Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

by Kathleen Belew

That the Oklahoma City bombing, which stood as a singular event of mass-casualty terrorism on American soil—deliberate violence at a scale unsurpassed, at that time, since the bombing of Pearl Harbor—did not solidify a public understanding of the white power movement and its capacity for violence is remarkable.4 Smaller-scale violent events earlier in the twentieth century, such as the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, had played a role in galvanizing public opinion against the Klan and in favor of the civil rights movement.5 Certainly such events helped tip the scale of public opinion away from overt racism and the outright support of racial violence, such that in their aftermath, even politicians who pursued policies with racial implications increasingly framed these in coded terms.