Jackson Henderson Ables III

Jackson Henderson Ables, III, died on May 14, 2025, in Flora, Mississippi. He was 78 years old. He was born in Vicksburg, Warren County, Mississippi on December 3, 1946, the oldest of the three children of Jackson Henderson Ables Jr, (a hydraulic engineer who modeled, tested, and consulted on navigation and ship locks on the Mississippi River, its tributaries, and other principal American and foreign waterways), and his wife Canna Elizabeth Kendrick, Virginia-born and Kentucky-raised, whom he met while an engineering student in the Navy's training program for officers entering service with engineering degrees at the University of Louisville during World War II. They were married on February 24, 1945, in the chapel of Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois.
Mr. Ables was baptized as an infant at First Presbyterian Church in Vicksburg. Mr. Ables and his brother Timothy Dale Ables and sister Susan Elizabeth Ables were raised in a devoutly God-fearing home; his fervent love of country was of only penultimate importance and a precept not up for debate. As a young boy Mr. Ables was active in the organization once known as the Boy Scouts of America. He became an Eagle Scout and was a Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow. At age thirteen, he was made the honorary Mayor of Vicksburg (for a day). As a junior at H.V. Cooper High School, he was business manager of "The Tattler" student newspaper, was active in the Latin Club, and built a full-sized Roman chariot for a class project. Because he was adept at impersonating the Massachusetts accent of then-President Mr. Kennedy, he was tapped to play the lead role of "John Fitzgerald Caeser" in the Latin Club/Junior Classical Society's send up of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." He was also in the cast of the senior play "The Importance of Being Ernest."
Mr. Ables decided while still in junior high school that he would become an attorney and, more specifically, a litigator. When he entered the University of Mississippi in 1965 it was with two definite plans: (1) to take a degree in political science, preparatory to law school, and (2) to work toward achieving a commission in the U.S. Navy, continuing his father and grandfather's naval service tradition. He accomplished both but, on the way, he expanded his academic pursuits to complete, in addition, the baccalaureate requirements for English and History degrees. In fact, he completed extended majors in both without preventing his graduating on time in May 1969. He was an officer in Eta Chapter of the Sigma Chi Fraternity. In 1968, during college, he served at sea as a midshipman aboard the flagship for the Navy's mine warfare force in the Pacific, the USS Catskill MCS-1.
Not long before his commissioning, Mr. Ables and two classmates were directly approached by another government agency with the evident permission of the US Navy, proposing that each might "forego" accepting commissions as naval officers and instead serve the country in another active way. All three declined the suggestion and accepted their Naval commissions and US Marine Corps commission, respectively.
Mr. Ables' most notable naval duty was with the U.S. Navy's Combat Engineers. As a newly-minted Ensign, he was appointed to the Headquarters staff and made the Administrative Officer of the Twentieth Naval Construction Regiment which exercised operational control of the several battalions of naval combat engineer forces units based in the Atlantic Fleet area, but primarily operating in southwest Asia. The 20 th NCR was also charged with assuring the deployment readiness of all construction battalions in the Naval Reserves. Lieutenant Ables performed collateral duties as the regiment's Legal Officer and the Top-Secret Material Control Officer. Three years later, after one last deep sea fishing trip with Navy buddies far at sea in the recently renamed "Gulf of America", he reentered civilian life, yet retaining a regular US Navy commission until the 1980s.
In law school, he "wrote onto" the Law Review, and was first published his freshman year. Because of his writing ability, he became Associate Editor of the Mississippi Law Journal and was elected by his fellow members as the Magister (President) of the Mayes Inn of Phi Delta Phi, the international law school scholastic honorary society. When he graduated in 1975, again "on time", he had completed 133% of the academic hours required for the degree of Juris Doctor. He liked to jest that every school he had ever attended, since Grove Street Elementary, had been forced to "change the locks" to get him to leave. He loved school, but he loved learning more. Over the course of his life, he delved into subjects as diverse and numerous as the many friends he made. His interests included Biblical Archaeology, the English war with Spain, the several attempts to colonize "Pars Virginia" (now the Carolinas), and every war in which his forebears had fought since arriving in America.
Mr. Ables was called by the bar in 1975 when he began his career as a litigator at Daniel Coker Horton Bell and Dukes where he served for all or parts of five decades. He made partner in five years, served as an officer of the firm, a member of its Executive Committee, and chair of the Hiring and Long Range Planning Committees. With his dear friend Larry Moffett, he co-authored "The Handbook of Mississippi Environmental Law." He wrote and published numerous scholarly articles for private publications as well as substantive compendia of law for, among other organizations: The International Association of Defense Counsel, The Mississippi Law Institute, and The American Law Firm Association International. He was a civil litigator-usually but not exclusively appearing for the defense, editor of a nationally published quarterly on product liability law, a frequent speaker at various organizations' national seminars, and he served his State's Bar and its citizenry. Among his clients were judges and congressmen. He had litigations with or against nearly every governor of this State from the 1960s until he retired from active practice. Early in his career, Mr. Ables was tasked by the bar to chair a yearlong investigation of whether allegedly substantive rights of Mississippi citizens would be threatened, actually impinged, or perhaps lost, if new rules of civil procedure were adopted to replace those existing since Mississippi became a state. Mr. Ables and his committee concluded their work, including a review of the entire Code of Mississippi, successfully and on time. His committee concluded that the anxieties voiced by some members of the bar were groundless. The Mississippi Rules of Civil Procedure have done much since to bring order to the conduct of civil litigation in our state courts.
Admiral Thomas Lilly recruited Mr. Ables to involvement in the activities of the Southeastern Legal Foundation in Atlanta; as a member of the group's legal advisory board, which included former Attorney General of the United States, Griffin Bell. The board reviewed and approved SLF's involvement in numerous civil matters of major importance, including the disbarment of President Clinton and the failed attempt to overthrow the decennial 2000 census' actual enumeration requirement established in the US Constitution and replace it with a contrived method of "scientific statistical sampling", which would import fraudulent manipulations and presumptions that some citizens must be "hiding" from census-takers for the actual population counts to slant the periodic redrawing of US House of Representative districts. The foundations' positions prevailed in both these actions.
By the end of his career at the firm, Mr. Ables had litigated numerous cases to final conclusion in states other than Mississippi. Every one litigated elsewhere, but one, concluded successfully. His clients in this country sent him to litigate their cases and controversies in the state and federal district (and appellate) courts in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, and the District of Columbia. He also regularly represented clients in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and several nations in Africa. And when the despot Saddam Hussein al Tikriti and his henchmen attempted to extort several million dollars from a prominent Jackson businessman, Mr. Ables obtained, on Christmas morning, injunctive relief to stop his client's local bank from transferring the client's funds to Saddam's bank in Baghdad.
Mr. Ables litigated about alleged defamations by life insurance on the lives of persons subsequently murdered; motion picture and print media sued in the United States and Canada; airport crashes; manufacturing processes by the company chosen to make the rocket fuel for the US space shuttles; the tragic I.C.R.R derailment in Bourbonnais, Illinois; alleged defects in firearms and weapons; artificial heart valves; misused agricultural chemicals; accidents involving nuclear power generation; the blowout of an onshore natural gas well; and perhaps most famously, the defeat of the libel claims brought about the motion picture "Mississippi Burning," which led directly to the reopening of the dormant prosecution of Medgar Evers' murderer. Mr. Ables was a member of the Bar of the State of Mississippi, the District Courts of the Northen and Southern Districts of Mississippi, The US Circuit Courts of Appeals for the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, the Supreme Court of the United States, and all the Tribal Courts of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. His professional accomplishments included memberships in: the Defense Research Institute, The International Association of Defense Counsel, the Bar Association of the United States Supreme Court, and selection as one of the Top Ten Lawyers in Mississippi and The Best Lawyers in America, and selection for repetitive listings in Marquis' "Who's Who in American Law", "Who's Who in America", and "Who's Who in the World".
With Scottish and English protestant ancestors on both sides of his family, Mr. Ables was a life-long Presbyterian, but he was a member of the Presbyterian Church in America from the denomination's original organization. He joined First Presbyterian Church in Jackson immediately after graduating Law School and remained a member of its now so-called "Young Seekers" Sunday school class until his death; over two decades, he also taught children's Sunday school classes for children in grades two through five, an opportunity he exploited to persuade his own children of the truths of The Gospel. He served on the Mission to North America Committee in the church's ministry to international professionals and academics residing here, and international students enrolled at area colleges and universities.
Mr. Ables' hobbies were diverse (so only some of these yielded to the infirmities that accompany encroaching old age). He particularly enjoyed fishing, he had fished the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, Narragansett Bay, and as many ponds and lakes as he could find and access and he made custom-built fishing rods for his friends in the Office of Naval Intelligence; he had canoed virtually the entire Big Black River, the last third in pitch-black darkness. He twice crossed the Continental Divide on horseback in snow, he shot pheasants in South Dakota, dove and partridge and quail in Mississippi, and hunted elk in the San Juan range of the Colorado Rockies. He became a member of the British Society for the Turin Shroud. Late in his life, once retired, he volunteered as an archivist for the National Archives. He had a passable reading knowledge of German, French, Italian, and Spanish thanks to his wonderful Latin teacher. He was working on a half-dozen novels and several works of non-fiction when he died, taking with him an encyclopedic memory that had stored everything he had ever seen or heard and all in crystalline clarity. He was, it is fair to say, a polymath. Mr. Ables is preceded in death by his father, Jackson Henderson Ables, Jr., his mother, Canna Elizabeth Kendrick Ables, and his sister, Susan Elizabeth Ables. He is survived by his wife of 32 years, Karon Lynn Graves Ables, a Natchez native, and by three children: Christopher Bradley Ables (Carol Ann), Emily Cameron Ables Holloway (Daniel), and Ryan Kendrick Ables (Chloe), each of whom he loved selflessly and relentlessly; granddaughter Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, granddaughter MC Ables, due in July, a grandson James Witt Holloway, due in September, his brother Timothy Dale Ables, a niece and many nephews, and 33 of surviving first cousins.
Mr. Ables' visitation will be held Friday, May 23 at 9:30 a.m. with service following at 11:00 a.m. at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, with interment and graveside service to follow in the Ables Family plot at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Vicksburg. In lieu of flowers, Mr. Ables requested that any memorials, including bequests, be made to any of these deserving recipients: Reformed Theological Seminary, The Palmer Home for Children (Columbus, MS), French Camp Academy, The African Bible College (Kampala, Uganda), St. Jude Children's Hospital (Memphis, TN), the Wounded Warrior Project, and Disabled American Veterans.
He asked that you reflect on the words of Job and of St. Paul:
" Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him", " For we know that all things work together for good to them who are the called according to His purposes." (Here endeth the Lesson.)