Clifton Walker was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on February 28th, 1964, as he drove home from the International Paper Plant in Mississippi.
It was close to midnight, and he took a shortcut on Poor House Road to avoid the long drive via Woodville to go home to his wife and five children. The KKK Klansmen stopped his car, on the unpaved road, surrounded him and shot him at point-blank range in the face.
The next day, he was found dead with his feet on the floorboard under the wheel and his upper body flung across the passenger seat. This was believed to be the first act of racial violence and murder by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
No arrests were made.
About two weeks before Walker’s murder, some 200 members of the White Knights met and declared it a nationwide organisation in response to the growing civil-rights movement at the time. They held cross burnings and agreed to exterminate Blacks.
Walker was a Black American US Army veteran of the Korean war.