MAY 29, 1980
Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, looks at the New York Post, May 29, 1980, with a front page story on the shooting of National Urban League President Vernon Jordan Jr. in Fort Wayne, Ind. Credit: AP Photo/Carlos Rene PerezVernon Jordan, who once worked alongside Medgar Evers as a field secretary for the NAACP and later advised Bill Clinton, survived an assassination attempt in Fort Wayne, Indiana, by racist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin (who also wounded Hustler publisher Larry Flynt in 1978).
Franklin was acquitted of the assault — only to confess his guilt years later. In an interview, Franklin said he considered Adolf Hitler his hero and “Mein Kampf” his Bible. “I read it hundreds of times.”
Trying to start a “race war,” he said he bombed synagogues, shot interracial couples and killed “enemies of the white race.” By the time it ended, he had killed at least 22 people, including Jackson State University student Johnnie Noyes Jr., who had simply been washing his car.
In 2013, Franklin was executed in Missouri for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in St. Louis.
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