On February 27th, 1967, less than a year after Whi…
On February 27th, 1967, less than a year after White was killed, a car bomb detonated in the driveway of Wharlest Jackson Sr.
Jackson was the treasurer of the Natchez NAACP chapter.
He had just been promoted to a position at the Armstrong Tire and Rubber plant that had previously been reserved for white workers.
The promotion cost him his life.
The bomb killed him instantly.
Red Glover was the primary suspect for the FBI.
Nobody was ever charged.
Two years after that, on April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
The man the Natchez clansmen had tried to lure to Mississippi with Ben Chester White’s blood was killed in a different city by a different gunman.
For reasons that had nothing to do with the failed plot of June 1966, >> >> King died in Memphis, just 200 miles north of Natchez.
He never knew that 2 years earlier a 67-year-old farm hand had been murdered specifically to draw him into rifle range.
The plot had been so thoroughly unsuccessful, so completely irrelevant to the larger movement that it hadn’t even registered as a footnote in the history of King’s life.
Ben Chester White died for a plan that Martin Luther King Jr.
never even heard about.
One by one, the people who knew what happened on that bridge over Pretty Creek disappeared.
Claude Fuller died.
James Lloyd Jones died.
>> >> The clerk at the store where the men had stopped, the officer who had taken the stolen car report, >> >> the medical examiner who had examined White’s body, all of them died before any second reckoning could reach them.
Meanwhile, the broader reckoning with Mississippi’s civil rights era crimes was happening slowly, painfully, >> >> and mostly not at all.
The files sat in drawers.
The families waited.
The FBI maintained its records, but took no action.
The Justice Department reviewed civil rights cases periodically, but rarely found the legal footing to bring new charges.
The conventional wisdom was that these cases were over.
The defendants had been tried, or the witnesses were dead, or the evidence was gone, or the political will simply wasn’t there.
Mississippi had moved on, or at least it wanted the world to believe it had.
For more than 30 years, the murder of Ben Chester White existed as a closed file in a county records office.
A resolved case, an acquittal, a matter that Mississippi had officially decided was finished.
Not everyone agreed.
And the version of moved on that Mississippi was selling didn’t hold up very well if you looked at it closely.
Because a man had confessed to murder, walked free, and lived the rest of his life without consequence.
That wasn’t justice delayed, that was justice denied.
And as long as Ernest Avants was alive and free, the case was not closed.
It was dormant.
There’s a difference.
The journalist who wouldn’t let go, in 1989, a court reporter named Jerry Mitchell walked into a movie theater and watched a film called Mississippi Burning.
The movie told a fictionalized version of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
Mitchell worked at the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, one of Mississippi’s largest newspapers.
And as he sat in the theater watching actors portray clansmen and FBI agents, and a justice system that had failed spectacularly, something clicked.
Mitchell started investigating civil rights cold cases, not as a side project, as a calling.
His first major breakthrough came in the early 1990s when he uncovered evidence that Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a taxpayer-funded segregationist agency, had secretly screened potential jurors during the 1960s murder trials of Byron De La Beckwith, the man who assassinated NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in 1963.
The Sovereignty Commission had helped identify which jurors would be sympathetic to Beckwith, effectively rigging the jury pools that produced two mistrials.
Mitchell’s reporting blew the case wide open.
In 1994, Beckwith was tried a third time and convicted.
He died in prison.
Mitchell didn’t stop there.
He understood something that the legal system had failed to grasp for decades.
These cases weren’t cold because the evidence was gone.
They were cold because nobody in power had wanted to pursue them.
The witnesses hadn’t all disappeared.
Some of them were still alive.
The documents hadn’t been destroyed.
They were sitting in filing cabinets in courthouses and FBI field offices across the South.
The physical evidence, the autopsy reports, the ballistics analyses, the confessions, all of it still existed.
What had been missing wasn’t proof.
It was will.
Over the next two decades, Mitchell’s investigations would help put four clansmen and a serial killer behind bars.
He wrote extensively about the murder of Ben Chester White, tracing the connections between Fuller, Avants, Jones, the Silver Dollar Group, and the broader network of clan violence in Natchez.
He documented how the same small group of men in Adams County had been responsible for a chain of bombings, beatings, and murders that stretched across years and left a trail of shattered families in its wake.
His reporting kept these cases alive when everyone else in Mississippi seemed content to let them stay dead.
Mitchell would later win a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009 for his work and go on to found the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.
But the breakthrough in the White case didn’t come from a document or a confession or a witness coming forward.
It came from television.
In 1999, ABC’s news magazine program 20/20 aired a segment featuring journalist Connie Chung.
During the segment, they broadcast a recent interview with Ernest Avants.
The tape was sent to the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi.
Somebody at the DOJ watched the interview.
And then somebody at the DOJ did something that nobody had done in 33 years.
They pulled out a map.
Pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything.
The map detail that changed everything.
The bridge over Pretty Creek.
The spot where Claude Fuller and Ernest Avants stepped out of the car and shot Ben Chester White at least 17 times.
The place where an old man spoke his last words to God and had his body thrown into the water below.
That bridge sits inside the Homochitto National Forest.
The Homochitto National Forest is federal land.
It belongs to the United States government.
And under federal law, a murder committed on land under the territorial jurisdiction of the United States is a federal crime prosecutable under federal statute regardless of what any state court has already decided.
This was the detail that the killers never thought about.
In 1966, when Fuller chose this stretch of road as the kill site, he wasn’t thinking about jurisdiction.
He was thinking about isolation.
He picked the forest because it was remote, because there were no witnesses, because nobody would hear the gunshots.
The fact that the trees and the creek and the bridge belong to the federal government didn’t cross his mind.
But it mattered.
It mattered more than any other single fact in this case.
Here’s why.
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects Americans from being tried twice for the same offense.
That’s the double jeopardy clause.
Avant had already been tried for murder in Mississippi state court and acquitted.
Under normal circumstances, that acquittal would have been permanent.
You can’t bring a man back to trial for the same crime just because you didn’t like the verdict the first time.
But the double jeopardy clause has a critical exception.
It only applies within the same sovereign jurisdiction.
A state prosecution and a federal prosecution are brought by two different sovereigns, the state government and the federal government.
And they operate under two different sets of laws.
A state acquittal does not prevent a federal prosecution for the same underlying conduct as long as the federal charge is based on a different statute.
The state of Mississippi had charged Avant with murder under Mississippi state law.
The federal government could now charge him with murder under 18 USC Section 1111, the federal murder statute.
Because the crime occurred on federal land, on the soil of the Homochitto National Forest.
And there was one more critical fact.
Federal capital eligible murder has no statute of limitations.
It doesn’t matter if the crime happened 5 years ago or 50.
If the evidence is there, the prosecution can go forward.
Think about what this means in practical terms.
For 33 years, everyone involved in this case, the family, the FBI, the prosecutors, the journalists, assumed that the 1967 acquittal was the end of the road.
Double jeopardy.
Can’t try a man twice.
Case closed.
And legally, within the state of Mississippi, that was correct.
The state had taken its shot and missed, or more accurately, the state had rigged the game and let the defendant walk.
Either way, the state was done.
But the federal government had never taken a shot at all.
No federal charges had ever been filed.
No federal jury had ever heard the evidence.
And because the murder happened to occur on a bridge in a national forest, the federal government had every legal right to file its own charges under its own laws, in its own courts, with its own jury pool.
The irony is staggering.
>> >> The clansmen chose the Homochitto National Forest because it was isolated, remote, dark, the perfect place to kill a man without being seen.
They had no idea that the very remoteness that protected them in 1966 would become the legal mechanism that destroyed them decades later.
In June of 2000, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Mississippi returned an indictment against Ernest Henry Avants for aiding and abetting the premeditated murder of Ben Chester White on federal land.
Claude Fuller was dead.
James Lloyd Jones was dead.
Avants, now in his late 60s, was the only surviving perpetrator.
The case that Mississippi had closed 33 years earlier was open again.
And this time, the courtroom would look very different.
No clansmen in the gallery, no rigged jury, no system built to protect the defendant and abandon the victim.
This was a federal court.
The clock was already ticking on Avants’s freedom.
He just couldn’t hear it yet.
Before the case could reach trial, there was a fight over evidence.
The federal prosecutors wanted to introduce Avants’s 1967 confession to the FBI, the one where he said he blew White’s head off with a shotgun.
The district court initially excluded it.
The government appealed.
The case went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the lower court’s ruling and allowed the confession into evidence.
The decision is recorded as United States versus Avants, 278 F.
3d 510.
During the appeals process, Avants suffered a stroke.
His health deteriorated.
By the time the case was cleared for trial, he was 72 years old and confined to a wheelchair.
The question hanging over the proceedings was as much moral as legal.
Could a man this old, this frail, be held accountable for something he did when he was 34? Did time erase guilt? Did a wheelchair earn sympathy that a confession should not? The federal prosecutors believed the answer was no.
Time does not erase guilt.
A wheelchair does not undo a murder.
And a man who confessed to blowing another man’s head off does not get to escape justice simply because he managed to outlive most of the witnesses.
The trial.
37 years later, in February 2003, the federal trial of Ernest Henry Avants began in Jackson, Mississippi before U.
S.
District Judge William H.
Barbour Jr.
The prosecution was led by Assistant U.
S.
Attorney Jack Brooks Lacey Jr.
>> >> and Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Attorney Paige Fitzgerald.
The defense was handled by Thomas E.
Royals.
The courtroom in Jackson was a world away from the Adams County Courthouse, where Avants had been tried in 1967.
No clansmen filling the gallery, no silver dollars being flipped in the back rows, no winks and nods from a jury that had already made up its mind before the opening statements.
This was a federal proceeding in the state capital with a judge appointed for life and a jury drawn from a broader pool than tiny Adams County could provide.
But the challenge facing the prosecution was enormous.
And it had nothing to do with jury composition.
This was not a case with living witnesses who could take the stand and point at the defendant.
Nearly four decades had passed.
The passage of time had taken almost everyone.
James Lloyd Jones’s testimony, the driver, and the man whose confession had been the backbone of the original case, was dead.
Claude Fuller, the ringleader, was dead.
The store clerk who had seen the men together before the murder, was dead.
The police officer who had taken the stolen car report, was dead.
Dr. Scanlon, the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on Ben Chester White, was dead.
The prosecution had to build their case from the grave.
Jones’s testimony from the 1966 preliminary hearing was read aloud to the jury.
His recorded statement to the prosecutor, given on July 15th, 1966, was played in the courtroom.
Under the rules of evidence, testimony from an unavailable witness who was subject to cross-examination at the time, can be admitted.
Jones was dead.
His words were not.
Dr. Scanlon’s autopsy findings were read into the record by a different doctor, establishing the nature and extent of White’s injuries.
And then the prosecution brought their most devastating witness.
FBI Special Agent Kornblum took the stand and testified about his 1967 interview with Avants.
He told the jury that during an interview about a completely separate racial murder, Avants had volunteered his confession without prompting.
He said he shot Ben Chester White.
He said he blew the man’s head off with a shotgun.
But the prosecution didn’t stop there.
They had anticipated the defense strategy, the same shot a corpse argument that had worked in 1967.
This time, they were ready.
Forensic pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne took the stand and testified about the wounds inflicted on Ben Chester White.
He examined the evidence from the autopsy and re- and reached a conclusion that directly contradicted the defense.
The massive head wound that killed White, Hayne testified, was consistent with a shotgun blast fired at close range, not with a rifle round from Fuller’s M2 carbine.
The fatal wound came from the shotgun, Avance’s weapon.
This was the testimony that destroyed the shot a corpse defense.
In 1967, Avance had claimed that Fuller’s rifle had already killed White before the shotgun was fired.
In 2003, the forensic evidence showed the opposite.
The shotgun blast was the killing blow.
Avance didn’t shoot a dead man.
He killed a living one.
The weight of that testimony in the courtroom was enormous.
For 37 years, the shot a corpse defense had been the shield that protected Ernest Avance.
It was the story that the 1967 jury had accepted, the technicality that let a confessed killer walk free.
And now, in a federal courtroom in 2003, a forensic pathologist was standing in the witness box and systematically dismantling it with medical evidence.
The defense called a single witness, a pathologist named Dr. Galvez, who offered an alternative interpretation of the wounds and attempted to resurrect the theory that White was already dead when the shotgun was fired.
The prosecution challenged his conclusions.
The jury listened to both sides.
They weighed the forensic testimony against each other, and they weighed all of it against the fact that Ernest Avants himself had told an FBI agent, without being asked, that he blew Ben Chester White’s head off with a shotgun.
Those were not the words of a man who thought he was shooting a corpse.
The trial lasted 3 days.
3 days to present evidence that had accumulated over 37 years.
3 days to tell the story of a man who was killed as bait, acquitted by a rigged jury, and forgotten by a system that should have protected him.
The jury deliberated for less than 3 hours.
Guilty.
The word came back on February 28th, 2003.
Guilty.
Ernest Henry Avants, 72 years old, sat in his wheelchair in a federal courtroom in Jackson, Mississippi, and heard a jury deliver the verdict that a different jury, in a different courtroom, in a different century, had refused to give.
37 years.
That’s how long it took.
37 years between the night on the bridge over Pretty Creek and the moment a jury finally said that what happened there was murder, and that the man who pulled the trigger was guilty of it.
The statements from the prosecutors and officials reflected the weight of the moment.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Ralph F.
Boyd Jr.
called the verdict a tremendous victory that brought a measure of justice to the senseless death of Ben Chester White.
He said that acts of violence motivated by hatred and bigotry would not be tolerated, whether they occurred in 1966 or today.
US Attorney Dunn Lampton said that justice was delayed, but not denied, and that the jury’s verdict spoke well for the racial progress that had occurred in Mississippi since the original trial.
He credited the FBI with never giving up on the case.
Because of Avants’s failing health, sentencing was held at a federal medical facility in the Northern District of Texas, where he had been transferred for medical care.
Judge William Barber traveled to the facility to deliver the sentence, life imprisonment.
At the sentencing hearing, Judge Barber addressed Avants directly.
The judge told the convicted man that justice in this country can and sometimes has to wait.
That times have changed since 1966.
And then he said something that carried the full weight of everything this case represented.
He expressed his hope that when Ernest Avants’s generation is finally dead, most of the hatred will have died with it.
Avants appealed the conviction.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case and on April 19th, 2004, affirmed the verdict.
The court rejected Avants’s arguments about pre-indictment delay, about the admission of decades-old testimony from dead witnesses, and about the constitutionality of being sentenced outside the district where he was convicted.
The decision is recorded as United States versus Avants, 367 F3d 433.
There is something worth noting about the timeline.
Avants was convicted in February 2003.
His appeal was denied in April 2004, and he died in June 2004.
He spent the last year and a half of his life in federal custody, a convicted murderer confined to a medical facility, his health deteriorating, his freedom gone.
Some people will say that’s not enough.
That a year and a half in prison for the murder of a man who has been dead for nearly four decades is not justice.
And they would have a point.
No sentence could give back the 37 years that Ben Chester White’s family spent waiting.
No verdict could undo the damage of the 1967 acquittal >> >> or restore the faith that was destroyed when two clansmen sat on the jury that set their father’s killer free.
But a guilty verdict is not nothing.
It is in fact the only thing the legal system can offer in a case like this.
A formal, public, on-the-record declaration that what happened on that bridge over Pretty Creek was murder.
That the man who did it was a murderer.
And that the state of Mississippi’s decision to let him walk free in 1967 was wrong.
Ernest Henry Avants died in federal prison on June 14th, 2004.
He was 72 years old.
He died a convicted murderer, which is the one thing that for 37 years it seemed like he would never be.
Redemption, the legacy of Ben Chester White.
The conviction of Ernest Avants was not just a verdict.
It was a door.
The federal prosecution of a civil rights era murder on the basis of jurisdiction, using a map and a land survey to circumvent an unjust acquittal, was something that had never been done before.
Avants’ case was the first successful federal murder conviction connected to a killing from the civil rights movement.
And it proved that the law could reach backward through decades of silence, through dead witnesses and destroyed evidence and closed files, and still find a way to hold someone accountable.
That precedent mattered.
In the years that followed, a string of long dormant civil rights cold cases were reopened and brought to trial.
In 2001 and 2002, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
The attack that killed four young girls and became one of the defining atrocities of the Civil Rights era.
On June 21st, 2005, exactly 41 years to the day after the original crime, a Mississippi jury convicted Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter for the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the Mississippi Burning Case that had haunted the state for four decades.
In 2007, another federal prosecution in Mississippi convicted James Ford Seale for the 1964 kidnapping and murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two young black men whose bodies were found in the same Homochitto National Forest where Ben Chester White had been killed.
The forest that had been a killing ground for the Klan became decades later the jurisdictional key that put their members in prison.
Each of these cases owed something to the Avant prosecution.
Not because the legal theories were identical, they weren’t.
Each case had its own facts, its own challenges, its own jurisdictional puzzles, but the Avant verdict proved that these prosecutions were possible.
It proved that a jury in Mississippi in the 21st century would convict a white man for the murder of a black victim during the Civil Rights era.
It proved that dead witnesses and destroyed evidence and decades of elapsed time were obstacles, not walls.
And it gave prosecutors, families, and journalists the evidence they needed to argue that reopening these cases was not a symbolic gesture.
It was a viable path to actual convictions.
This momentum, this slow and painful reckoning with crimes that had been allowed to fester for generations, culminated in the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, signed into law by President George W.
Bush.
Bush, in October 2008.
The act directed the Department of Justice and the FBI to jointly investigate racially motivated homicides committed during the Civil Rights era, defined as no later than December 31st, 1979.
It authorized appropriations of up to $10 million per year to fund the investigations.
It was reauthorized in December 2016.
As of early 2024, more than 138 cold cases have been reopened under the act.
Ben Chester White’s name is inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, alongside the names of 40 martyrs who gave their lives in the struggle for equality.
The memorial was dedicated in 1989.
White is among the honored dead, not because he marched or organized or led, but because he was killed by men who saw his life as a tool, and his death as a means to a larger end.
His inclusion on that wall is a recognition that the victims of racial terror were not only the leaders and the activists.
They were also the quiet men, the farmhands and the deacons, the people who never made a speech or carried a sign, the people who were chosen to die precisely because no one would come looking for them.
Jesse White, Ben Chester White’s son, spent decades fighting for some form of accountability.
The million-dollar judgment he won against the Klan in 1968 was a legal landmark, the first time the organization was held liable for the actions of its members, and it was also an empty one.
No money was ever collected.
The real payment came 35 years later in a federal courtroom in Jackson when a jury delivered the word that Jesse White and his family had been waiting their entire lives to hear.
The story of Ben Chester White is, in the end, a story about what happens when justice refuses to die.
>> >> The clansman who killed him counted on silence.
They counted on a rigged courtroom and an indifferent system and the slow erosion of memory.
They counted on the idea that if enough time passed, the crime would simply cease to exist.
They were wrong.
It took a journalist who wouldn’t stop digging.
It took a television interview that should never have been given.
It took a prosecutor who looked at a map and realized that a bridge in a national forest sat on federal land.
And it took a jury, 37 years removed from the crime, who listened to the evidence, including the defendant’s own words about what he had done, and decided in less than 3 hours that Ernest Avants was guilty of murder.
Three men knocked on Ben Chester White’s door on a Friday evening in June 1966 and asked him to help find a lost dog.
They offered him $2 and a soda.
He said yes.
He walked out of his house and got into their car and he never came home.
For 37 years, that was where the story ended.
A body beneath a bridge, an acquittal, a closed file.
It’s not where it ends anymore.
The story ends here in a courtroom with a verdict, with the word guilty spoken aloud 37 years after a man who deserved to hear it was silenced on a bridge in the Mississippi woods.
Justice arrived late.
It arrived imperfect.
It arrived after the defendant was in a wheelchair and most of the witnesses were underground.
But it arrived.
And in a case like this one, in a state like Mississippi, in the long and painful history of civil rights, cold cases that everyone assumed would stay cold forever, that is not a small thing.
That is everything.
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