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See Also

See Also in
Notorious Lives

Theodore G. Bilbo

Matthew F. Hale

Adolf Hitler

William Joyce

Tom Metzger

James Earl Ray.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

J. B. Stoner

by William V. Moore

American bigot

Major offense: Bombing a church

Active: 1942-1990

Locale: United States

Sentence: Imprisoned but paroled after three and one-half years

Early Life

Jesse Benjamin Stoner (STOH-nuhr), Jr., was born near Lookout Mountain in northern Georgia, the son of Jesse Benjamin Stoner, Sr., and Minerva Pogue Stoner. His father was associated with a sightseeing company and worked as a conductor on the incline railroad train on Lookout Mountain. J. B. Stoner’s early years were characterized by tragedy. When he was two years old he was stricken with polio, which crippled him for life. When he was five, his father died in an accident. His mother died when he was seventeen. Although he attended both private and public schools in Chattanooga, he never graduated. As a teenager he admired the segregationist U.S. senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo.

Stoner first garnered attention during World War II when, at the age of sixteen, he wrote to William Joyce, the British propagandist for Radio Berlin called Lord Haw Haw. Stoner was hoping to find a doctor in Germany who could cure his affliction caused by polio. Joyce responded on the air that he would help Stoner secure the services of a German doctor after the war was over. At the time, Stoner denied having Nazi sympathies.

Political Career

Stoner’s association with hate groups began when he was a teenager. When he was eighteen he was a kleagle (organizer) for the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee. In 1944, he petitioned the United States Congress to pass a resolution recognizing the “fact” that Jews were the children of the devil, and he urged Congress to take immediate action against what he called “the Jew-devils.” In a 1946 interview he stated to a reporter, “I’ll never be satisfied as long as there are any Jews here or anywhere. I think we ought to kill all Jews just to save their unborn generations from having to go to hell.” Shortly thereafter, Stoner founded the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party. He said he started the party to ouster Adolf Hitler, whom he called a moderate. The stated purpose of the party was to make being a Jew punishable by death.

In the early 1950’s, Stoner moved to Atlanta, where he attended Atlanta Law School. There he met Edward R. Fields, who later became one of Stoner’s political allies. In 1958, Fields formed the National States Rights Party, of which Stoner became chairman and the most visible member. National States Rights Party members wore white shirts, black ties, and black armbands with the Nazi thunderbolt symbol. The organization also published a newspaper called The Thunderbolt.

During the 1950’s and 1960’s, Stoner and members of the National States Rights Party actively opposed the Civil Rights movement. Stoner frequently made inflammatory speeches in cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, St. Augustine, Florida, and Bogalusa, Louisiana, where opposition to integration was greatest. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement officials suspected Stoner of being involved in church and synagogue bombings. In 1977, Stoner was indicted for the 1958 bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church, an African American church in Birmingham. He was convicted in 1980. After exhausting his appeals, he disappeared. In June, 1983, he surrendered to authorities in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1986, after serving three and one-half years in prison, Stoner was paroled. A year later he was involved in a counterdemonstration over civil rights in Forsyth County, Georgia. Then, in 1998, he attended a Ku Klux Klan leadership meeting with Edward Fields in Zinc, Arkansas.

In addition to illegal means, Stoner used the political process to further his cause. Before he was disbarred, he defended Klansmen and other segregationists charged with racial crimes. For a short time he represented James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Ray’s brother, Jerry Ray, worked for Stoner as a bodyguard.

Stoner frequently used the electoral process to spread his message of hate. From 1970 through 1990, he ran for various political offices in Georgia on an openly racist platform. In 1970, he ran for governor against Jimmy Carter and fellow segregationist Lester Maddox. Two years later, in 1972, Stoner was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate. In that race, Stoner won a Federal Communications Commission ruling that allowed him to say the word “nigger” in television ads. In 1974, he was a candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia. In that campaign he received approximately seventy-three thousand votes, nearly 10 percent of the total. Stoner ran for lieutenant governor again in 1990. In the election he received almost thirty-one thousand votes, about 3 percent of the votes cast.

By the late 1990’s, Stoner had faded from public view. In 2001, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and confined to a nursing home in Walker County in northwest Georgia. A lifelong bachelor, he remained an unapologetic racist and anti-Semite until his death in April, 2005, at the age of eighty-one.

Impact

From the early 1940’s to the end of the twentieth century, J. B. Stoner used his positions in the Ku Klux Klan, the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party, and the National States Rights Party to spread his message of hate throughout the American South. His rhetoric was so extreme that prosegregation politicians distanced themselves from him. Although some dismissed his ramblings as demented, Stoner may have actually contributed to the success of the Civil Rights movement with his extremism, as his rhetoric made some people reflect on the legitimacy of segregationist policies and those who defended them.

Further Reading

1 

Bushart, Howard L., John R. Craig, and Myra Barnes. Soldiers of God. New York: Kensington Books, 1998. Analyzes the white supremacist movement in the United States. It includes quotations of Stoner’s anti-Semitic statements.

2 

George, John, and Laird Wilcox. American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, and Others. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996. Examines numerous extremist groups, left and right, including a chapter on the National States Rights Party.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Moore, William V. "J. B. Stoner." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1560.
APA 7th
Moore, W. V. (2007). J. B. Stoner. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Moore, William V. "J. B. Stoner." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.