Samuel Holloway Bowers (August 25, 1924 – November 5, 2006) was a leading white-supremacist activist in the American state of
Mississippi during the
African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968). In response to this movement, he co-founded a reactionary organization, the
White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Bowers committed two notorious murders of civil rights activists in southern Mississippi: the 1964
triple murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney near
Philadelphia, 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. He also was accused of bombings of Jewish targets in the cities of Jackson and Meridian in 1967 and 1968 (according to the man who was convicted of some of the bombings, Thomas A. Tarrants III). He died in prison at the age of 82.