Concerned Parent Helped Disrupt Assassination Plot, Sheriff Says

A county sheriff in Tennessee tells MyFOXMemphis.com that a call from a concerned parent helped disrupt two skinheads' alleged plot to kill Barack Obama.

A county sheriff in Tennessee says a call from a concerned parent helped disrupt an alleged plot by two skinheads to assassinate Barack Obama and kill and behead scores of blacks across the country.

Haywood County Sheriff Melvin Bond told MyFOXMemphis.com that a woman called his office worried about her daughter. "As the investigation led on, we found out who these individuals were," the Tennessee lawman said.

Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., are accused of dreaming up a plan in which they'd drive into the candidate while wearing top hats and tuxedos. They have a federal court hearing scheduled for Thursday morning in Memphis.

While authorities say the men had guns capable of creating carnage, documents show they never got close to getting off the ground.

Among the blunders: They drew attention to themselves by etching swastikas on a car with sidewalk chalk; they knew each other for only a month; they couldn't even pull off a house robbery; and a friend ratted them out to authorities.

"Certainly these men have some frightening weapons and some very frightening plans," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who studies the white supremacy movement. "But with the part about wearing top hats ... it gets a bit hard to take them seriously."

While authorities say that the incident may have been far-fetched, they still conjure images of the segregation era for some.

"These incidents, isolated though they are, serve as a reality check," journalist John Seigenthaler said about the arrests. The 81-year-old was U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant and was attacked with the Freedom Riders anti-segregation activists during the Civil Rights era.

"Yes we've changed in significant ways, but there are those that haven't," said Seigenthaler.

The alleged plot "should serve as a low voltage electric shock. We're a new South, but there are elements of the old South still under the surface."

The Rev. James Lawson, an 80-year-old Freedom Rider who worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement and is now a visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University, said he was not surprised by this latest threat to Obama.

He said he has had conversations with fellow blacks at various places, not just the South, since Obama's candidacy began nearly two years and they have been afraid for Obama's life.

"In the black community, there's been all over the country anticipation of his being in harm's way," Lawson said. "That is a reflection of the fact that, by and large, the black community still experiences racism when it comes to access to jobs, in unemployment levels, in housing discrimination and predatory lending in housing."

The alleged plot highlights tensions that both blacks and whites say exist in Helena-West Helena, a predominantly black east Arkansas city that has struggled economically.

I think that [Schlesselman] just made a bad choice," Helena-West Helena resident Betty Hunt told MyFOXMemphis.com. "That's what I think. I feel he made a bad choice. But I don't really know him."

Mayor James Valley said he doesn't believe Schlesselman's involvement in the alleged plot indicated any organized effort by white supremacists in the city, but he said there has been at least a political tension among blacks and whites.

"The white community controls the finances and the black community here controls the ballot box, so that's where you're going to see it," said Valley, who is black.

One Helena-West Helena resident, Larry Johnston, said he was not surprised that white supremacists had been plotting to kill Obama. Johnston, who is white, said he voted for John McCain during early voting and that he didn't believe the country is ready for a black president.

"You look at all your big cities that have black mayors and you have trouble," said Johnston, 58. "That's what I'm afraid of with Obama."

Despite making sure the plot was stopped, authorities did not believe Cowart and Schlesselman had the means to carry out their threat to assassinate Obama, said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

Asked whether the two suspects had Obama's schedule or plans to kill him at a specific time or place, a second law enforcement official who also was not authorized to speak publicly said, "I don't think they had that level of detail."

The two met online about a month ago, introduced by a friend and bound by a mutual belief in white supremacy, according to an affidavit written by a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who interviewed them.

Schlesselman's family said Tuesday that it was unlikely he was seriously planning an attack, even though he expressed hatred for blacks. A high school dropout who was unsuccessful finding work, he often spent time on the computer, his 16-year-old sister, Kayla said. She said she often argued with him about his racial beliefs, and he would say things like "Obama would make the world suffer."

He hated his tiny Delta hometown of Helena-West Helena because it was predominantly black, she said.

"He just believes that he's the master race," she said. "He would just say things like 'white power' and 'Sieg Heil' and 'Heil Hitler."'

Comments like those and the plot uncovered are inevitable as the region still struggles with its past, said Dan Fountain, assistant professor of history at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fountain said those views are no longer mainstream in the South, but have not completely disappeared either.

"Those people who stood in the doorways had children, and their ideas still passed on and still live on to some extent today," Fountain said.

Doug Shipman, executive director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, says threats to Obama and blacks in the South are remnants of the Old South, but not the face of most of today's South.

"But these kinds of feelings are harbored by individuals and will probably continue to be in the future," he said. "The political season has shown race is still a relevant issue, but it's much more complicated than in the past."