Former Klansman Is Found Guilty of 1966 Killing
Ben Chester White used twists of wire to hold the soles on his shoes, patched his own clothes with scrap and said "yes, sir," to white men, and when he made a little money, he wrapped the $1 bills in wax paper so they would not be ruined by his own sweat. He was not registered to vote, and had never fought against the segregation that was as much a fact of life for him as a hoe handle or cotton sack.

He died huddled in a car's back seat, killed by men who needed a piece of bait, who needed to kill a black man so brutally in the summer of 1966 that the act itself would lure the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Natchez, Miss., so that they could assassinate him.

Today, in a federal courtroom in Jackson, Mr. White, the 67-year-old field hand, became, officially, a martyr of the civil rights movement.

"Imagine the hatred," said Paige Fitzgerald, a trial lawyer with the United States Department of Justice, after helping to convict Mr. Avants.

It was just the latest of several convictions over the last decade of old killers in civil rights cases who thought they had gotten clean away. But it was the first federal murder trial, and the first to involve a victim who was not a civil rights hero or well-known casualty, like Medgar Evers, a civil rights hero in Mississippi, or the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing.

"This courtroom has been a time machine where the past and the present have collided," said Jack Lacy, the federal prosecutor who tried the case here.

He was acquitted in state court in 1967, despite the testimony of an F.B.I. agent who said that Mr. Avants had confessed to the crime, and he seemed destined to live out his life a free man.

But the revelation that Mr. White's body had been found on federal land, in a national forest, gave prosecutors a way around the double jeopardy protections that had shielded Mr. Avants, and, years ago, they began building their case. Everything he had ever said about the case was relevant and damaging, all over again.

This week, the F.B.I. agent who had heard him confess in 1967, Allan Kornblum, returned to Mississippi to again tell the jury what he heard.

"I blew his head off with a shotgun," Mr. Kornblum testified that Mr. Avants told him in 1967.

But this time, in a racial climate that is more prone to automatically condemn such behavior than to automatically dismiss it or condone it, as was the case then, the jury came back with a guilty verdict.

For Mr. White's son, Jesse White, it was like finally being fed after living his whole life hungry.

"Like a good meal," said Mr. White, 65. "It feels good."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/national/01SLAY.html?pagewanted=all&position=top