Bryant W. Bowles
Bryant William Bowles Jr. (March 4, 1920 in Alford, Florida[1] – April 13, 1997 in Tampa, Florida) was a white leader in the resistance against race mixing of public schools in the United States. He began his opposition with his formation of National Association for the Advancement of White People.
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Early life
Bryant Bowles was born in rural Florida near southern Alabama. His father Bryant Bowles Sr. was a contractor in the timber industry. His mother, Nellie, was a homemaker and raised five children. At 19 he joined the US Marine Corps rising to the rank of staff sergeant before being discharged at the end of World War II.[2]
After returning from the war he married ,divorced and became a father all within two years. In 1949 he meet his second wife, Eloise Williford, a nurse whom he meet while recovering from a dynamite blast accident while working for an oil company in Texas.[3]
At the outbreak of the Korean War he retuned to the marines and was released from active duty in December 1953 where he settled in Baltimore, Maryland starting his own construction company.
National Association for the Advancement of White People
In December 1953 he took $6,000 of his own money and started the National Association for the Advancement of White People months before the infamous 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling stateing racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional. He established his offices in Washington DC.
Protests in Milford, Delaware
During the latter half of 1954, Bowles held rallies and gave speeches in several different states. At one such rally Bowles is reported to have said that his daughter "will never attend a school with Negroes as long as there is breath in my body and gunpowder will burn." He briefly attracted nationwide attention for leading a pro-segregation boycott of Milford High School in Milford, Delaware. The ensuing unrest, which included cross burnings, contributed to desegregation in some parts of Delaware being delayed for another ten years.
Bryant Bowles worked closely with Conde McGinley the publisher of Common Sense. In Milford, Delaware McGinley flooded the area with a special "desegregation issue" of his paper claiming Communist Jews were responsible for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and for desegregation.
On August 21, 1955, 3,000 gathered at the Milford's airport where Kenneth Goff, a former associate of Gerald L. K. Smith shared the platform with Bryant Bowles and Conde McGinley. Literature against Jewish supermacism was widely distributed including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, John O. Beaty's Iron Curtain Over America, and Frank L. Britton's booklet, Behind Communism.
Charged for making inflammatory statements, Bowles was tried in 1955 in Dover before Judge Charles Sudler Richards. After brief deliberation the jury found Bowles not guilty. A 1999 article in Delaware Lawyer states that "many years later it was learned that one of the jurors was a member of Bowles' organization."
Murder charge
In 1958, while living near Beaumont, Texas, Bowles shot and killed his brother-in-law, James Earl Harvey, on May 4 for assaulting his wife. According to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records, he was sentenced to a life term for premeditated murder but was paroled in March 1973. In 1994 Bowles returned to prison in Texas for a year for allegedly having violated the terms of his parole.
Bowles died at age 77 of congestive heart failure in Tampa, two years after gaining parole a second time. He was buried in Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell, Florida.
