page_title: June 1966
section_title: June 10, 1966 (Friday)
hierarchical_section_title: June 1966 / June 10, 1966 (Friday)
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photo of Janis Joplin.
context_page_description: The following events occurred in June 1966:
context_section_description: Janis Joplin made her debut as a rock vocalist, appearing with Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
  Members of the "Mississippi White Knights", a gang within the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, killed a 67 year old African-American man whom they had selected at random, as part of a larger plot to lure civil rights activist Martin Luther King to Natchez, Mississippi for an assassination attempt.  The unfortunate pick was Ben Chester White, a sharecropper whom they lured into a car on the pretext of finding a missing dog. James Lloyd Jones drove White to a remote area of the Homochitto National Forest.  Claude Fuller, who had hatched the scheme, shot White multiple times with an automatic rifle, and Ernest Avants finished off the killing with a shotgun blast to White's head.  Afterward, they realized that Jones's car now had bullet holes and blood stains, so the gang set fire to the vehicle so that it could not be identified.  Police quickly traced the vehicle's owner and arrested Jones, who confessed to the crime the next morning and named his accomplices.  All three men would escape conviction in state proceedings but, because the murder had been in a National Forest, Avants would be indicted decades later on federal charges and convicted of murder on February 28, 2003. and would die of heart disease a little more than a year later while in prison.
  Died:
  Henry Treece, 54, British poet and novelist;
  Joseph Biondo, 69, American mobster with the Gambino family
caption: Janis Joplin
exif: {"Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Express Editor"}