Freedom Summer’s agony revisited

Michael E. Ross Reporter • Profile • E-mail

The facts are as dry and clinical as the stuff of any police blotter report: The bodies of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner were discovered by FBI agents near Philadelphia, Miss., on Aug. 4, 1964. The three men, civil rights workers who came south to register African Americans to vote, were shot to death sometime on June 21. Their Ford station wagon was torched and their bodies were bulldozed 17 feet under an earthen dam.

But for civil rights activists of long standing, and for a brother of one of the murdered men, the forthcoming trial of the principal suspect in the crime is unfinished business for America.

On Monday, in what’s thought to be one of the last pursuits of justice postponed from the civil rights era, the trial of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen begins in Philadelphia with jury selection.

The Freedom Summer voter registration drive and the murder case galvanized the civil rights movement, ultimately inspiring the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

In a federal trial in 1967, seven men were convicted of federal charges of conspiracy and violating the workers’ civil rights. They were sentenced to prison terms of from three to 10 years. Killen, a Baptist minister and former recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, was tried for the killings, but escaped conviction when a lone juror refused to convict him. Seven others also were acquitted.

Nearly four decades later, Killen was arrested again, on Jan. 6, this time on state charges.

Now or never
Stanley Dearman, a veteran Mississippi journalist, now retired, places the start of the effort to retry Killen at around 1989. “A group of citizens got together and wanted to put on a memorable event to mark the 25th anniversary,” he said.

After years of prodding by civil rights activists, state officials obtained the FBI files on the case from the Justice Department. The state Attorney General, Jim Hood, moved with alacrity shortly after taking office in January 2004.

Considerations of fading memories and Killen’s own advancing age also played a part in retrying him now. “Jim Hood realized that if it wasn’t done now, it would never be done,” Dearman said. Hood will prosecute the case, with Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan.

Dearman contends that Killen was a ringleader in the slayings of the young men.

“Think of the way movies are made,” said Dearman, who followed the case as a reporter “since the morning after the boys went missing,” and who was editor and publisher of the weekly Neshoba (Miss.) Democrat from 1996 to 2000. “You could say Killen was the producer and director of this show — he selected the murder site, he worked out all the details.”

But even as Killen's trial is set to begin, some point to what they have long insisted is proof that the deaths of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were engineered by a state agency.

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