Sunday, July 7, 2019

Civil Rights Events
Mississippi -- Freedom Summer
Delayed Justice
 
Following the discovery of the bodies of the murdered civil rights activists, Carolyn Goodman, Rita Schwerner, and Fanny Lee Chaney made these public statements.
 
Carolyn Goodman: All I can say is that if the people who have expressed their feelings most eloquently to us in these past weeks are any reflection of what I believe are the vast numbers of people throughout this country, I have great optimism.
 
Rita Schwerner: As you know, lynchings in Mississippi are not uncommon, they have occurred for many, many years. Uh, maybe this one could be the last if some positive steps were taken to show that the people in this country have had enough. That they require that human beings be treated as human beings.
 
Fanny Lee Chaney: Well, you all know that I am Fannie Lee Chaney, the mother of James Chaney. Y’all know what my child was doing. He was trying for us all to make a better living. And he had two fellows from New York – had their own home and everything, didn’t have nothing to worry about. But they come here to help us. Did y’all know they come here to help us? They died for us (Mississippi 15)!
 
It would be informants from within the Klan that would break the case open. The first information, from a Klan member at the periphery of the conspiracy, enabled the FBI to focus on the more central figures. One Klan member who received a great deal of attention from prosecutor John Proctor was James Jordan, a Meridian speakeasy owner. Over the course of five increasingly rough interviews, Jordan came to see turning state's evidence as his best bet to avoid a long prison term. He was also promised $3500 and help in relocating himself and his family in return for his full story. Jordan would become the government's key witness to the crime (Linder Trial 3).
 
State and local law enforcement did not pursue filing charges, claiming insufficient evidence. Knowing that state authorities would never charge the alleged attackers and that an all-white jury would refuse to convict the suspects of murder, on December 4, the Justice Department [using an 1870 post-reconstruction civil rights law] charged 21 men with conspiring to violate Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman’s civil rights.
 
Prosecutors brought the charges before a federal grand jury, which indicted 18 men in January 1965. The following month, presiding judge William Harold Cox dismissed the charges against the majority of the defendants, maintaining that the law applied only to law enforcement -- in this case, deputy sheriff Price, the county sheriff, and a patrolman. The prosecution appealed, and in 1966 the Supreme Court reinstated the charges, ruling that the law applied to both law enforcement officials and civilians.
 
In February 1967 another federal grand jury indicted the men once again, and in October the trial began in Judge Cox’s courtroom. Cox was known as a segregationist -- he had been the subject of an unsuccessful impeachment attempt after describing African American witnesses in an earlier case as “chimpanzees.” But on the first day of the trial, when the defense attorney asked a witness whether Schwerner was part of a plot to rape white women during the summer of 1964, Cox called the question improper, stating, “I’m not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial."
 
Prosecutor John Doar later called Cox’s response to the rape question a turning point in the fight for justice. “If there had been any feeling in the courtroom that the defendants were invulnerable to conviction in Mississippi, this incident dispelled it completely," Doar said afterwards. "Cox made it clear he was taking the trial seriously. That made the jurors stop and think: ‘If Judge Cox is taking this stand, we’d better meet our responsibility as well'" (Murder in Mississippi 8-10).
 
The trial of the sixteen accused began October 7, 1967.  A jury of seven white men and five white women, ranging in ages from 34 to 67, was selected. Defense attorneys exercised peremptory challenges against all seventeen potential black jurors. A white man, who admitted under questioning by Robert Hauberg, the U.S. Attorney for Mississippi, that he had been a member of the KKK "a couple of years ago," was challenged for cause. Judge Cox denied the challenge.
 
The heart of the government's case was presented through the testimony of three Klan informants, Wallace Miller, Delmar Dennis, and James Jordan. Miller described the organization of the Lauderdale klavern and described his conversations with Exalted Cyclops Frank Herndon and Kleagle Edgar Ray Killen about the June 21 operation in Neshoba County. Dennis incriminated Sam Bowers, the founder and Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the KKK of Mississippi. Dennis quoted Bowers as having said after the killing of Schwerner and the two others, "It was the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew." … Dennis described a Klan meeting in the pasture of Klan member Clayton Lewis. He then pointed to Lewis, the mayor of Philadelphia, sitting at the defense table as a member of the twelve-man defense team. James Jordan was the government's only witness to the actual killings. Fearing a Klan assassination, the government had arranged to have Jordan hustled into court by five agents with guns drawn. After first requiring hospitalization for hyperventilating, and then collapsing and having to be carried from the courtroom on a stretcher, an obviously nervous Jordan finally made it to the witness stand. Jordan described the events of June 21 and the early morning of June 22, from the gathering of Klan members in Meridian to the burial of the bodies at the Old Jolly Farm. His vivid testimony caused one black female spectator to break down and have to be led from the courtroom, sobbing.
 
The defense case consisted of a series of alibi and character witnesses. Local residents testified as to the "reputation for truth and veracity" of various defendants, or to having seen them on June 21 at locations such as funeral homes or hospitals.
 
John Doar presented the closing argument for the government on October 18. Doar told the jury that "this was a calculated, cold-blooded plot. Three men, hardly more than boys were its victims." Pointing at Price, Doar said that "Price used the machinery of law, his office, his power, his authority, his badge, his uniform, his jail, his police car, his police gun, he used them all to take, to hold, to capture and kill." Doar concluded by telling jurors that what he and the other lawyers said "will soon be forgotten, but what you twelve do here today will long be remembered."
 
 
On the morning of October 20, 1967, the jury returned with its verdict. The verdict on its face appears to be the result of a compromise. Seven defendants, mostly from Lauderdale County, were convicted. The list of convicted men included Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, trigger man Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, and Horace Barnett. Seven men, mostly from Neshoba County, were acquitted, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, burial site owner Olen Burrage, and Exalted Cyclops Frank Herndon. In three cases, including that of Edgar Ray Killen, the jury was unable to reach a verdict. (Charges were dropped against one defendant, Travis Barnette, before deliberations.)…
 
On December 29, Judge Cox imposed sentences. Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four. Cox said of his sentences, "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man-- I gave them all what I thought they deserved" (Linder Trial 4-7).
 
None of the convicted Klansmen served more than six years in prison. One major conspirator, Edgar Ray Killen, a klansman and part-time pastor, went free after the jury deadlocked 11-1. The lone holdout told them she could “never convict a preacher” (Murder in Mississippi 9).
 
[Deputy] Price declared himself a candidate for sheriff in 1967, at the same time he was facing trial with his fellow Klan conspirators. Price lost the election to Hop Barnette, one of his co-defendants.
 
Price was found guilty at trial and sentenced by Judge Cox to a six-year prison term. He served his time at Sandstone federal penitentiary in Minnesota. After his release in 1974, Price returned to Philadelphia where he worked as a surveyor, oil company driver, and as a watchmaker in a jewelry shop.
 
 
Price died on May 6, 2001, three days after falling from a lift in an equipment rental store in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He died in the same hospital in Jackson where thirty-seven years earlier he helped transport the bodies of the three slain civil rights workers for autopsies (Linder Cecil 4).
 
In 1998, Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, published excerpts from a 1984 interview with Samuel Bowers in which he spoke openly about the killings. “I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man, which everybody -- including the trial judge and the prosecutors and everybody else knows that that happened,” Bowers said. Mitchell’s reporting established that Bowers was referring to [Edgar Ray] Killen.  (Murder in Mississippi 9).
 
Mitchell's interest in the case had piqued after watching a press screening of "Mississippi Burning" in 1988. A pair of FBI agents at the screening dissected the film for Mitchell and told the reporter what really happened.
 
"The thing that was horrifying to me was you had more than 20 guys involved in killing these three young men and no one has been prosecuted for murder," Mitchell recalled.
 
Mitchell, whose reporting also helped secure convictions in other high-profile civil rights era cases, began looking closely at the "Mississippi Burning" case. His big break came when he obtained leaked files from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a segregationist group that tried to curb growing civil rights activism. Mitchell found out that the state had spied on Michael Schwerner and his wife for three months before he, Goodman and Chaney were murdered (Smith 9).
 
In 1999, Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore announced that the state would reopen the case. At his request, the FBI turned over more than 40,000 pages related to the initial investigation (Murder in Mississippi 10).
 
Indictment of Killen was delayed.  On October 6, 2004 approximately 500 people marched in support of Killen’s state prosecution.
 
On January 6, 2005, the State of Mississippi charged 79-year-old former Klan preacher Edgar Ray Killen with murder in connection with the slayings of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Police arrested Killen at his home following a grand jury session, according to Neshoba County Sheriff Larry Myers. Convicted Klan conspirator Billy Wayne Posey expressed anger at Killen's arrest: "After 40 years to come back and do something like this is ridiculous...like a nightmare." … Carolyn Goodman, the 89-year-old mother of victim Andrew Goodman, was pleased with the news. She hoped the killers would someday be "behind bars and think about what they've done" (Linder Trial 9).
 
Although several of the other conspirators were still alive at the time, the grand jury did not find sufficient evidence to indict anyone else. The trial drew national news coverage; members of the victims’ families were present at the trial, some as witnesses and some as observers. Ultimately, the jury [nine whites and three blacks] found insufficient evidence for a murder conviction, but did find Killen guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter (Murder in Mississippi 10).
 
According to FBI files and court transcripts from a 1967 federal conspiracy trial, Killen had done most of the planning in the ambush killings.
 
witnesses [had] testified that on June 21, 1964, Killen went to Meridian to round up carloads of Klansmen to ambush Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, telling some of the Klan members to bring plastic or rubber gloves. Witnesses [had] said Killen then went to a Philadelphia funeral home as an alibi while the fatal attack occurred (Pettus 3).
 
Judge Marcus Gordon today sentenced Edgar Ray Killen to serve three 20-year terms, one for each conviction of manslaughter in connection with the deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964. Judge Gordon said in pronouncing sentence, "I have taken into consideration that there are three lives in this case and that the three lives should be absolutely respected." Sentencing followed Killen's conviction earlier in the week. The manslaughter convictions came after nearly three days of jury deliberations. The jury found that there was reasonable doubt as to whether Killen intended that the klansmen kill the civil rights workers, and thus did not return a murder conviction (Linder Trial 10).
 
The courts had finally acknowledged the "Mississippi Burning" killings but the public sentiment was mixed. After Killen was arrested, [investigator reporter] Mitchell says he was threatened by some residents in an area where a "let-sleeping-dogs-lie" mentality prevailed. One man wrote a letter in 2005 to the Clarion-Ledger editor, saying Mitchell "should be tarred, feathered and run out of the state of Mississippi."
 
But Mitchell says others were grateful for the belated justice as Mississippi tried to shed its racially charged past (Smith 10).
 
In February 2010, Killen sued the FBI, claiming the government used a mafia hit man to pistol-whip and intimidate witnesses for information in the case. The federal lawsuit sought millions of dollars in damages and a declaration that his rights were violated when the FBI allegedly used a gangster known as “The Grim Reaper” during the investigation. The lawsuit was later dismissed (Pettus 5).
 
Linda Schiro, the ex-girlfriend of former mobster Gregory Scarpa, nicknamed "The Grim Reaper," testifying for the prosecution in a murder case, stated that Scarpa put a gun in the mouth of a Ku Klux Klansman in an effort to gain information about the location of the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. The ploy worked and the bodies were soon dug up in an earthen dam. Scarpa died in prison in the 1990s.
 
Schiro's story confirmed reports, coming from confidential FBI sources in 1994, that a frustrated J. Edgar Hoover had turned to the Colombo crime family for help in cracking the "Mississippi Burning" case.
 
 
On March 15,[2013] Owen Burrage died at age 82. Burrage owned the farm on which Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were buried under an earthen dam, but was acquitted in the 1967 trial. Days before the killings, Burrage bragged that his 250-foot long dam would make a good burial place for civil rights workers. According to an FBI informant, Burrage told a roomful of KKKers discussing the arrival of the civil rights workers in 1964: "Hell, I've got a dam that will hold a hundred of them." Horace Barnette told the FBI that around midnight after the killings, Burrage was waitng at his farm to direct Klansmen to the dam site. Burrage then went to his trucking company garage to get gasoline that was used to burn the civil rights workers' station wagon. With the death of Burrage, only one of the 18 people originally indicted remains alive. The survivor is Pete Harris, who witnesses say called the Klansman to gather on the night of the murders (Linder Trial 11-12).
 
Killen, serving three consecutive 20-year terms for manslaughter inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman , died at 9 p.m. Thursday, January 11, 2018.  He was 92.
 
“It wasn’t even murder. It was manslaughter,” David Goodman, Andrew’s younger brother, observed Friday.
 
“His life spanned a period in this country where members of the Ku Klux Klan like him were able to believe they had a right to take other people’s lives, and that’s a form of terrorism,” Goodman said. “Many took black lives with impunity.”
 
 
[Michael] Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, said on the day Killen was convicted that the slayings were part of a larger problem of violence in Mississippi against black people and others who challenged the segregationist status quo.
 
“Preacher Killen did not act in a vacuum and the members of the Klan who were members of the police department and the sheriff’s department and the highway patrol didn’t act in a vacuum,” she said.
 
Goodman said …that Killen’s passing is a reminder that issues of racism and white nationalism remain today. He pointed to the violent rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia ….
 
Killen wouldn’t say much about the killings during a 2014 interview with The Associated Press inside the penitentiary. He said he remained a segregationist who did not believe in racial equality, but contended he harbored no ill will toward black people. Killen said he never had talked about the events that landed him behind bars, and never would.
 
 
 When she learned of Killen’s death, Chaney’s sister, the Rev. Julia Chaney Moss, said her first thought was that “God has been kind to him. And for that I am grateful.”
 
“My last thought on this is just that I only wish peace and blessings for all the families as well as the families of the perpetrators,” she said. (Pettus 6-8).
 
 
Works cited:
 
Linder, Douglas O.  “Cecil Price.”  Famous Trials.  Web.  https://famous-trials.com/mississippi-burningtrial/1971-price
 
Linder, Douglas O.  “The "Mississippi Burning" Trial: An Account.” Famous Trials,  Web.  https://famous-trials.com/mississippi-burningtrial/1955-home
 
Mississippi Freedom Summer Claims Three Young Victims.”  nbclearn.com.  Web.  http://www.nbclearn.com/finishing-the-dream/1964-spotlights/cuecard/48786
 
“Murder in Mississippi.”  American Experience.  Web.  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-murder/
 
Pettus, Emily Wagster and Santana, Rebecca.  “Man Convicted of 3 Killing Civil Rights Workers Dies in Jail.”  AP News.  January 13, 2018.  Web.  https://www.apnews.com/3d82e778b5d643088268c3214ae904f8
 
Smith, Stephen.  “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.”  CBSNews.  June 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississippi-burning-murders-resonate-50-years-later/


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