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
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 Mississippi
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 Jordan
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 Mississippi
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 Mississippi Philadelphia Jordan Jordan Jordan
described the events of June 21 and the early morning of June 22, from the
gathering of Klan members in Meridian
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 Neshoba County
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
[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 Philadelphia
…
Price died on May 6,
2001, three days after falling from a lift in an equipment rental store in Philadelphia , Mississippi Jackson
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
Mitchell's interest in
the case had piqued after watching a press screening of "Mississippi
"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 Mississippi State
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
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 Neshoba County
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
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 Philadelphia
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 Mississippi
But Mitchell says
others were grateful for the belated justice as Mississippi
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
“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
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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