Stoner campaigned for several political offices as a Southern Democrat in order to promote his white supremacist agenda.
[citation needed] Stoner rechartered a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga in 1942, when he was 18 years old.
"[3] He ran the National States' Rights Party, founded by Edward Reed Fields, an associate of Stoner's.
He served as the attorney for James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.[5] The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) suspected that Stoner was also involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., as well as bombings of several synagogues and black churches during the 1950s and 1960s, such as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
[3] During the campaign, in which he called himself the "candidate of love", he described Adolf Hitler as "too moderate"; described black people as an extension of the ape family; and said that Jews are "vipers of Hell.
[citation needed] During Stoner's Senate campaign, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that television stations had to play his offensive, racist ads because of the fairness doctrine.
His best showing was 73,000 votes (10%) in his campaign for lieutenant governor in 1974, when he sought to succeed Lester G. Maddox in Georgia's second- highest constitutional office.
[14] After his release from prison and until his death at the age of 81, Stoner lived at a nursing home in northwest Georgia, still defending his segregationist views.