Previously, he was a Grand Dragon of the Mississippi Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, appointed to his position by Imperial Wizard Roy Davis.

Bowers was responsible for instigating and planning the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by members of his Klan chapter near Philadelphia, Mississippi, for which he served six years in federal prison; and the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, for which he was sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after the crime.

One may be termed his idea of the development by higher education, social equality, and the like, while the other might be dominated [sic] the Southern idea of the absolute segregation of the two races, the fitting the negro for that sphere and station which, based upon an experience born of more than a century's knowledge of him as a slave and nearly forty years' experience with him as a freedman, we believe he can acceptably and worthily fill, with absolute denial of social intercourse and with every restriction on his participation in political affairs and government that is permissible under the Federal Constitution ...

Bowers came to believe that the Soviet Union was a front for Jewish elites which were seeking to overthrow Christianity as the dominant religion of Western society, that Fidel Castro's government in Cuba was recruiting and providing military training to blacks as part of a plot to invade the Gulf Coast, and that the U.S. federal government would use the invasion as a pretext to federalize the National Guard and deport all whites from his home state of Mississippi.

He became the group's first fraternal "Imperial Wizard," writing a "Klan Konstitution" for the "Sovereign Realm of Mississippi", which he would govern with the assistance of a body that he would name the "Klongress."

[5] In an "Imperial Executive Order", which was issued at a Klan meeting on June 7, 1964, and recorded by the FBI, Bowers wrote: This summer, within a very few days, the enemy will launch his final push for victory here in Mississippi.

When the first waves of blacks hit our streets this summer, we must avoid open daylight conflict with them [...] we must reveal their leaders as the immoral hypocrites they are.

Two other men, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, were murdered at that time because they were suspected of being civil rights activists.

Charles Marcus Edwards also participated in the abduction and beating and testified that he was the one who had identified Dee as a target because "he fit the profile of a Black Panther..." Seale and Edwards were convicted because journalists, particularly Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen in his award-winning CBC documentary Mississippi Cold Case, investigated the case and discovered incriminating evidence.

[10] In 1966, alleged members of the White Knights firebombed the house of Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights activist who was working to register African Americans for the vote.

Alton Wayne Roberts had previously been sentenced to 10 years in prison for violating the civil rights of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.

[13] Convicted in August of 1998 of ordering the assassination of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., Bowers served a life sentence.