 |
Kathryn Madlyn Ainsworth | |
|---|---|
| Born | Kathryn Madlyn Capomacchia July 31, 1941 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | June 30, 1968 (aged 26) Meridian, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Gunshot wound |
| Other names |
|
| Occupation | Elementary school teacher |
| Spouse | Ralph Ainsworth |
Kathryn Madlyn Ainsworth (born Kathryn Madlyn Capomacchia) was an American Ku Klux Klan terrorist. She was killed by law enforcement in 1968 during her failed assassination attempt on a prominent Jewish Mississippian. [2]
Kathryn Madlyn Ainsworth was born Kathryn Madlyn Capomacchia on July 31, 1941. Capomacchia was raised by her mother, who was known to have anti-Semitic views. She introduced Kathy to the works of far-right political organizer Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the Christian Nationalist Crusade and member of the Silver Legion of America. [3]
Kathy was a devout churchgoer. She taught Sunday school and sang in choir at Coral Baptist Church in Miami. [1]
Capomacchia attended college at Mississippi College in Clinton, Mississippi. In the spring of 1960, she roomed with Bonnie Barnes, the daughter of extremist Sidney Crockett Barnes - a devoted follower of Wesley Swift. In the years between graduation and marriage, Kathy Capomacchia and her mother were frequent guests at the Barnes home in Mobile, Alabama where she met her future lover, Thomas Albert Tarrants III (born December 20, 1946) of Mobile, Alabama.
Around the summer of 1967, Kathy Capomacchia married Ralph Ainsworth.[ citation needed ]
Ainsworth and her companion, Thomas Tarrants, were both members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of the most militant white terrorist organizations during the Civil Rights era. Ainsworth, herself, was also a member of two additional KKK groups: the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the United Klans of America - as well as a Klan front called Americans for the Preservation of the White Race. [4]
According to police sources and numerous acquaintances of the two, older fanatics had influenced Kathy and Thomas with propaganda and hate material that came from organizations in Arizona, California, New Jersey and other states. [4]
Unbeknownst to her husband, Ainsworth began training in firearms and explosives in 1967. [5] He was aware of his wife's Klan connections, but not of her deep involvement.[ citation needed ]
On May 28, 1968, Ainsworth, along with Tarrants, had participated in the bombing of the Congregation Beth Israel in 1968. [6] [7]
Early on the morning of June 30, 1968, [8] Kathy Ainsworth and Thomas Tarrants drove to the home of Meyer Davidson planning to place a bomb on the side of his house below where they believed his bedroom to be. [9] Ainsworth waited in their car while Tarrants attempted to blow up Davidson's home with a homemade bomb consisting of 29 sticks of dynamite. [10] [11]
Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson documented the payment of $36,500 by ADL director Adolph Botnick, acting as agent provocateur, to two Klansmen, Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts, in order to set up Tarrants [12] in an ambush organized by the FBI and local police. [13] A bloody shootout took place, Ainsworth was shot in the neck and died immediately. [14] [15] A loaded pistol and a KKK membership card were found in her purse. [16] Right wing literature from groups including the Minutemen and the National States Rights Party was found during a search of her home. [17]
Tarrants survived numerous wounds and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The prosecution had sought a death sentence under a rarely-used state law regarding the criminal use of explosives. However, the jury declined to make a decision, and left it to the judge, who spared Tarrants's life. In 1969, Tarrants escaped from prison with two other convicts, Malcolm Houston, who was serving a 15-year sentence for bank robbery, and Louis Shadoan, who was serving a two-year sentence for child molestation. Shadoan was killed in a shootout with the FBI, while Houston and Tarrants later surrendered. Tarrants spend five years in maximum security for the escape. [18]
In December 1976, Tarrants, who had since become a Born Again Christian who had renounced his racist views, was freed under a work release program. Since then, he has preached against racism. [19]
The car's owner was identified to be Danny Joe Hawkins, a Ku Klux Klan hitman who had helped bomb Beth Israel. [20]
The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is the name of several historical and current American white supremacist, far-right terrorist organizations and hate groups. According to historian Fergus Bordewich, the Klan was "the first organized terror movement in American history." Their primary targets at various times have been African Americans, as well as Jews and Catholics.
David Curtis "Steve" Stephenson was an American Ku Klux Klan leader, convicted rapist and murderer. In 1923 he was appointed Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan and head of Klan recruiting for seven other states. Later that year, he led those groups to independence from the national KKK organization. Amassing wealth and political power in Indiana politics, he was one of the most prominent national Klan leaders. He had close relationships with numerous Indiana politicians, especially Governor Edward L. Jackson.
Viola Fauver Liuzzo was an American civil rights activist in Detroit, Michigan. She was known for going to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. There she was shot and killed by three Ku Klux Klan members while driving activists between the cities and transportation.
Edgar Ray Killen was an American Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights activists participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He appealed the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on April 12, 2007, by the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, at age 92.
This is a partial list of notable historical figures in U.S. national politics who were members of the Ku Klux Klan before taking office. Membership of the Klan is secret. Political opponents sometimes allege that a person was a member of the Klan, or was supported at the polls by Klan members.
Ku Klux Klan auxiliaries are organized groups that supplement, but do not directly integrate with the Ku Klux Klan. These auxiliaries include: Women of the Ku Klux Klan, The Jr. Ku Klux Klan, The Tri-K Girls, the American Crusaders, The Royal Riders of the Red Robe, The Ku Klux balla, and the Klan's Colored Man auxiliary.
Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan is a 1975 American two-part made-for-television drama film which dramatizes the events following the 1964 abduction and murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. In this, it is similar in theme to the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning, though some names and details were changed, and both productions pick up the approximate storyline of the 1990 TV-movie Murder in Mississippi.
Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr. was an American white supremacist who co-founded the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and became its first Imperial Wizard. Previously, he was a Grand Dragon of the Mississippi Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, appointed to his position by Imperial Wizard Roy Davis. Bowers was responsible for instigating and planning the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by members of his Klan chapter near Philadelphia, Mississippi, for which he served six years in federal prison; and the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, for which he was sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after the crime. He also was accused of being involved in the 1967–1968 bombings of Jewish targets in the cities of Jackson and Meridian. He died in prison at the age of 82.
Harry Tyson Moore was an African-American educator, a pioneer leader of the civil rights movement, founder of the first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Brevard County, Florida, and president of the state chapter of the NAACP.
Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), also known as Women's Ku Klux Klan, and Ladies of the Invisible Empire, held to many of the same political and social ideas of the KKK but functioned as a separate branch of the national organization with their own actions and ideas. While most women focused on the moral, civic, and educational agendas of the Klan, they also had considerable involvement in issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and religion. The women of the WKKK fought for educational and social reforms like other Progressive reformers but with extreme racism and intolerance.
James Ford Seale was a Ku Klux Klan member charged by the U.S. Justice Department on January 24, 2007, and subsequently convicted on June 14, 2007, for the May 1964 kidnapping and murder of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two African-American young men in Meadville, Mississippi. At the time of his arrest, Seale worked at a lumber plant in Roxie, Mississippi. He also worked as a crop duster and was a police officer in Louisiana briefly in the 1970s. He was a member of the militant Klan organization known as the Silver Dollar Group, whose members were identified with a silver dollar; occasionally minted the year of the member's birth.
Mississippi Cold Case is a 2007 feature documentary produced by David Ridgen of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the Ku Klux Klan murders of two 19-year-old black men, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, in Southwest Mississippi in May 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement and Freedom Summer. It also explores the 21st-century quest for justice by the brother of Moore. The documentary won numerous awards as a documentary and for its investigative journalism.
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organization which is active in the United States. It originated in Mississippi and Louisiana in the early 1960s under the leadership of Samuel Bowers, its first Imperial Wizard. The White Knights of Mississippi were formed in December 1963, when they separated from the Original Knights of Mississippi after the resignation of Imperial Wizard Roy Davis. Roughly 200 members of the Original Knights of Louisiana also joined the White Knights. Within a year, their membership was up to around six thousand, and they had Klaverns in over half of the counties in Mississippi. By 1967, the number of active members had declined to around four hundred. Similar to the United Klans of America (UKA), the White Knights are very secretive about their group.
The United Klans of America Inc. (UKA), based in Alabama, is a Ku Klux Klan organization active in the United States. Led by Robert Shelton, the UKA peaked in membership in the late 1960s and 1970s, and it was the most violent Klan organization of its time. Its headquarters was the Anglo-Saxon Club outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The Ku Klux Klan has had a history in the U.S. state of New Jersey since the early part of the 1920s. The Klan was active in the areas of Trenton and Camden and it also had a presence in several of the state's northern counties in the 1920s. It had the most members in Monmouth County, and operated a resort in Wall Township.
Judge Edward Aaron was an African American handyman in Birmingham, Alabama, who was abducted by seven members of Asa Earl Carter's independent Ku Klux Klan group on Labor Day, September 2, 1957.
Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., known in Witness Protection as Thomas Neil Moore, was a paid informant and agent provocateur for the FBI. As an informant, he infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, as part of the FBI's COINTELPRO project, to monitor and disrupt the Klan's activities. Rowe participated in violent Klan activity against African Americans and civil rights groups.
Undercover with the KKK is a 1979 NBC TV movie based on the autobiography My Undercover Years with the Ku Klux Klan by Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. and starring Don Meredith as Rowe.
Ben Chester White was an African-American caretaker, uninvolved in the civil rights movement, shot down by the KKK. This was likely in an attempt to move focus away from James Meredith’s March Against Fear or to lure Martin Luther King, Jr. in an assassination attempt. This murder went unnoticed by King.
Kathy Capomacchia.