The Mississippi civil rights workers murders involved the lynching of three political activists in Neshoba County, Mississippi on June 21, 1964, during the American Civil Rights Movement.
The murders of James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker also from New York, demonstrated the dangers faced by civil rights workers in the South, especially during what became known as "Freedom Summer", dedicated to voter education and registration. Blacks had been essentially disfranchised in Mississippi since 1890 and passage of a new constitution, and lived under racial segregation and Jim Crow laws.
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Blacks had led an increasing series of civil rights activities in the South since after World War II. Sit-ins, non-violent demonstrations, and Freedom Rides were among the actions that had been taken by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC), and other organizations. White volunteers also helped with organizing and supported actions, many of them from northern states.
In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) a coalition of SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC in Mississippi planned a summer of voter education and registrations in that state, which had essentially disfranchised black and Native American voters since passage of a new constitution in 1890. They organized volunteers and local activists to work on these issues. Michael Schwerner and his wife Rita were in Meridian as CORE organizers. He and James Earl Chaney, a local young man, had returned from training in Ohio with Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old volunteer from New York. Officials of the state of Mississippi and local groups such as the Ku Klux Klan resented these efforts to change their society of white supremacy, and activists worked at high risk.
Since May 2, 1964, two young black men, Henry Hezekiah Dee, a civil rights activist, and his friend Charles Eddie Moore had been missing from Roxie. Their beaten bodies were found months later, bound to an engine block and railroad rails in a river in Warren County. Most suspected the Klan.[1] (In 2007, James Ford Seale was tried and convicted of the kidnapping of the two men. They were beaten by several Klansmen and drowned in the river.)
Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were lynched shortly after midnight on June 21, 1964, after they had investigated the burning of a church that had agreed to support a Freedom School. James Chaney was a local Freedom Movement activist in Meridian, Mississippi; Michael Schwerner was a CORE organizer there from New York; and Andrew Goodman, also from New York, was a Freedom Summer volunteer. The three men had just finished week-long training on the campus of Western College for Women (now part of Miami University), in Oxford, Ohio, regarding strategies on how to register blacks in the South to vote.[2]
Local Klansmen were resentful of the activities of Schwerner and other workers.[3] Schwerner, called "Goatee" by the Klansmen, had been based in Meridian since January 1964. His activities included setting up a black community center in the town, organizing a black boycott of a white-owned variety store that refused to hire a black shop assistant, and educating African Americans to register to vote, as they had to deal with discriminatory rules and officials.[4][5] Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the KKK splinter group White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had issued an order to kill the civil rights worker.[6]
The morning after they returned to Meridian, the three men headed to Longdale, Mississippi, 50 miles away in Neshoba County, in order to inspect the ruins of Mount Zion United Methodist Church. The church, a meeting place for civil rights groups, had been burned just five days earlier. Neshoba County was known as a dangerous area for civil rights workers. The County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price were found to be members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, as were many other residents.[6]
Aware that their station wagon's license number had been given to members of the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan,[7] before leaving Meridian they informed other Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) workers of their plans and set check-in times, part of standard security procedures. Late that afternoon, Price, the county deputy, stopped the blue Ford carrying the trio. He arrested Chaney for allegedly driving 35 miles per hour over the speed limit. He also booked Goodman and Schwerner "for investigation" when he took them back to the county jail.
Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were each denied telephone calls during their time at the jail.[6] COFO workers made attempts to find the three men, but when they called the Neshoba County jail, the secretary followed instructions to deny that the workers were being held there.[6] During the hours they were held incommunicado in jail, Price notified his Klan associate Edgar Ray Killen, who assembled fellow Klan members and planned how to kill the three workers.[6]
After the Klan ambush was set up on the road back to Meridian, Chaney was fined $20, and the three men were ordered to leave the county. Price followed them to the edge of town, where he pulled them over, sounding his police siren. He held them until the Klan murder squad arrived. The KKK took the three men to an isolated spot where they shot Schwerner and Goodman, and beat Chaney before shooting him to death. The Klan drove the CORE car into Bogue Chitto swamp and set it on fire. They buried the bodies in an earthen dam, using a bulldozer to cover them.[8]
On June 4, 2000, the journalist Jerry Mitchell, who had been reporting on the case, published data from the autopsy report. It had been withheld from the 1967 trial as the county pathologist had contended that the injuries to Chaney's body had happened during excavation of the grave, which the FBI denied. The report stated Chaney's left arm was broken in one place, his right arm was broken in two places, there was "a marked disruption" of the left elbow joint, and he may also have suffered trauma to the groin area.[9] A pathologist who examined the bodies at the families' request following their autopsies noted Chaney had suffered "an extreme beating with either a blunt instrument or a chain."[10] As the autopsy photographs and x-rays have been destroyed, the injuries could not be confirmed by additional study.
The national uproar caused by the disappearance of the civil rights workers led President Lyndon Johnson to force J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to investigate the case. Hoover's antipathy to civil rights groups caused him to resist until Johnson used indirect threats of political reprisals. One hundred and fifty FBI agents[11] including Major Case Inspector Joseph Sullivan[6] were sent to Neshoba county to investigate. During the investigation, searchers including Navy divers and the FBI discovered the bodies of at least seven other Mississippi blacks, whose disappearances over the past several years had not attracted attention outside of their local communities.
The disappearance of the three activists captured national attention; it took 44 days for investigators to discover where they had been buried. Johnson and civil rights activists used the outrage over their deaths in their efforts to bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mississippi officials resented the outside attention. The Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey said, "They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity for this part of the state." The Mississippi governor Paul Johnson dismissed concern by stating that "they could be in Cuba".[12]
For a while, the trail went cold. When the FBI offered a $25,000 reward for news of the workers' whereabouts, a break came in the case. After paying at least one participant in the crime for details, the FBI found the men's bodies on August 4. They were buried in an earthen dam on Olen Burrage's Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had each been shot once in the heart; Chaney, a black man, had been beaten and shot three times.
Known as "Mr. X", the identity of the informant was a closely held secret by the government for 40 years. In the process of studying the case, journalist Jerry Mitchell and teacher Barry Bradford uncovered his identity: Maynard King, a highway patrolman who had been tipped off by Klansman Pete Jordan.[13]
In 2007, Linda Schiro testified in an unrelated court case that her late boyfriend, Gregory Scarpa Sr., a capo in the Colombo crime family, had been recruited by the FBI to help find the civil rights workers' bodies. She said that she had been with Scarpa in Mississippi at the time and had witnessed his being given a gun, and later a cash payment, by FBI agents. She testified he told her he had threatened a Klansman by placing a gun in his mouth, forcing him to reveal the location of the bodies. Similar stories of mafia involvement in the case had been circulating for years, and had been previously published in the New York Daily News, but had never before been introduced in court.[14][15]
Because Mississippi officials refused to prosecute the killers for murder, a state crime, the US Justice Department, led by prosecutor John Doar, charged 18 individuals under the 1870 US Force Act with conspiring to deprive the three of their civil rights (by murder). They indicted Sheriff Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Price and 16 other men.
Those found guilty on October 20, 1967, were Cecil Price, Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers, Alton Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, Horace Barnett, and Jimmy Arledge. Sentences ranged from 3 to 10 years. After exhausting their appeals, the seven began serving their sentences in March 1970. None served more than six years. Sheriff Rainey was among those acquitted. Two of the defendants, E.G. Barnett, a candidate for sheriff, and Edgar Ray Killen, a local minister, had been strongly implicated in the murders by witnesses, but the jury came to a deadlock on their charges and the Federal prosecutor decided not to retry them.[11] On May 7, 2000, the jury revealed that in the case of Killen, they deadlocked after a lone juror stated she "could never convict a preacher".
For much of the next four decades, no legal action was taken on the murders.
The journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, wrote extensively about the case for six years. Mitchell had earned fame for helping secure convictions in several other high-profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the murders of Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer, and the Birmingham Church Bombing.
In the case of the civil rights workers, Mitchell developed new evidence, found new witnesses, and pressured the state to take action. Barry Bradford, a high school teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, and three of his students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel, joined Mitchell's efforts. Bradford later achieved recognition for helping clear the name of the civil rights martyr Clyde Kennard.
Together the student-teacher team produced a documentary for the National History Day contest. It presented important new evidence and compelling reasons to reopen the case. The team also obtained an interview with Edgar Ray Killen, which helped convince the state to investigate. Partially by using evidence developed by Bradford and the students, Mitchell was able to determine the identity of "Mr. X", the mystery informer who had helped the FBI discover the bodies and end the conspiracy of the Klan in 1964.
Mitchell's investigation and the high school students' work in creating Congressional pressure, national media attention and a taped conversation with Killen prompted action.[16] In 2004, on the 40th anniversary of the murders, a multi-ethnic group of citizens in Philadelphia, Mississippi, issued a call for justice. More than 1,500 people, including civil rights leaders and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, joined them to voice their desire to revisit the case.[17][18]
On January 6, 2005, a Neshoba County grand jury indicted Edgar Ray Killen on three counts of murder. When Mississippi Attorney General prosecuted the case, it was the first time the state took action against the perpetrators. Rita Bender, Michael Schwerner's widow, testified in the trial. Afterward she said to the press,
"You're treating this trial as the most important trial of the civil rights movement because two of these three men were white," she said. "That means we all have a discussion about racism in this country that has to continue. And if this trial is a way for you to all acknowledge that, for us to all acknowledge that and to have that discussion openly, then this trial has meaning."[19]
On June 21, 2005, a jury convicted Killen on three counts of manslaughter; he was described as the man who planned and directed the killing of the civil rights workers.[20] Killen, then 80 years old, was sentenced to three consecutive terms of 20 years in prison. He appealed, claiming that no jury of his peers would have convicted him at the time on the evidence presented. The Mississippi Supreme Court confirmed the verdict in 2007.[21]
Several films dramatized the events of that summer. In 1974, a CBS made-for-television movie aired, Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan, co-starring Wayne Rogers and Ned Beatty. This was followed in 1988 by Mississippi Burning, with Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman; and in 1990 by Murder in Mississippi, starring Tom Hulce, Blair Underwood and Josh Charles. The sympathetic portrayal of FBI agents in the first two movies angered civil rights activists, who believed the Bureau received too much credit for solving the case and too little condemnation for their previous lack of action in regards to civil rights abuses.
A 2008 documentary entitled Neshoba details the murders, the investigation, and the 2005 trial of Edgar Ray Killen. The documentary features statements by many surviving relatives of the victims, other residents of Neshoba county, and other people connected to the civil rights movement. The film also contains footage from the 2005 trial.[22]