Before Gen. Flynn There Was Gen. Walker

The Tulsa race massacre commemoration this week has returned a focus to the violent actions of white supremacists which are still with us. The recent seditious call for a coup by deranged QuackAnon authoritarian Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn reminded us of the ignominious career of right-wing loon Gen. Edwin Walker. Walker came to national attention during the integration of schools in Little Rock, AR, in the mid-1950s, when he reluctantly carried out the orders of President Eisenhower to supply Federal troops to enforce the court-ordered integration. Just a few years later, absorbing the rantings of the fascist John Birch Society and a segregationist Christofascist preacher named Billy James Hargis, Walker was a full-blown fanatic who accused everyone from Eisenhower to Pentagon brass of being sympathetic to Communism, which he also imagined controlled the civil rights movement. 

As a private citizen in 1962, he broadcast incendiary statements urging people to rise up and fight the integration of the University of Mississippi. White supremacists answered his call, and rioted for hours, with two civilians killed execution-style and hundreds wounded, including six Federal marshals. Walker was arrested on charges of insurrection and sedition against the U.S., and was ordered for psychiatric evaluation by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, but only spent a few days under observation. Walker and Hargis then embarked on a speaking tour of the nation, spreading conspiracy theories and racist beliefs. His life unravelling in the years ahead, Walker was arrested in Dallas in 1976 for public lewdness for fondling an undercover police officer. 

In an ironic convergence of history, Lee Harvey Oswald, just months before assassinating President Kennedy, nearly assassinated Walker as he sat in his dining room with the same rifle used in the Kennedy assassination. Had he been successful, he would have likely been apprehended or on the run, and we may have had one less racist and one more beloved President.