Wharlest Jackson

Case background and investigation

Wharlest Jackson was a Korean War veteran, a father of five, and the treasurer of the Natchez, Mississippi branch of the NAACP. He had worked for about twelve years at the Armstrong Rubber and Tire Company when, in early 1967, he accepted a promotion to a mixing-room position that had previously been held only by white employees. The promotion came with a modest raise — reported in most accounts as 17 cents an hour — and, according to later reporting, coworkers had warned and threatened him over accepting the job. His wife, Exerlena, reportedly opposed the move because of the danger it carried.

On the evening of February 27, 1967, Jackson was driving his pickup truck home from the Armstrong plant when a bomb that had been planted on the frame of the truck, beneath the driver's seat, exploded at about 8 p.m. on Minor Street, a short distance from the factory. Jackson was killed at the scene; his young son, Wharlest Jackson Jr., was among the first to arrive after the blast. The attack closely echoed an earlier bombing: on August 27, 1965, George Metcalfe, president of the Natchez NAACP, Jackson's friend, and a fellow Armstrong employee, had been seriously injured when a bomb exploded in his car. No one was ever charged in the Metcalfe bombing either.

The murder drew a large FBI investigation and a strong response in Natchez, where thousands marched from the Armstrong plant to the site of the explosion. Armstrong offered a $10,000 reward and the Natchez Board of Aldermen added $25,000. Investigators focused on the Silver Dollar Group, a small, secretive and violent Klan-affiliated cell active in the Natchez, Mississippi and Ferriday, Louisiana area in the mid-1960s. According to the Department of Justice's closing memorandum, informants told the FBI that Raleigh 'Red' Glover and Elden Hester — both Klan members and Armstrong employees — had been involved in obtaining explosives shortly before the bombing, and that Glover moved a cache of explosives after the FBI investigation began. One source reportedly offered to provide information sufficient to convict Glover of conspiracy in exchange for written immunity for his own crimes; the request was denied, and prosecutors concluded the evidence was insufficient to bring charges. The original investigation was closed in 1968 without an arrest.

The case was reexamined beginning in 2007 under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which directed federal review of unsolved civil rights era killings. After reviewing a file that ran to roughly ten thousand pages, the Justice Department formally closed the case in 2017, naming several long-suspected Silver Dollar Group associates in its closing document but concluding that it could not be conclusively determined who planted the bomb and that the most likely suspects were deceased. No one was ever prosecuted for Wharlest Jackson's murder.

The killing remains one of the most prominent unsolved crimes of the civil rights era. Jackson's family, including Wharlest Jackson Jr., continued to press for answers for decades, and the case was the subject of the 2022 PBS Frontline documentary 'American Reckoning' as well as Frontline's Un(re)solved project on federally reviewed civil rights cold cases.