Waiting almost four decades, Jesse White–the son of a Mississippi sharecropper–has experienced justice at last.
In a grisly crime of hate and malice that took place in 1967, Jesse White’s father–Ben Chester White–was lured deep into a Mississippi National Forest by three known members of the KKK. Offering White $2 and a can of soda for helping them with an important “chore,” Ernest Avants and James Lloyd Jones watched as Claude Fuller shot Mr. White 16 times with a high-caliber rifle. Avants, in an unbridled display of arrogance, delivered the final shot to the head of Mr. White’s bullet-riddled body.
The motive for the crime was sinister. Avants, Jones, and Fuller had brutally killed Mr. White in hopes of inciting racial tensions to draw civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. to Mississippi where he would be assassinated.
In a unanimous verdict by a federal jury, 72 year-old Avants was convicted of aiding and abetting murder. For his crime, Avants finally received a life sentence. Avants stood trial alone as his co-conspirators, Fuller and Jones had died years earlier.
In a gross miscarriage of justice, Avants was earlier acquitted of all charges in Mississippi State court in 1967. Upon his acquittal, Avants bragged that he couldn’t be convicted for shooting an already-dead man.
Through the diligence of those committed to seeing justice carried out, it was discovered that Ben Chester White was killed on federal land thus paving the way for federal charges to be filed. The trial marked a legal milestone because it was the first civil rights-era murder case prosecuted by federal officials.
Since the conviction of Avants, civil rights activists are now forcing those who have committed similar crimes to stand trial in courthouses throughout the South.
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