(Thursday) Benjamin Britten's work, The Burning Fiery Furnace, was premièred at Orford Church, Suffolk, by the English Opera Group. Two days after black voters in Mississippi helped pro-civil rights candidates win primary elections in Claiborne County and Jefferson County, the Mississippi State Senate voted, 30–13, to pass a resolution for a constitutional amendment that would allow the legislature to consolidate some of the state's 82 counties. June 10, 1966 (Friday) 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 Jr. 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 June 11, 1966 (Saturday) The Queen's Birthday Honours for New Zealand were announced. Recipients included businessman James Wattie (knighted) and novelist Ngaio Marsh, who was given the female equivalent of knighthood by being made a Dame. Died: Wallace Ford (Samuel Jones Grundy), 68, English-born American film actor Thomas Hardie Chalmers, 81, American opera singer, actor, and filmmaker Alfred Berger, 71, Austrian figure skater who won two world championships with his