FEBRUARY 27, 1967
Wharlest Jackson Sr., a Korean War veteran and treasurer of the NAACP branch in Natchez, Mississippi, became a Ku Klux Klan target after he was promoted to a whites-only position at his job in Natchez. It was a promotion his wife, Exerlena Jackson, wanted him to turn down because of what had happened two years earlier to their friend, George Metcalfe, who received a similar promotion — only to be injured by a bomb when he started his 1955 Chevrolet.
The Jackson family helped nurse Metcalfe back to health. Wharlest Jackson had just finished his shift at the Armstrong Rubber and Tire Co. and was heading home. Four blocks later, the turn signal tripped the wire to a bomb that Klansmen had planted in his truck. The explosion killed him instantly, hurling his roof hundreds of feet. His 8-year-old son, Wharlest Jr., ran to the scene and returned home with his father’s shoe.
“He was 36 and in the prime of his life,” recalled his son. “He had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and they took that away.” Despite an FBI investigation, his killers were never prosecuted. “A lot of people have tried to push my daddy’s death under the rug,” his son said. “We’re still trying to pull it out into the light.”
Wharlest Jackson Sr. is among 40 martyrs listed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.