Question: Philip Skinner created the role of what former Ku Klux Klan organizer in Appomattox?

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. <SEP> 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. <SEP> 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. <SEP> 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.  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".  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."