------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the March 13, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
FBI NO FRIEND TO CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT KLAN CONVICTION: JUSTICE DELAYED By Monica Moorehead Former Ku Klux Klan member Ernest Avants was found guilty in a Jackson, Miss., federal court on Feb. 28 of "aiding and abetting" in the murder of Black sharecropper Ben Chester White. This conviction occurred almost 36 years after the original trial where Avants was acquitted by an all-white jury. The 72-year-old Avants is scheduled to be sentenced on May 9. His lawyers plan to appeal the verdict. This case marks the first time a federal jury has issued a guilty verdict in a trial so closely associated with the civil rights movement. This case was reopened because White's body was found near Natchez in the Homochitto National Forest, which is deemed federal land. White became a tragic statistic in the all-too-long list of lynching victims. Like 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till, and unlike martyred NAACP leaders Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer, White had not been active in the civil rights movement. Till, Dahmer and Evers were all murdered in Mississippi. Any Black person was subject to beatings and even death at the hands of the KKK and other white supremacist groups that wanted to keep the Black masses in semi-enslaved, segregated conditions. In 1966, White was randomly abducted by Avants and two other white supremacists, James Lloyd Jones and Claude Fuller, and brutally shot multiple times. It was later revealed that the KKK wanted to use the murder of White to lure Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Mississippi to assassinate the civil rights leader. The trials of Jones and Fuller--both deceased now--were declared "mistrials." Years later, Jones testified that Avants shot White in the head after the sharecropper had already been shot multiple times and killed by Fuller. While White's family understandably feels justice has been done with this verdict, there are others who feel that the conviction is too little, too late. Sawandi Olug bala, an African American Mississip pian, replied following the verdict, "If somebody commits a murder, or a crime, and gets away with it for almost 40 years ... that's not justice." (Washington Post, March 1) The Avants conviction follows a pattern of recent murder trials that have been tied to the civil rights movement. These trials include the conviction of a KKK member last year who planted bombs that killed four Black girls in the 1963 Birmingham church blast. And in 1994, Klan member Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers in the civil rights activist's driveway in 1963. FBI COMPLICIT IN MURDERS For every recent conviction, like in the White case, there are thousands more cases of murdered Black people and civil rights workers that will not see the light of day. This raises the role the Federal Bureau of Investigation played during the civil rights movement. Movies like "Mississippi Burning" make it seem as though the FBI was a true friend of the civil rights movement. For instance, the FBI provided informants to infiltrate extra-legal terrorist groups like the KKK to "monitor" their activities. In reality, however, the FBI, a repressive agency of the U.S. government, was no friend of the civil rights movement. It was very rare that any KKK member was indicted for any murders or assaults on civil rights activists based on the evidence of these informants. During the 1950s, as an outgrowth of the anti-communist witch hunt, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover helped create the Counter-Intelligence Program--or Cointelpro--as a mechanism for discrediting leaders of the civil rights movement, including Dr. King. The spying, wiretapping and frame-ups were meant to sow divisions and lead to the demise of this powerful mass movement. And to this day, the FBI has yet to share crucial evidence it obtained in a milestone case--the horrific murders of voting-rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The three were shot by Klan members on June 21, 1964. A Jackson, Miss., newspaper recently reported that the FBI has more than 40,000 pages on this case and that they were turned over to the Mississippi attorney general's office in 1999. These pages do not include informant files, results of wiretaps or internal memos. (Clarion-Ledger, March 2) Mike Moore, the attorney general, has not made any public comments on this case. This is the same attorney general who will not reopen the murder case of 15-year-old Till, which the NAACP has requested. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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