Civil Rights: Million-Dollar Deterrent

For all the civil rights advances in the Deep South, a harsh reality remains in Mississippi courts: white men accused of violent crimes against Negroes are almost never convicted. About the only time such offenders are punished is when they are tried in federal courts under statutes enacted during Reconstruction times. Among those antique laws, several prohibit conspiracy to deprive any citizen of his civil rights, and last week a federal judge in Vicksburg concluded that one of man’s most basic civil rights is his right to live. U.S. District Court Judge William Harold Cox, a stubborn segregationist, decided that the Ku Klux Klan, and three of its former members accused of killing a Negro, should pay damages.

Directed by the judge to fix the amount of damages, the jury awarded $1,021,500 to the estate of a 67-year-old Negro who was murdered in 1966. None of the defendants have been convicted of the murder, but one of them, James L. Jones, 58, confessed before his 1967 trial. He said that he had been present when Ernest Avants, 37, and Claude Fuller, 48, killed Ben Chester White, a caretaker who worked on a farm near Natchez. For no particular reason, said Jones, the three men took

White on a ride in a car and riddled him with 30-cal. slugs and shotgun pellets. Despite that confession, Jones’ trial ended in a hung jury. And though he was indicted again as an accessory after the fact, he has never been retried. Avants was later acquitted in a separate trial, and Fuller has never been tried for murder at all.

Members of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, who took the case to the federal courts, asked for $1,000,000 in punitive damages. Judge Cox held that the three defendants were unquestionably responsible for “the dastardly act”; as a matter of law, he said, no reasonable person could dispute their liability. The jury of eight Negroes and four whites then called for $21,500 actual damages, plus $1,000,000 punitive damages. Said Attorney Martha Wood: “We hope that an award of this size will deter such acts in the future.”

Indeed it may. Though none of the ex-Klansmen has nearly enough money to pay off, nor are they ever likely to, all may be burdened with heavy debt for the rest of their lives. Under Mississippi law, they can be forced to sell real and personal property, and 25% of their salaries can be garnisheed until the award is liquidated.