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Feds charge Mississippi man with civil rights-era murder

Avants is accused of killing Ben Chester White in 1966 in what may have been part of a larger plot to assassinate the Rev. Martin Luther King

June 8, 2000
Web posted at: 7:16 p.m. EDT (2316 GMT)

From staff and wire reports

JACKSON, Mississippi -- A white Mississippi man is being held on $100,000 bond after being charged with committing the racially motivated murder of a black farm worker in 1966.

Ernest H. Avants, 69, pleaded innocent Thursday to a federal murder charge. Avants is accused of killing Ben Chester White 34 years ago.

Avants was acquitted of the killings in a Mississippi court in 1967. Federal prosecutors reopened the case last year after hearing a news report that said White was killed on federal property, in the Homochitto National Forest. A federal grand jury issued the new indictment on Wednesday.

It is the first time prosecutors have brought federal murder charges for a civil rights-era killing on federal land. They have not said if they will seek the death penalty.

Brad Pigott, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, said, "No time is too late to vindicate our country's repudiation of acts of racial violence. We are committed to bringing to justice those who commit such acts, no matter how long it takes."

Avants maintains that he is innocent. Two other men accused along with Avants -- James Jones and Claude Fuller -- have died.

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Jones confessed but a mistrial was declared in his case. Fuller was never tried.

Authorities believe White was killed in a bizarre plot to provoke a protest by Rev. Martin Luther King in Natchez, Mississippi, where he could be assassinated.

An FBI report cited in The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in January said Avants had confessed to participating in White's killing.

The report quoted the Adams County attorney at the time as saying he did not present the confession in court because Avants "had not been advised of his rights against self-incrimination" and had been drinking.

Among recently opened cases from the 1960s, former Ku Klux Klan chieftain Sam Bowers was convicted in 1998 for the 1966 firebombing death of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, civil rights figure Vernon Dahmer.

Byron De La Beckwith is serving a life sentence after his 1994 conviction in the 1963 ambush killing of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi.

Last month two former members of the Ku Klux Klan surrendered to face murder charges in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church that killed four black girls and galvanized the U.S. civil rights movement.

Mississippi is now investigating the case of three civil rights workers killed in 1964 while registering black voters in Neshoba County.

Correspondent Terry Frieden, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.