Murders
During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, James Chaney, 21, a young black man from Meridian, Mississippi and Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, two Jewish men from New York, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen, along with Cecil Price, then deputy sheriff of Neshoba County, was found to have assembled a group of armed men who conspired, pursued and killed the three civil rights workers. The Mississippi civil rights workers murders galvanized the nation and helped bring about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
At the time of the murders, the state of Mississippi made little effort to prosecute the guilty parties. The FBI, under the pro-civil-rights President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, conducted a vigorous investigation. A federal prosecutor, John Doar, circumventing dismissals by federal judges, opened a grand jury in December 1964. In November 1965, Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall appeared before the Supreme Court to defend the federal government's authority in bringing charges. Eighteen men, including Killen, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate the victims' civil rights in United States v. Price.
The trial began in 1966 in the federal courthouse in Meridian, Mississippi before an all-white jury convicted seven conspirators, including the deputy sheriff, and acquitted eight others. It was the first time a white jury convicted a white official of civil rights killings. For three men, including Killen, the trial ended in a hung jury, with the jurors deadlocked 11–1 in favor of conviction. The lone holdout said that she could not convict a preacher. The prosecution decided not to retry Killen and he was released. None of the men found guilty would serve more than six years in prison.
Over twenty years later, Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, wrote extensively about the case for six years. Mitchell had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in other high profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer. Mitchell assembled new evidence regarding the murders of the three civil rights workers. He also located new witnesses and pressured the state to take action. Assisting Mitchell were high school teacher Barry Bradford and a team of three students from Illinois.
The students persuaded Killen to do his only taped interview (to that point) about the murders. That tape showed Killen clinging to his segregationist views and competent and aware. The student-teacher team found more potential witnesses, created a website, lobbied Congress, and focused national media attention on reopening the case. Caroline Goodman, the mother of one of the victims, called them "super heroes".
Read more about this topic: Edgar Ray Killen
Famous quotes containing the word murders:
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
—John Adams (1735–1826)