The Wilkinson County Board of Supervisors has rejected a request to rename the road where a Black World War II veteran was gunned down in what is believed to be the first killing by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
In May, his family asked supervisors to change the road’s name from Poor House Road to Clifton Earl Walker Road.
On Monday, the board’s administrator, David Wilkerson, told the family that supervisors had turned down the request because the “vast majority of the residents on this road opposed the name change.”
Walker’s granddaughter, Rosabel Hall, told Mississippi Today that she’s disappointed in the decision. She said some who didn’t want their addresses changed told her they would support a memorial or historical sign to honor him.
She wrote a letter to supervisors, proposing alternate ways to honor Walker’s “life, military service and historical significance,” such as a historical sign.
“Our goal has always been to ensure that Clifton Earl Walker’s story is remembered and that his family receives the recognition that has been absent for more than 60 years,” she wrote. “We believe these alternatives would allow the county to honor his legacy while addressing concerns regarding residential address changes.”
Groups can purchase historical signs to commemorate the state’s history. They cost $2,800 each for a regular marker and $10,000 each for a Freedom Trail marker.
Other alternatives the Walker family suggested:
Naming a county-owned facility, park, bridge, community center or public space to honor him.
Designating a portion of a county roadway as the Clifton Earl Walker Memorial Highway.
Adopting a county resolution honoring his legacy and contributions.
Clifton Walker was fatally shot in February 1964 in what’s believed to be the first killing by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Credit: Courtesy of Ben Greenberg
It was nearly midnight on Feb. 28, 1964, when the 37-year-old Walker turned his cream-colored 1961 Impala onto Poor House Road, six miles north of Woodville. He had just finished his shift at the integrated International Paper plant in Natchez and was headed home to his wife and five children.
Three hundred yards after he pulled onto the gravel road, a mob of white men, including Klansmen, stopped his car and opened fire with their shotguns. The pellets tore Walker’s face apart.
When he was found the next day, he was dead, all the windows had been shot out, and part of the steering wheel had been blown off.
FBI and congressional records show the Mississippi Highway Patrol wanted to arrest then-Wilkinson County Constable Gordon “Bud” Geter and Klansman Ed Fuller, but then-District Attorney Lennox Forman refused to charge them.
The killing of Walker was part of a series of attacks on Black men in southwest Mississippi. Mobs of white men wearing hoods or masks whipped, beat and robbed dozens of Black men. Some had to be hospitalized.
The FBI concluded the White Knights, the most violent white supremacist group in the nation at the time, carried out the attacks. The White Knights are believed to have killed at least 10 people in Mississippi.
In 2009, the FBI began to review the Walker case, thanks to the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. After a rehash of the 1964 Highway Patrol investigation, the Justice Department closed the case again in 2013, saying all known suspects were dead.
Journalist Ben Greenberg, who investigated the case, said the FBI did not speak to anyone in the Walker family until an agent delivered a 2013 letter notifying them that the Department of Justice was closing the case.
Greenberg urged supervisors to “transform Poor House Road from being a forgotten crime scene to a memorial to one of the county’s citizens whose life was violently taken when he was just 37 years old,” he wrote. “They can give Clifton Walker’s family some closure where all else has failed him.”
