‘America’s Secret Jihad’: The Christian Identity Movement and Its Quest for a Race War
From the Archives
(July 10, 2015)
The G-Man Interviews: Stuart Wexler
(Hosted & Produced by Gary Glennell Toms)
Stuart Wexler is a historian who has devoted the past 10 years of his research to domestic terrorism in the United States. Mr. Wexler is a history teacher who earned his B.A. in history from Tulane University and has just completed his Masters in Political Science from Rutgers University under the prestigious James Madison Fellowship.
His research has been featured in the Boston Globe, Salon, Newsweek, the Mississippi-Clarion Ledge and on the Thom Hartman and Mark Thompson shows, to name a few.
According to the critically acclaimed author and lecturer, his groundbreaking 2012 book, The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr (Counterpoint), which he co-authored with Larry Hancock, allowed him to “have a better understanding of how a network of religious zealots created an informal proto-social network under the umbrella of a little known but important ideology: Christian Identity.
In tracing this network through the 1960s, it became clear that they may have had their hand in a number of different racial crimes. This revelation served as the catalyst for his new book, America’s Secret Jihad, which will be released in August.”
He spent the next several months examining that proposition, while helping Hancock with another book, Shadow Warfare: America’s History of Undeclared Wars. This emerged out of their long-time mutual interest in the history of covert operations in the 1960s– although they traced such activity all the way back to just before World War II and on through the current war on terrorism.
“Larry led the charge on that book, while I continued to investigate the Christian Identity network, and continued my work on the MLK assassination,” said Wexler.
“We eventually published what you might call an abridged version of The Awful Grace of God as an e-book and called it Killing King. His work on the Birmingham Bombing also became a very small eBook: Rebels, Redbaiters and Religious Radicals.
For the past several years, he has written a number of extended essays on isolated, historical crimes and their connection to Christian Identity ideology. He filed FOIA requests, visited archives in Alabama and Mississippi, and data-mined newly released information made available through various online networks and resources. He published an article in the Mississippi Clarion Ledger on the Mississippi Burning murders, which received praise from noted historians and the general public.
Information pertaining to this episode is available through the following links: Newsweek, Salon, Book review of “America’s Secret Jihad”, Site for the book.