference that the accused assassin belonged to the “Free Cuba Committee.” He is corrected by a voice in the press gaggle: “That’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Henry.” The voice was that of Jack Ruby, impersonating a newspaperman. (Wade will earn further notoriety for being the Wade in Roe v. Wade.)
In early 1958, Davis spoke at the Adolphus Hotel to the Oak Cliff Indignant White Citizens Council about school integration. “[I] would rather die or be put in prison than allow Negro children be integrated with white children in Dallas white schools,” he proclaimed. Of course, the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka deemed segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Guy Banister was deeply bonded with the Greater New Orleans Chapter of the White Citizens Council.
In early 1961, Davis was cited in The Shreveport Times as “the nation’s top Klan man.” Davis told the Louisiana newspaper the Klan’s main goals were “states’ rights, constitutional government and white supremacy.” Davis was in the Pelican State on a Klan recruiting mission. This corresponds, interestingly, with Guy Banister ostensibly undertaking similar recruiting efforts of Mississippi Klansmen in summer 1963.
According to John Collins:
“In declassified FBI documents, it becomes clear that Roy Davis was already being tracked by the Federal Government. And when John F. Kennedy was elected president, this would have made Roy Davis a classified public enemy of the state.”
The day before his death, handbills circulated around Dallas: the president was “Wanted for Treason.”
Nazi supporter Robert Surrey, aide to disgruntled right-wing former general Edwin Walker, whom Oswald purportedly took a shot at seven months before JFK’s hit, printed and circulated the fliers. It was Surrey’s daughter who presented a bouquet of flowers to Madame Nhu, displaced “dragon lady” of South Vietnam’s soon-to-be-overthrown Ngo family, when she visited Dallas on October 23, 1963. Others connected to the handbill were Bobby Savelle Joiner, who had formed the Indignant White Citizens Council in July 1963, and none other than R.E. Davis himself.
Lettercraft Printers employee Robert Klause said the person for whom he made the film negative of the “Wanted for Treason” leaflet “looked like Lee Harvey Owald in a wig.” Furthermore, according to John Collins, “the printing presses [for the leaflet] were traced to printing equipment borrowed by Roy Davis from Earl Thornton.” Thornton and Davis were suspected by a member of the Dallas PD Intelligence Unit, Investigator Brumley. Brumley also suspected another individual involved in the leaflet issue, Jimmy George Robinson — an organizer of Dr. Fields’ National States’ Rights Party.
A Catholic President, A Catholic Antichrist
While all of this was smoldering R.E. Davis’s preacher acolyte, the “prophet” William Branham, whom Davis baptized and in many ways was Branham’s puppet, took aim at JFK’s policies, particularly the inevitable showdown on civil rights. John Collins paints an evocative picture on the tension broiling in Dallas leading up to November 22:
“Almost ninety percent of the African American population of Texas was on the eastern side near Dallas. When Dallas was ordered to integrate on January 27, 1958, as the battle against integration was exploding, Davis was elected president of the white supremacy council to lead the opposition. Interestingly, this was the same time Branham held campaigns in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. It was also one of the campaigns in which William Branham told his ‘slave’ story describing African Americans as ‘aliens.’”
Collins, who grew up in Branham’s church, detailed the number of attacks from Branham on the sitting president:
- JFK “broke the Constitution” by activating the National Guard to enforce desegregation
- Supported the efforts of the Indignant White Citizen’s Council
- Compared MLK to Hitler
- Said JFK’s equal rights stance was a denial of freedom of religion
- JFK was the “antichrist” and “the pharaoh of Egypt” because “the exodus is at hand”
- Supporters of JFK were to be “Excommunicated from the Word”
Collins noticed the assaults on JFK started when Kennedy ran for office, corresponding with R.E. Davis re-birthing the KKK.
Both Branham and Davis promoted the Klan concept of a “true” or “pure Americanism.” This can be defined by the questions of a Klan application from the 1920s:
7.) Were your parents born in the United States of America?
8.) Are you a Gentile or Jew?
9.) Are you of the white race or a colored race?
13.) Do you believe in White Supremacy?
15.) What is your religious faith?
17.) Of what religious faith are your parents?
20.) Do you owe ANY KIND of allegiance to any foreign nation, government, institution, sect, people, ruler or person?
“Pure Americanism” can also be neatly summed up here, dialogue from the film Mississippi Burning (1988), wherein the local Klan leader is confronted by newspapermen:
“I am getting sick and tired of the way many of us Mississippians are havin’ our views distorted by your newspaper people and on TV. So let’s get this straight. We do not accept Jews because they reject Christ. And their control of the international banking cartels are at the root of what we call communism today. We do not accept Papists because they bow to a Roman dictator. We do not accept Turks, Mongols, Tartars, Orientals nor Negroes because we’re here to protect Anglo-Saxon democracy and the American way.”
True Americanism was reflected in William Branham’s Serpent Seed theology, preaching that intercourse between Eve and the serpent resulted in Cain, inferior brother and murderer to Adam and Eve’s son, Abel. The “colored race,” then, are the offspring of Cain, according to Branham. John Collins discussed this at length in Preacher Behind the White Hoods. Branham originally advocated a Biblical, single bloodline beginning with Adam, claiming as late as 1956 that “skin tone came from sun exposure — not from a separate bloodline.” But as desegregation loomed, Branham called out the “race mixing” as “communistic.” Collins concluded that while he was not yet publicly identified with R.E. Davis, Branham was “saying exactly what Roy Davis and other white supremacists wanted him to say.”
The serpent seed doctrine is the foundation of Christian Identity theology: that is, the real Jews are European whites, the true descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and Jesus, therefore, was also white.
At this very same time, and in the same small town of Jeffersonville, Indiana as William Branham, a new political party was registered in 1958, a merger of the United White Party and States’ Rights Party: the National States’ Rights Party.
In awe of “the prophet” and “his message” was a young man who yearned to emulate the healing revival gifts of his idol, Branham. His name was O.L. Jaggers — the same O.L. Jaggers who will team up with O.B. Graham much to the consternation of Graham’s longtime supporter, George Sherrell, as told to me by Rod Sherrell. Here we can establish our own foursquare connection: purported Kennedy shooter R.E. Davis to influential healing preacher William Branham to Rev. O.L. Jaggers to O.B. Graham and the Abundant Life Temple.
Another Shooter, Another Preacher: T.R. Jackman
Also at this exact same time, an inferior bloodline was being preached in the sermons of another Pentecostal-trained preacher, Rev. Wesley Swift. Swift was a student at Aimee Semple McPherson’s L.I.F.E. Bible College of Angelus Temple in LA in the early 1930s when purported Kennedy shooter and Christian Zionist T.R. Jackman taught there. Swift was also a one-time rifle instructor for the Klan. He is generally regarded as the chief proponent of Christian Identity in America. To Swift, if white people were the real Chosen People, black people arrived on the planet by way of a space fleet organized by Lucifer.
This may seem totally outlandish, but consider the prominence of UFOs within not only the sermons of these preachers but also the Banister operation in New Orleans and throughout the coverup of the assassination (Col. Philip Corso, a member of the Shickshinny Knights Order of St. John, was the source of the rumor that Lee Oswald was a paid FBI informant. And just before his death in 1998, Corso published the purported nonfiction memoir The Day After Roswell, with a foreword by Senator Strom Thurmond).
Why were UFOs a strangely common topic?
According to R.E. Davis Klan collaborator Congressman William Upshaw, quoted in the Klan newspaper The Fiery Cross, “39,000,000 persons in the United States had alien (un-American) thought.” John Collins wrote, “White supremacy groups claimed that allowing African Americans in white schools, jobs, and marriages was ‘un-American,’ and therefore promoted their agendas as ‘Americanism’.”
Swift and Branham both ideologically point to Louisiana preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, whose Christian Nationalist Crusade promoted rhetoric such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Smith founded a party, America First (1943–1947), with its main priority being to “Preserve America as a Christian nation.”
Another person inspired by Smith, particularly when the preacher read pages of Mein Kampf, was George Lincoln Rockwell, eventually the overall head of the American Nazi Party. Amazingly, the editor of the pseudo-archaeological magazine Ancient American from 1993–2007 was Frank Collin, former coordinator of the American Nazi Party and founder of the National Socialist Party of America.
The mixing of the races, of an inferior bloodline with the bloodline of Adam, of alien and American was a shot across the bow from those seeking a new world order, to destroy true Americanism — white and Christian (Michael Barkun has discussed the idea of “UFOs and the search for scapegoats” in relation to anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism in his 2013 book, A Culture of Conspiracy).
In the same circles advocating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the Rev. Dr. Theodore Roosevelt (Ted) Jackman. Jackman made his living passing as an expert in Palestinian archaeology and antiquities, a representative of the World Christian Fundamentals who supported anti-evolution and blamed the Palestinian problem on the United Nations and Arab chiefs.
Jackman took speaking gigs for the John Birch Society and addressed groups like the Young Americans for Freedom and Daughters of the Confederacy. He was spending the early 1960s advocating against the Kennedy plan for total nuclear disarmament. As the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded he’s advocating for national defense. In Danville, last capitol of the Confederate States of America, he talked heraldry, seeming to tie his speeches back to some kind of yearning for royal elite. He emceed a January 1962 meeting where folks listened to a telephone speech given my Edwin S. Walker. He was blamed for fear mongering while echoing Gerald L.K. Smith by stating Congolese troops were training in Georgia. Jackman and his ilk believed the UN would occupy the U.S., thinking Kennedy-favored arms control and disarmament would strip the U.S. of military might.
And in April 1963 Jackman spoke at the Congress of Freedom meeting in New Orleans, advocating violence as the way forward. At this meeting, attended by Joseph Milteer and Willie Somersett, assassination plots were hatched against both political figures and prominent citizens, but not against the president. According to Jeffrey Caufield, both Jackman and R.E. Davis were associates of General Walker. In a letter, General Pedro del Valle recommended Jackman could provide the names of the targets put forward at the Congress of Freedom meeting to General Walker.
It is beyond the scope of this piece here, but General Walker and del Valle constitute a band of watchful protectors for the Klansmen we have been discussing here through the loose federation of hard radical right-wingers of the Shickshinny Knights, in which the same mentality of Christian Identity, antisemitism, Christian nationalism and U.S. isolation was advocated, while pretending to be a legitimate Catholic order of knights.
Where does J.D. Tippit fit in?
“We are fixing to go in and shake it down,” Sergeant Gerald Hill of the Dallas Police broadcasted a little after 1:41 PM, referring to the Abundant Life Temple, where a witness reported last seeing a Tippit shooting suspect flee inside. Before anyone could shake it down, however, the police were called to the Texas Theatre, where Lee Oswald was quickly arrested during the screening of the Korean War actioner War Is Hell and taken into custody. But what of the suspect seen running into the Abundant Life Temple?
The encounter between Tippit and his murderer strangely evokes an incident involving Wesley Smith thirty years earlier. A group of kidnappers seemed to be stalking Swift and his young wife in 1932. According to the Los Angeles Times, Smith’s mother was threatened by the gang outside the Angelus Temple. Smith’s mother escaped her assailants by rushing inside the church, shaking off her potential kidnappers.
Thanks to research put forth by John Collins, R.E. Davis was known to plant Klansmen to infiltrate the Dallas Police. Could this have been Tippit? Tippit certainly knew those in this hard right milieu, given his moonlighting part-time as a bouncer at Austin’s BBQ, a known meeting place for the John Birch Society.
Whatever transpired between Officer Tippit and his killer at Tenth and Patton is unclear but does not totally obscure the connections and implications put forward here. Based on the seemingly spurious activities of Tippit in the frenzied final minutes of his life, it is not out of the realm of possibility to consider that if Somersett was correct, Tippit’s job was probably to kill Oswald — the Kennedy assassin quickly put down by the able and responsible Dallas PD. But something went awry; maybe Oswald got privy to what was unfolding — other witnesses described two shooters firing upon Tippit.
Either way, Tippit was dead and Oswald was still alive; the slippery “patsy” was rounded up by a huge number of police at the Texas Theatre. In the scenario of the conspiracy, perhaps, Oswald was never supposed to be taken alive. On the other hand, pinning both JFK and Tippit’s murder made him seem overwhelmingly guilty.
Whatever the motivations of these tragic figures, white supremacy continued to fester, as it does to our own time. Recognizing its role in the assassination of the president will be a cathartic step in healing our country of its greatest sin.
