White supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin is best known for his attempts on the lives of pornographic magazine publisher Larry Flynt and civil rights attorney Vernon Jordan.

He was born as James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in Mobile, Alabama on April 13, 1950. His father, James Clayton Sr., was a butcher. His mother, Helen Rau, was a German woman Clayton had met while serving in World War II, and he had three siblings. James Sr. abandoned the family when his son was 8 years old; when he would come back to visit, he would beat his four children, but James got it the worst. They were poor and James suffered from malnutrition. A family friend recalled that Helen was "a very strict, perfectionist German lady. I never saw her beat her kids but I heard stories." James claimed his mother didn't take his father's abuse of them seriously and seemed to dismiss it as a joke; he thought she never really cared about her children's well-being.

As a teenager, James became interested in evangelical Christianity and then Nazism. This would lead to him adopting the name "Joseph Paul Franklin" in honor of Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Goebbels. He read Mein Kampf and became inspired to start a race war. He was injured in an accident in high school that impaired his eyesight and dropped out of school. Due to this physical impairment, he was disqualified from military service at a time when many of his peers were being drafted into the Vietnam War.