Fuller called White to come outside to his car. Armed with two automatic pistols, he baited White by asking if he agreed that it was all right for blacks and whites to go to school together, swim in the same pool, and use the same public facilities. White said he guessed it would be okay. When witnesses were spotted, Fuller postponed the killing. Afterward, he told his companions, “See, he is really involved deep in civil rights; he’s got to be got rid of.”47
Two weeks later, on Friday, June 10, Jones arrived as planned at Fuller’s house in Kingston. Divorced from his wife, the fifty-seven-year-old Jones had served in the Army during World War II and had done time in the state pen in Mississippi for stealing a car in Port Gibson and in the Louisiana pen for stealing a shotgun in Winnsboro.48 From his bedroom, Fuller retrieved an M-13 carbine and shotgun. Jones loaded the weapons into his new four-door 1966 Chevrolet Bel Air. Fuller told Jones that Martin Luther King was involved in a march to Jackson and that he intended White’s murder to lure King to protest in Natchez. (James Meredith, who had integrated Ole Miss in 1962, had been leading the march from Memphis to Jackson when he had been shot four days earlier. He survived.) If King took the bait, Fuller boasted, the Klan would assassinate the preacher in Natchez. Fuller also claimed that he was leading the mission on the orders of Klan higher-ups; this was a lie.49
A short time later, Avants, also an IP employee, arrived. Avants was an overbearing man who once during a gathering shot a black man’s cow over an alleged unpaid debt. He had been involved in the beating of Earl Hodges in Franklin County in 1965 and, like Fuller, had been booted out of the White Knights. An alcoholic, Avants had been labeled by Sheriff Odell Anders as crazy and dangerous. In 1965, Avants was so drunk on Jax beer that residents of a fishing camp outside Vidalia ran him off after he strapped a holster on his seven-year-old son and let the boy use a .22 pistol to shoot at logs in the river.50 Fuller introduced Jones and Avants, who had never met. Avants bragged that he had been to Washington (in January) and had “outsmarted the FBI” during congressional hearings on the Klan.51
The three stopped at two country stores along the way to White’s home. Jones drank a Coke and ate a pickled sausage, while Fuller and Avants drank more beer. Once at White’s, Fuller called the old man outside. Fuller said he would pay White two dollars to help him find a dog. Reluctantly, White got into the car. By then, Fuller and Avants were drunk. As if they had not left a long enough trail of witnesses, they stopped again at a store, got more beer, and bought White a soda pop. Jones was driving and Fuller riding shotgun. White was in the backseat behind Fuller, and Avants was behind Jones.52
On Fuller’s orders, Jones stopped atop the Pretty Creek Bridge in the Homochitto National Forest. It was dusk. Immediately, Fuller grabbed the automatic carbine, and Avants grabbed the shotgun. As Fuller opened White’s door, Avants came around. Fuller told White, “All right, Pop, get out.” White said, “Oh, Lord, what have I done to deserve this?” and slumped on the seat. Impatient to kill, Fuller unloaded seventeen rounds into White and the car. Then he told Avants, “Now you shoot him.” Avants aimed the long-barreled shotgun and pulled the trigger, releasing a fireball that blew White’s brain matter throughout the car and onto a terrified Jones, who was still sitting in the front seat: “I had brains splattered all over me—a piece hit me on the neck. I reached up there with my hand and felt it. I thought I was shot. A big piece, as big as the end of your finger, and there was big spots all over the front of my shirt.”53
Fuller was too weak from drinking to help dispose of the body. Jones grabbed White’s feet while Avants took his hands, and they lifted him over the bridge and dropped him below to the bank of Pretty Creek. They returned to Fuller’s shortly after 8 p.m., went inside, and washed their hands. Jones took off his brain-splattered shirt and put on one given him by Fuller. They sat around for an hour without comprehending what fools they were. Jones car, now a crime scene, was too full of bullet holes, blood, guts, and brains to clean. Fuller decided to burn it.54
They left at 9 p.m. Minutes later, Fuller parked Jones’s car at the Braswell store on Liberty Road before joining the others in Avants’s car. The three went to Tiny Lewis’s barbecue pit in Natchez. Avants and Fuller each drank yet another beer, while Jones nervously waited in the car for twenty-five minutes. When the two returned, they put a gas can in the trunk. They took Jones to work at the IP plant at 10 p.m. He was instructed that when his shift ended the next morning, he was to walk around the parking lot and pretend to search for his car before reporting to the guardhouse that the vehicle was stolen. “If you sell me down the river, the same thing can happen to you that happened to the old darkey,” Fuller warned.55
Two hours later, shortly after midnight, Boyd Sojourner called the Adams County Sheriff’s Office to report that a car was on fire in front of his home on Upper Kingston Road. At 7:45 a.m., a Natchez telephone operator notified the sheriff’s office that an unknown party had called to report that Sojourner had killed a black man at the Pretty Creek Bridge near Kingston. She traced the call to the Billups gas station on US 61 south of Natchez. Sheriff Anders was immediately suspicious. Sojourner was a well-respected farmer and community leader. Anders raced to the station and learned from the attendant that the only person who had used the pay phone had been Claude Fuller, whose wife and son had been sitting in his car at the time. Fuller had left the station just thirty minutes before the sheriff’s arrival. Apparently, he was trying to use the same ruse that had failed three years earlier when he burned his own car and blamed others. He had also reportedly threatened Sojourner a few weeks earlier, telling Sojourner “to get the Negroes off his place.”56
The next day James Carter, a county official and farmer, reported that his employee Ben Chester White had not been seen since 7 p.m. Friday. Mid-afternoon on Sunday, a woman reported that she and her children were wading in the shallow, clear water by the bridge at Upper Pretty Creek near Kingston when they discovered the body of a black male.57 White lay on his stomach, his body on the sandy bank and his head in the water. A deputy found in his left shirt pocket a wallet containing White’s Social Security card and twenty-nine dollars in cash. Fifty-six cents were found in his right rear pocket. Dr. Leo Scanlon’s autopsy revealed that White “was in a state of abject poverty.” He was wearing no socks. A hole in the toe of one of his boots had been patched with small twisted wires. The upper portion of his face and skull were missing. He had been shot in multiple places, including the heart. His liver was shattered. His aorta had been perforated several times. The top of his head had been blown away.58 In mid-July, Jet magazine ran a photo of White’s hideously disfigured face with the caption: “The grisly remains of White at funeral last week tell grim story of horror Mississippi Negroes face day after day.”59
WITHIN HOURS, Jones simultaneously got scared and got religion. He went to the sheriff’s office, and over the days to come, he gave several statements confessing the whole senseless scheme: “I was just as deep in sin as anybody that ever was. I have read the Bible and I have prayed and I had the blood on me and I knowed that I could never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. So I’m telling, and if it costs me my life, this old body of mine, I believe my soul will be in Heaven.” After learning that Jones was to be given a polygraph, Fuller checked into a Natchez hospital, suffering from “a nervous attack.”60 Avants called Sheriff Anders one day, stating that he needed to be locked up because he feared he was going to kill somebody. He discussed the White case with FBI agents: “Yeah, I shot that nigger . . . I blew his head off with a shotgun.” He insisted that all he had done was “shoot a corpse.”61
All three men were arrested and charged with murder. Although the eyewitness and physical evidence against the three was overwhelming, Avants was acquitted in a jury trial, Jones’s trial ended in a hung jury, and Fuller was never tried. On June 11, 1968, county attorney Edwin E. Benoist Jr., who fought hard for Klan convictions and worked tirelessly to help the FBI in its investigations, informed the bureau
that Jones and Avants would not testify because each feared that Claude Fuller’s brother, Ed, would kill them.62 Jones, despite his confessions of being a tortured soul longing to get right with Jesus, obviously feared Ed Fuller on earth more than an afterlife with Satan. On August 15, District Attorney Lennox Forman said he was closing the case against Fuller because of Jones’s and Avants’s refusal to testify. He added that the Klan had so many connections in Adams County that it would be impossible to convict Claude Fuller. During Avants’s trial, the prosecution went through 211 prospective jurors before seating twelve men who quickly acquitted him.63 Among them were two Klansmen, including John Dawson, who had been a UKA state officer when McDaniel was head of the Mississippi Realm.
As a reward for their efforts to kill a black man, Red Glover accepted Claude Fuller and James Howard Jackson, who had been with Fuller on the first attempt on White’s life, into the Silver Dollar Group. This 1967 induction connected the SDG to yet another murder and once again gave Fuller a Klan home.64 In 2000, ABC’s 20/20 reported that the crime had been committed on federal government property. Avants, the only perpetrator still alive, was indicted on federal charges in June, thirty-four years after the murder, and convicted in February 2003. His sentence was life in prison. He died at the age of seventy-two on June 14, 2004, having served more than four years after his arrest.
1967
12
CODE NAME: WHARBOM
BY 1967, THE NATION’S interest in civil rights in the South was fading as riots broke out in the big cities in the North and protests against the Vietnam War raged on. At the same time, President Lyndon Johnson promoted his program to end poverty and pushed to abolish discrimination in the selection of juries and in housing sales and rentals. His supportive majority in Congress that had passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, had vanished. Elsewhere, young leaders in the “black power” movement created a schism within the traditional civil rights structure that Dr. Martin Luther King feared would stop the momentum.
One of the emerging black leaders, Baton Rouge native H. Rap Brown, a twenty-three-year-old who thought the United States should be split into two racially divided territories, chilled white people when he warned that if “America don’t come around, we’ve got to burn America down, brother.” Brown had followed Stokely Carmichael as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As Carmichael moved toward the Black Power Party, whose members declared war on police, SDG Klansmen considered Brown and Carmichael the new enemies. When the FBI questioned an SDG member in Vidalia about Klan violence, the Klansman was incensed that agents weren’t harassing Carmichael, who he believed was as responsible for the unrest in America as the NAACP and the communists. The Klan’s war against the integration of schools, neighborhoods, and public buildings was far from over.
WHARLEST JACKSON wanted nothing more from this world than to be treated like a man and to be allowed a fair chance to give his family a good life. He was willing to outwork and out-sacrifice anybody for the opportunity. A native of DeLeon Springs, Florida, twenty miles inland from Daytona Beach, Jackson had moved to Natchez in his youth. His father was a minister. When serving in the Korean War, Jackson risked his life to push a comrade into a foxhole and out of the way of an enemy shell. Although he returned home a hero, that label embarrassed him. In Chicago in 1952, he met the girl of his dreams on a blind date. Exerlena, a fifteen-year-old Natchez native, had moved to the big city with a girlfriend to find employment and was working in a factory, making bulletproof jackets for American soldiers. From the beginning, Exerlena called him by his last name, “Jackson.” His humility and selflessness appealed to her.1
After marrying in 1954, they moved to Natchez. The family attended church every Sunday at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church and returned home afterward for a feast. Jackson raised hogs, loved to hunt and fish, played jacks with his four daughters on the front porch, and wrestled with his son. He worked at Armstrong Tire, where his best friend was George Metcalfe, twenty years his senior. The two were elected officers of the reactivated NACCP in Natchez, with Metcalfe serving as president and Jackson as treasurer.2
Their friendship intensified following the attempt on Metcalfe’s life in 1965. Both Jackson and Exerlena cared for Metcalfe during his year of convalescence, and Jackson’s work at the NAACP increased. Jackson became so protective of his best friend that he insisted on chauffeuring him to work. In effect, he became Metcalfe’s bodyguard. The two developed a habit of checking Jackson’s pickup for bombs. Jackson routinely looked under the hood, and Metcalfe checked beneath the seat. They carried their lunches from home and ate together at the plant. By late 1966, Jackson had decided to step down as treasurer of the NAACP to have more time for his ailing wife, who had been diagnosed with lupus, but he remained on the board of directors.3
In early 1967, Armstrong Tire created a third “chemical mixer” position to handle an increase in production. The position was dangerous because it required the blending of raw rubber with a high-octane gasoline that was used to cut the material into a liquid, manageable form. Even so, Jackson wanted the job. All of his working life, he had held as many as three jobs at a time to support his family. In 1967, in addition to his job at the plant, he cut hair part-time at a barbershop and served as assistant director and collected burial insurance premiums for Archie Curtis’s funeral home. (The Klan had beaten Curtis in 1964 because of his civil rights work.) The Armstrong mixer position paid seventeen cents more per hour than the $2.90 an hour Jackson was earning in the refine mill.4 The additional $6.80 per week would increase Jackson’s annual salary to $6,385.60 (approximately $44,000 today), and the extra income would mean that Exerlena could quit her job as a cook at nearby Jefferson College.5
Jackson was one of 127 men eligible for the job, which had previously been held only by white men.6 He and two white men were the only employees to apply. Because of his seniority, Jackson got the promotion. He talked to Metcalfe and Mississippi NAACP field secretary Charles Evers about whether accepting it would cause him trouble with white employees. Evers predicted it would but advised Jackson to take the job, despite rumors circulating at the plant that any black man who took a better job traditionally held by a white man would be taken care of by the Klan. Jackson, however, expressed no fear of reprisal.7
Jackson’s white coworkers liked him. Though he was taciturn, they found him cooperative and dependable. Jackson didn’t have a troublemaker reputation, as Metcalfe did, among the white employees. Only one person he knew was upset over the promotion—his wife. Exerlena had long been bothered that Jackson drove Metcalfe to work after the car bombing in 1965. “George didn’t have a house full of children like Jackson,” she would tell the Concordia Sentinel before her death in 2009. “But Jackson didn’t pay me no attention. He was quiet and determined to live his life.” Although Exerlena was consumed by fear over the danger she felt her husband faced by taking a job over two white men, Jackson appeared unconcerned and told her he had amiable working relationships with the white men on his shift.8
He began training for his new job on February 20, 1967, working his regular 4 p.m. to midnight shift, with Metcalfe still sharing a ride to work. But on February 27, Jackson was moved to the day shift, and for the first time the friends went to work separately. At 3:15 p.m. that day, forty-five minutes before his shift ended, Jackson and a white coworker agreed to work four hours overtime. Jackson clocked out at 8:01 p.m. It was dark and raining. He walked a half-block to his pickup, a 1958 green half-ton Chevrolet, parked west of the plant where Concord Street, Kelly Street, and Brenham Avenue converged. After traveling two blocks west on the winding avenue, Jackson turned north onto Minor Street. He had crossed three streets when, at a point a half block from Pine (Martin Luther King Street today), he switched on his left turn blinker. A thunderous boom jarred Natchez, shattering the windows of nearby homes. The pickup veered to the right and splintered a utility pole. Two and a hal
f blocks away at No. 9 College Drive, Exerlena heard the deafening roar and bolted up from her sickbed. Somehow she knew. “Oh, Lord, that’s Jackson!” she wailed. “That’s Jackson!”9
A minute later a Natchez patrolman was on the scene as residents throughout the black neighborhood near the tire plant emerged from their homes into the rainy, cold night. It took a few minutes before anyone could figure out whose lifeless body rested on the slick pavement of Minor Street. As an ambulance arrived, the identity of the dead man became known. Exerlena, joined by friends, raced to the hospital. She followed a blood trail from the ambulance into the emergency room, where she saw her husband’s body lying on a gurney with no medical personnel in sight.10 She was unaware that Jackson was already dead. She would tell Jet magazine a few days later that, as she pleaded for a doctor, Sheriff Odell Anders, standing nearby, told a deputy, “Get her out of here. She won’t be no help; all she’s gonna do is holler.”11
At 9:15 p.m., Natchez Police Department detective Charles C. Bahin notified the FBI office at Jackson of the bombing. At 11:35 p.m., acting attorney general Ramsey Clark in Washington requested a full FBI probe. A short time later, Special Agent in Charge Roy K. Moore of the Jackson field office rushed to the scene with a squad of eighteen agents. J. Edgar Hoover ordered Inspector Joseph A. Sullivan to spearhead the probe, which was given the code name WHARBOM. Two lab experts were dispatched from Washington to process the crime scene.12
Devils Walking Page 21