Killen Charged in Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner Murders
excerpts from First Murder Charge in ‘64 Civil Rights Killings of 3 by Robert D. McFadden, NYTimes, 1/7/05, p.A1
Edgar Ray Killen, a 79-year-old preacher and longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, who, investigators say, organized and led two carloads of Klansmen on the night of the killings in 1964, was arrested at his home in Philadelphia, Miss., and charged with the murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, Sheriff Larry Myers of Neshoba County said. The sheriff said there would be more arrests.
(F)ederal officials gathered enough evidence to prosecute 18 Klansmen in 1967 on charges of violating the civil rights of the three slain men. Seven Klansmen were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 3 years to 10 years, although none served more than 6 years. Mr. Killen was released after there was a deadlock by an all-white jury.
But the state never brought murder charges in the case, and it was not until 1999 that the state’s attorney general reopened the matter, after The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., published expose’s, including excerpts from a secret interview given to a state archivist by Sam Bowers, the onetime imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
In the interview, Mr. Bowers, who was serving a life sentence for ordering the 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a prominent civil rights leader, said he had thwarted justice in the killings of Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Chaney. He said that he did not mind going to jail because a fellow Klansman had gotten away with murder.
The slain civil rights workers - Mr. Chaney, 21, a black man from Meridian, Miss., and two white New Yorkers, Mr. Schwerner, 24, a Cornell graduate, and Mr. Goodman, 20, who had attended Queens College - were participating in what became known as Freedom Summer, the climax of an intensive voter-registration drive in the South. The victims were working with the Congress of Racial Equality at a community center in Meridian. Mr. Chaney had been a volunteer there for months. Mr. Schwerner had gone to Mississippi with his wife, Rita, in January 1964, having been hired as a CORE field worker. Mr. Goodman, a graduate of the Walden School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, arrived in Mississippi only a day before he was killed.