Samuel Bowers

Samuel Bowers

Samuel Kenneth ("Sam") Bowers (August 25, 1924, – November 5, 2006) was a leading white supremacist militant in the American state of Mississippi during the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968). In response to this movement, he cofounded a clandestine violent organization, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Bowers was a mastermind of two notorious murder events of civil rights activists in southern Mississippi: the 1964 triple murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney near Philadelphia, 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 a mastermind of bombings of Jewish targets in the cities of Jackson and Meridian in 1967 and 1968 (according to the man who was convicted of some of the bombings, Thomas A. Tarrants III). He died in prison at the age of 82.