MISSISSIPPI 1966 Cold Case Solved After 37 Years —…
MISSISSIPPI 1966 Cold Case Solved After 37 Years — The Klan Killed Him to Lure Martin Luther King
In June 1966, three men knocked on Ben Chester White’s door and asked him to help find a lost dog.
They offered him $2 and a soda.
White was 67 years old.
He’d spent his entire life working the same piece of land near Natchez, Mississippi where his grandparents had been enslaved.
He was a church deacon who could recite scripture by heart.
He had nothing to do with the civil rights movement.
He wasn’t registered to vote.
He’d never caused trouble a single day in his life.
That’s exactly why they chose him.
The men drove White into the Homochitto National Forest, pulled over on a bridge above Pretty Creek, and shot him at least 17 times.
His last words were a question to God.
The killers were clansmen.
And the reason they murdered an innocent old man had nothing to do with Ben Chester White himself.
It had everything to do with Martin Luther King Jr.
One of those men confessed.
He told the FBI exactly what he did.
And a Mississippi jury set him free anyway.
That was 1967.
By 2003, 37 years later, a second jury in a federal courtroom in Jackson, Mississippi, heard the same evidence, the same confession, and the same facts.
This time, the verdict was different.
This time, the word was guilty.
It took one journalist, one old television interview, and a single detail on a government land survey map to bring a dead case back to life.
This is the story of Ben Chester White, the man who was killed as bait, and the map detail that beat a rigged acquittal.
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The man they chose.
It was 1899 when Ben Chester White was born in the flatlands outside Natchez, Mississippi.
Along the banks of the river that had defined the region’s wealth and its cruelty for centuries.
The land where White would spend his entire life sat on Liberty Road, >> >> a stretch of farmland that had been worked by enslaved people for generations before the Civil War.
White’s own grandparents had been among them.
After emancipation, the family stayed.
They worked the same soil.
They lived in the same small world.
And when Ben Chester White grew old enough to work, he took over as caretaker of the property, maintaining it for the family that owned it.
That was his life.
Not remarkable by any outward measure.
Not dramatic.
Not the kind of life anyone writes about in newspapers.
White was a quiet man, >> >> hard-working, humble.
He kept to himself and he kept his head down.
And in Natchez, Mississippi, in the middle of the 20th century, a black man keeping his head down was sometimes the only strategy for staying alive.
But White wasn’t just a farmhand.
He was a deacon at his local Baptist church.
And even though he had only limited ability to read, he could recite long passages of scripture from memory.
People who knew him described a man of deep faith, the kind who carried his Bible with him.
Not because anyone was watching, but because it mattered to him.
He was respected in his community.
He was trusted.
He had two sons, Jesse, who had moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Lewis, who would go on to serve in Vietnam.
His elderly mother, Clairsy Green, born around 1867, still lived nearby.
White’s world was small, and he seemed to prefer it that way.
And here is the detail that makes everything that comes next so much harder to stomach.
Ben Chester White had absolutely nothing to do with the civil rights movement.
He was not a member of the NAACP.
He was not registered to vote.
He had never attended a protest, never marched, never signed a petition, never spoken publicly about segregation or equality or any of the battles that were tearing Mississippi apart in the 1960s.
He was, by every measure, a bystander.
A man living his life on the margins, >> >> invisible to the forces shaping the world around him.
That invisibility is exactly is exactly what got him killed.
The men who murdered Ben Chester White didn’t choose him because of what he’d done.
They chose him because of what he hadn’t done.
He was isolated.
He was quiet.
He had no allies with influence who would come looking for answers.
He was, in the coldest possible calculation, disposable.
A means to an end.
Bait.
I mean, think about that for a second.
A man lives 67 years without bothering a soul and the thing that cost him his life is the fact that nobody would make noise when he disappeared.
>> >> White’s name appears on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
A curved black granite wall inscribed with the names of 40 martyrs who gave their lives during the movement.
Most of the names on that wall belong to leaders, organizers, activists, people who stood up and were struck down for it.
White is different.
He was struck down precisely because he did not stand up.
He never asked for a place on that wall.
The men who killed him put him there.
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It helps more people find these stories, and Ben Chester White spent enough years being invisible.
He doesn’t need to be invisible anymore.
Natchez, 1966, a city at war.
To understand how three men could murder an innocent old man and walk free, you have to understand what Natchez, Mississippi, looked like in the middle of the 1960s.
Because this wasn’t a town where a racial murder was unthinkable.
This was a town where it was practically routine.
Natchez sits on the bluffs above the Mississippi River, right at the Louisiana border.
A city that had built its fortune on cotton and slavery and had never fully let go of either one.
By 1964, the Ku Klux Klan had established a stranglehold on the white population of Adams County.
On August 29th, 1964, >> >> the United Klans of America held a public rally in Natchez, led by Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, and launched their first local klavern under the cover name Adams County Civic and Betterment Association.
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, the most violent Klan faction in the state, were also active in the area under the leadership of Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, a man who would later be convicted of ordering the firebombing murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer.
But the most dangerous group in Natchez wasn’t even the White Knights.
It was a cell operating inside the Klan itself, the Silver Dollar Group.
The Silver Dollar Group was founded in the spring of 1964 at the Shamrock Motel in Vidalia, Louisiana, just across the river from Natchez.
Its leader was a man named Raleigh Jackson Glover, known as Red Glover, who worked at the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Plant in town.
Glover handpicked every member personally.
He gave each one a silver dollar, usually minted in the members birth year as a token of loyalty.
Members were known to flip these coins during conversation.
A quiet signal of who belonged and who didn’t.
The Silver Dollar Group was described by investigators as a clan within a clan, the most secretive and most violent cell operating anywhere in Mississippi, and they were not just talking.
On August 27th, 1965, someone planted a bomb under the car of George Metcalfe, the president of the Natchez NAACP chapter.
The explosion nearly killed him.
Red Glover was the FBI’s chief suspect, though he was never charged.
The bombing set off a firestorm.
Charles Evers, the brother of the assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers, came to Natchez to lead a boycott and protest campaign that lasted months.
By December of 1965, the city government caved.
The Natchez agreement conceded to nearly all of the NAACP’s demands, desegregation of public facilities, hiring of black police officers, paving of roads in black neighborhoods.
The clan was furious.
Every concession felt like a defeat.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed self-defense organization, had formed to protect the black community during the boycott, and their presence enraged white supremacists who were used to operating without resistance.
For the first time, the men who had operated in darkness with total impunity were encountering organized pushback, armed pushback, and it drove them to escalation.
By early 1966, the violence in Natchez had reached a pitch that is hard to comprehend from a distance.
This was not a city where a single act of racial terror happened and shocked everyone.
This was a city where bombings, beatings, and threats were woven into the fabric of daily life for the black community.
The Silver Dollar Group alone was suspected of involvement in multiple bombings, shootings, and acts of arson.
Red Glover ran the cell with military discipline, and the FBI, despite having informants inside the organization, struggled to build cases that could survive a trial in front of a Mississippi jury.
The informants could provide intelligence.
They could describe the meetings, the plans, the targets.
What they could not do was guarantee that a white jury in Adams County would convict a white man for violence against a black citizen.
That guarantee simply did not exist.
This was the Natchez that Ben Chester White lived in.
A city where the black community was winning hard-fought battles, and the Klan was looking for ways to strike back.
The ground was soaked in gasoline.
The bombers and the gunmen were organized, motivated, and protected by a justice system that had no interest in punishing white violence against black citizens.
And in the middle of all of this, a new opportunity arrived.
Not from Natchez itself, from a highway in central Mississippi where a lone black man had just been shot for daring to walk through the state without fear.
The march, the plan, and the biggest prize.
On June 5th, 1966, a man named James Meredith set out alone on a walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi.
The distance was 220 miles.
Meredith, who 4 years earlier had become the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, was marching to encourage black voter registration and to prove that a black man could walk through Mississippi without being afraid.
The next day near the town of Hernando, a white man named Aubrey James Norvell stepped out of the roadside brush and shot Meredith with a shotgun.
Meredith survived, but the shooting galvanized the entire civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King Jr.
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality all converged on Mississippi to continue the march.
It became known as the March Against Fear and it drew national media from every corner of the country.
This was the march where Carmichael first used the phrase black power in a public rally.
A moment that would reshape the movement forever.
The March Against Fear would stretch until June 26th when it concluded in Jackson with a rally of some 15,000 people.
Along the way it became the most significant civil rights march since Selma.
National television crews followed the marchers through Mississippi’s backroads and small towns.
Federal marshals provided protection.
The entire world was watching the state.
And for the clan, that attention was both a threat and an opportunity.
While the eyes of the nation were fixed on the march route winding through central Mississippi, the clansmen of Natchez saw their chance.
Claude Fuller was the man who saw it first.
Fuller was an ousted member of the White Knights, a drunk and a violent man who had been expelled from the organization but refused to stop operating.
He had formed his own splinter group, a small cell he called the Cottonmouth Moccasin Gang, and Fuller had an idea.
If a black man were murdered near Natchez, brutally and publicly enough to generate outrage, Martin Luther King Jr.
would come.
He would come to the funeral, or to the protest march, or to console the family.
And when he did, the Klan would be waiting.
Fuller described King as the biggest prize of all.
To pull it off, Fuller recruited two men.
The first was Ernest Henry Avants.
Avants was a Korean War era Army veteran who had served in the National Guard and the Army Reserve through the mid-1950s and early 1960s.
He had been an early recruit to the Klan and had built a reputation as one of the most dangerous men in the Natchez chapter.
In conversations with FBI agents, Avants had said that black churches should only be bombed when they were full of people inside.
He was not a man who dealt in half measures.
In 1964, he had been expelled from a local Klan subdivision after he showed up to a klavern meeting in a Natchez neighborhood and shot the place up, reportedly furious about unpaid dues.
He had been implicated in the 1965 beating death of Earl Hodges, a disillusioned former Klansman.
And in February 1966, just 4 months before the murder, Avants had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington to answer questions about Klan violence.
Like most of the Klansmen subpoenaed, he refused to say a word.
The second recruit was James Lloyd Jones.
Jones was the driver.
>> >> He was the least ideologically committed of the three, a follower more than a believer, the kind of man who went along because the alternative, saying no to men like Fuller and Avants, carried its own risks.
Jones owned the car they would use.
That made him necessary.
Between the three of them, Fuller was the schemer, Avants was the weapon, and Jones was the transport.
None of them had any personal connection to Ben Chester White.
None of them had ever been wronged by him.
They didn’t even know him.
They knew only that he fit the profile they needed.
Old, black, alone, uninvolved.
The kind of man whose murder would register as a racial act without triggering the kind of immediate organized response that might compromise the real target.
They chose Ben Chester White the way you would choose a piece of equipment for a job.
Without emotion.
Without hesitation.
Without any consideration of the fact that he was a human being with a family and a church and a life that had lasted 67 years on this earth.
If Fuller had stopped at that point, if the plan had fallen apart or someone had gotten cold feet, this would be a very different story.
Nobody stopped.
Nobody flinched.
The clock was already ticking on Ben Chester White’s life.
He just couldn’t hear it yet.
June 10th, 1966, the bridge over Pretty Creek.
On the evening of Friday, June 10th, 1966, James Lloyd Jones drove to Claude Fuller’s house.
Ernest Avants arrived about 30 minutes later.
The three men got into Jones’s car.
They drove to Ben Chester White’s home on Liberty Road outside Natchez and knocked on his door.
They told White they needed help finding a lost dog.
They offered him $2 and a bottle of soda for his trouble.
White agreed.
He walked out of his house, got into the back seat of the car, and Jones drove south into Adams County toward the Homochitto National Forest.
The Homochitto is a sprawling tract of federal land in southern Mississippi, thick with pine and hardwood, cut through by creeks and logging roads.
It’s the kind of place where sound doesn’t carry far.
The kind of place where nobody would hear anything.
Jones drove the car across a bridge that spanned Pretty Creek.
On Fuller’s orders, he turned the car around and stopped on the bridge.
Fuller sat in the front passenger seat.
He was carrying an EM-2 carbine, an automatic rifle.
Avant sat in the back behind the driver.
He had a shotgun.
Fuller got out first.
>> >> He walked to the passenger side of the car and ordered White to get out.
When White didn’t move, Fuller opened fire.
The EM-2 carbine fired in rapid bursts.
He shot White at least 15 times with the automatic rifle, the rounds tearing through the car and through the man sitting inside it.
Then Fuller turned to Avant.
“Now you shoot him with the shotgun”.
Avant stepped forward and fired once.
Ben Chester White’s last words, spoken before the first shot, were “Oh Lord, what have I done to deserve this?” The men threw White’s body off the bridge into Pretty Creek below.
Then they dealt with the car.
Jones’s vehicle was destroyed, covered in blood and tissue from the shooting.
They drove it to a planter’s driveway in another part of the county and set it on fire.
Fuller instructed Jones to go to the police and report the car stolen.
The next day, June 11th, Jones walked into the police station and filed a stolen vehicle report.
But law enforcement had already found the burned car.
Two days after the murder, children found Ben Chester White’s body beneath the bridge over Pretty Creek >> >> in the Homochitto National Forest.
The bait had been set, but the trap failed completely.
The murder of Ben Chester White never reached Martin Luther King Jr.
King was hundreds of miles away, marching through central Mississippi with the other civil rights leaders.
He never came to Natchez.
He never spoke publicly about White’s death.
The grand assassination scheme that Fuller had dreamed up, the plan to lure the biggest prize of all into range, collapsed before it even started.
Ben Chester White was dead for nothing.
An old man’s life traded for a plan that didn’t even work.
A 67-year-old church deacon shot 17 times in a national forest, his body dumped in a creek, all so that three clansmen could try to lure a man who never came to a city he never visited for an assassination that never happened.
The cruelty of it isn’t just in the violence.
It’s in the pointlessness.
White’s death accomplished nothing for the men who killed him.
It didn’t advance their cause.
It didn’t generate the media firestorm they expected.
It didn’t draw Martin Luther King Jr.
within 100 miles of Natchez.
It simply erased a quiet man from the earth and left his family to grieve an estate that had no interest in giving them answers.
And for a while, that appeared to be the end of it.
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It matters more than you think.
The confession and the courtroom.
That didn’t care.
Three days after the murder, on June 13th, 1966, James Lloyd Jones broke down under questioning.
He confessed to his role in the killing.
He told investigators what had happened in the car, on the bridge, and in the forest.
He named Claude Fuller and Ernest Avants as the other two men involved.
Jones described the shooting in vivid, horrified detail.
He talked about the blood.
He talked about the sound.
His confession gave the Adams County District Attorney Lennox Foreman enough to file state murder charges against both Avants and Jones.
Fuller, despite being the ringleader and the man who fired the rifle, would never be formally charged.
The reason was simple and devastating.
Neither Avants nor Jones would agree to testify against Fuller in open court.
Without their testimony and with a white Mississippi jury almost certain to acquit a white man accused of killing a black man, the District Attorney decided a prosecution against Fuller was futile.
In December 1967, Ernest Avants went to trial for the murder of Ben Chester White in Adams County, Mississippi.
The courtroom was packed with clansmen.
They filled the gallery rows, a silent wall of support for the defendant.
The jury was all white.
And if you’re wondering whether that’s even legal, so is everyone else.
Two of the 12 jurors were later identified as members of the Ku Klux Klan themselves.
This was the jury that would decide whether Ernest Avants was guilty of murder.
Avants’ defense was audacious.
His attorney didn’t deny that Avants had been present.
He didn’t deny that Avants had fired a shotgun at Ben Chester White.
Instead, the defense argued that by the time Avants pulled the trigger, White was already dead.
Fuller’s rifle had done the killing, the defense claimed.
Avants merely shot a corpse.
You can’t murder a dead man.
This was not a theory supported by the evidence.
This was a legal technicality designed for a jury that was already looking for a reason to acquit.
And Avants himself had already destroyed this defense in his own words.
On March 13th, 1967, >> >> during an FBI interview about a completely separate racial killing, Avants had volunteered his confession without being asked.
He told the agents what he had done to Ben Chester White.
He said he blew the man’s head off with a shotgun.
The trial was not a search for truth.
It was a performance.
The prosecution presented its evidence.
The defense offered its theory.
And the jury, seated in a courtroom full of clansmen, in a county where the clan controlled entire blocks of civic life, returned the verdict that everyone in the room already knew was coming.
>> >> The jury acquitted Ernest Avants.
Not because the evidence was insufficient.
Not because the confession was ambiguous.
>> >> Not because the shot a corpse defense was scientifically credible.
Because the system was built to protect men like him and to discard men like Ben Chester White.
In 1967 Mississippi, a white man’s confession to killing a black man was not evidence of guilt.
It was a formality that the jury was free to ignore.
And they did.
Jones’s trial ended in a hung jury, which, given the circumstances, was almost more remarkable than the acquittal.
It meant that at least one juror in Jones’s case had actually considered the evidence and refused to go along.
But a hung jury is not a conviction.
It’s a deadlock.
And with no prospect of a successful retrial and no cooperating witnesses willing to testify against Fuller, the district attorney closed the case on all three defendants.
But there was one more chapter in the immediate aftermath.
In 1968, Ben Chester White’s son, Jesse, filed a civil lawsuit against the Ku Klux Klan as an organization.
A court awarded him $1 million in damages, a decision that was reportedly the first time the Klan itself was held legally liable for the actions of its members.
It was a landmark ruling.
And the White family never collected a single cent.
The Klan had no assets to seize, no bank accounts to freeze.
The judgment was symbolic.
Justice on paper and nothing more.
The cold decades, the years after the acquittal, were quiet.
Quiet in the way that a grave is quiet.
Ben Chester White was buried at Southwood Lodge Church Cemetery in Natchez.
His headstone marked the place where a man who had lived 67 years in near total obscurity would continue to be forgotten.
The case file was closed.
The District Attorney’s office moved on.
The witnesses aged and scattered, and one by one they died.
Ernest Avants lived as a free man.
He had confessed to a murder and walked out of a courtroom without consequence.
And for decades, that was the end of the story.
Claude Fuller, the ringleader, the man who fired the automatic rifle, was never tried.
>> >> After the killing, Fuller was actually welcomed into the Silver Dollar Group by Red Glover, who admired his willingness to act.
Fuller’s reward for orchestrating the murder of an innocent man was a promotion within the Klan’s most violent inner circle.
The violence in Natchez did not stop with White’s death.
