On December 6, 2023, Stanley Nelson presented “The 1966 Murder of Ben Chester White: A New Look at an Old Case” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
White, a 67-year-old farm worker in Adams County, was murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan as part of an alleged plan to lure Martin Luther King Jr. to Natchez and assassinate him. The three Klansmen avoided convictions until the last one living was tried and sentenced to life in prison in 2003.
Author and journalist Stanley Nelson has uncovered new information related to the murder case, including why Claude Fuller, the Klansman who masterminded the murder, may have attempted to pin the killing on Adams County supervisor Boyd Sojourner.
“Fuller had gotten crossways with Sojourner for many reasons, including the fact that Sojourner had Black tenants on his property. Fuller wanted them removed,” said Nelson. “Ben Chester White had all his life lived and worked on the farm belonging to Jimmy Carter, who was also a county supervisor. The lifelong personal and working relationship of White, Carter, and Sojourner was strong, and this, along with other factors, may help explain why Claude Fuller targeted White.”
Before retiring from the Concordia Sentinel in 2021, Stanley Nelson wrote more than 200 stories on Klan murders. He was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his investigative work on the 1964 arson murder of Ferriday, LA, shoe shop owner Frank Morris. Nelson works with the LSU Cold Case Project helping lead student reporter investigations into Civil Rights-era cold cases in Louisiana and Mississippi. He is the author of Devils Walking: Klan Murders Along the Mississippi in the 1960s and Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy Sheriff, both published by LSU Press. Nelson won the Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism from the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication and was one of seven reporters featured in the Columbia Journalism Review’s 50th anniversary issue “The Art of Great Reporting.”
