Question: Philip Skinner created the role of what former Ku Klux Klan organizer in Appomattox?
Context: Guardians of Liberty is a three volume set of books published in 1943 by Bishop Alma Bridwell White, author of over 35 books and founder of the Pillar of Fire Church.  Guardians of Liberty is primarily devoted to summarizing White’s vehement anti-Catholicism under the guise of patriotism.  White also defends her historical support of and association with the Ku Klux Klan while significantly but not completely distancing herself from the Klan.  Each of the three volumes corresponds to one of the three books White published in the 1920s promoting the Ku Klux Klan and her political views which in addition to anti-Catholicism also included nativism, anti-Semitism and white supremacy.  In "Guardians of Liberty", White removed most, but not all of the direct references to the Klan that had existed in her three 1920s books, both in the text and in the illustrations.  In Volumes I and II, she removed most of the nativist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist ideology that had appeared in her predecessor books.  However, in "Guardians" Volume III, she did retain edited versions of chapters promoting nativism, anti-Semitism and white supremecy. Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen (born January 17, 1925) is a former Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights activists participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964.  He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison.  He appealed against the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on January 12, 2007, by the Mississippi Supreme Court. The White Patriot Party (WPP) was an American anti-Semitic white supremacist paramilitary political party associated with Christian Identity and the Ku Klux Klan.  It was led by its founder, Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., through various organizational incarnations.  The organization began in the mid-1970s as the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.  It was involved in the incident in Greensboro, North Carolina, when a confrontation between Klansmen, Nazis and communists left five people dead.  The organization became the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1980s and the White Patriot Party in 1985. The Enforcement Act of 1871 (17 Stat.  13 ), also known as the Civil Rights Act of 1871, Force Act of 1871, Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act, or Third Ku Klux Klan Act, is an Act of the United States Congress which empowered the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white supremacy organizations.  The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871.  The act was the last of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks upon the suffrage rights of African Americans.  The statute has been subject to only minor changes since then, but has been the subject of voluminous interpretation by courts. Samuel Holloway Bowers (August 25, 1924 – November 5, 2006), Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard, was a convicted murderer and leading white supremacist activist in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement.  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 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner 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. Philip Skinner is an American bass-baritone who has sung leading roles in both North American and European opera houses.  A veteran performer at San Francisco Opera, he made his debut there in 1985 and has gone on to sing over 35 roles with the company.  In 2007, Skinner created the role of Edgar Ray Killen when San Francisco Opera staged the world premiere of the Philip Glass opera, "Appomattox", and in 2015 he created the role of Casaubon in Allen Shearer's "Middlemarch in Spring."  He is a graduate of Northwestern University and received his master's degree from Indiana University, where he sang in the American premiere of Janáček's "The Excursions of Mr. Brouček to the Moon". The New York World’s exposé of the Ku Klux Klan brought national media to the operations and actions of the Ku Klux Klan beginning on September 6th, 1921.  The newspaper published a series of twenty one consecutive daily articles that discussed numerous aspects of Ku Klux Klan including rituals, recruitment methods, propaganda, and hypocrisies in logic.  At least fifteen other newspapers nationwide picked up the coverage, which led to national discourse on the activities of the group.  These publications included The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Sun, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), New Orleans Times-Picayune, Galveston News, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times, Milwaukee Journal, Minneapolis Journal, Oklahoma City Oklahoman, Toledo Blade, Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, Syracuse Herald, Columbus Enquirer-Sun and the Albany Knickerbocker Press.  The New York Times ran ads for the article series to increase exposure, while other large papers like the Baltimore Sun quickly picked up the article series instead of advertising for The World.  The Ku Klux Klan announced shortly afterward that it would take legal action against all the publications that ran the article series for libel, seeking total damages of over ten million dollars. Ku Klux Klan auxiliaries are organized groups that supplement, but do not directly integrate with the Ku Klux Klan.  These auxiliaries include: The Women of the Ku Klux Klan, The Jr.  Ku Klux Klan, The Tri-K Girls, the American Crusaders, The Royal Riders of the Red Robe, The Ku Klux balla, and the Klan's Blind Colored Man auxiliary. The WKKK (also known as the Women's Ku Klux Klan or Women of the Ku Klux Klan) was one of a number of auxiliaries of the Ku Klux Klan.  While most women focused on the moral, civic, and educational agendas of the Klan, they also had considerable involvement in issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and religion .  The women of the WKKK fought for educational and social reforms like other Progressive reformers but with extreme racism and intolerance.  Particularly prominent in the 1920s, the WKKK existed in every state, but their strongest chapters were in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Arkansas.  White, native-born, Protestant women over age 16 were allowed to join the Klan.  Women of the Klan differed from Klansmen primarily in their political agenda to incorporate racism, nationalism, traditional morality, and religious intolerance into everyday life through mostly non-violent tactics. Abram Colby was an American slave and politician who served in the Georgia House of Representatives during the Reconstruction era.  A resident of Greene County, Georgia, Colby was the son of an enslaved woman and a white planter.  He was free for fifteen years prior to emancipation.  He was an early organizer of freed slaves.  Colby and minister Henry McNeal Turner helped form a chapter of the American Equal Rights Association.  Colby was known for eloquent oratory and represented Greene County in 1865 at a freeman's convention.  A Radical Republican, Colby was first elected in 1866.  In 1868, he was bribed $7,500 by the Ku Klux Klan not to seek re-election, but refused to do so.  In October 29th, 1869, he was taken from his bed and beaten by the Ku Klux Klan in front of his family.  During his whipping he was asked, "Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket."  He replied, "If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket."  After his remark, the men continued to beat him.  Faced with debilitating injury, he was unable to work and did not seek re-election.  The injury was so extensive Colby was recorded saying in his testimony during the Joint Select Committee Report "They broke something inside of me, and the doctor has been attending to me for more than a year.  Sometimes I cannot get up and down off my bed, and my left hand is not of much use to me." .  In 1872, he was called before a joint U.S. House and Senate committee investigating reports of Southern violence.
Answer: Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen