Will a Wilkinson County road bear a Klan victim’s name?
By Jerry Mitchell | Originally published by Mississippi Today
The family of Clifton Walker Sr. is appealing to the Wilkinson County Board of Supervisors to rename the road where the 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.
His family wants to see the name changed from Poor House Road to Clifton Earl Walker Road.
“This request represents more than a road name: It is an effort to honor the life, military service and memory of a man whose family and community have carried his legacy for decades,” Walker’s granddaughter, Rosabell Hall, told supervisors on Tuesday.
After an executive session, the supervisors sent the family a statement saying they want to “hear from the residents who live on this road and would be most affected by any change of name. The Board intends to reach out to these residents over the next few weeks, and then take their views into consideration before making a final decision.”
It was nearly midnight on Feb. 28, 1964, when 37-year-old Walker turned his cream-colored 1961 Impala onto Poor House Road, six miles north of Woodville. The Black man had just finished his shift at integrated International Paper 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 Klansmen and perhaps other white men 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.
Catherine Walker Jones was 13 when she saw her father’s body in the blood-soaked Impala with holes in the driver’s side door and holes in the passenger’s side door. “He had been dead 14 hours,” she said. “That’s a bittersweet memory in my mind.”
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. Dozens of Black men had been whipped, beaten and robbed by white men wearing hoods or masks. Some injuries were so severe the Black men had to be hospitalized.
The attacks were believed to be the work of the White Knights, the most violent white supremacist group in the nation at the time. The White Knights are believed to have killed at least 10 people in Mississippi.
The FBI began to review the Walker case in 2009, 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.
“The tragedy is no one was prosecuted,” Wright said. “That’s really a hard pill to swallow.”
The family moved to Louisiana, and their mother raised them, Jones said. “We had a strong mom who made us safe. We had a good life because of her.”
Although there were three suspects named in the killings, authorities never interviewed any of them, she said. “Are you kidding me?”
Jones said naming the road after her father “would be part of his legacy passed on to the next generation. He’s the reason I am who I am.”
Journalist Ben Greenberg, who investigated the case, said the FBI did not speak to anyone in the Walker family until an agent in 2013 delivered a letter to Jones, notifying her that the Department of Justice was closing the case.
“During this time, I published articles with new leads that the FBI could have used,” he said, “but virtually none were explored.”
In a letter, Greenberg urged supervisors to adopt the name change and honor Walker “to help make sure that the injustice he and his family suffered is not forgotten. In 1964, a mob of Klansmen treated Mr. Walker as a disposable Black target of their racist hate.”
He told supervisors they could “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. … They can give Clifton Walker’s family some closure where all else has failed him.”
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
