Note—Part two wherein we pick up the
story of the 1964 murders of three Civil Rights workers.
If
the Police
Gazette daring do and James
McParlan’s handlebar moustache make
the Molly McGuire case seem too quaint, many of us of a certain age still have vivid snowy black and white TV images stuck
in our heads keeping alive the memory
of the murders of three young civil
rights activists in the Freedom
Summer of 1964. Hey, it still makes news 52 years later.
Just Monday Mississippi Attorney
General Jim Hood announced an end to the active Federal and State
investigations into the 1964 killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman,
and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. The announcement came just days after the death of Judge Marcus D. Gordon, who oversaw the 2005 murder trial at which Edgar Ray Killen, a Ku Klux Klansman and Baptist preacher who was believed to be
the prime mastermind of the crime
was finally convicted.
Hood told reporters:
The FBI, my office and other law enforcement agencies
have spent decades chasing leads, searching for evidence and fighting for
justice for the three young men who were senselessly murdered...It has been a
thorough and complete investigation. I am convinced that during the last 52
years, investigators have done everything possible under the law to find those
responsible and hold them accountable; however, We have determined that there
is no likelihood of any additional convictions. Absent any new information
presented to the FBI or my office, this case will be closed.
The news came as no
surprise to any of the victims’ families.
After so many years most, if not all of the others involved in the crime
are likely dead—Killen turned 91 in
prison—as are almost any witnesses. The
likelihood that new physical evidence may
show up has diminished to the vanishing
point.
The case has also been kept alive in the press and public awareness due to the diligent work of the Andrew Goodman Foundation which encourages young people of all religious backgrounds to be engaged in social justice work and
continues to campaign for the preservation
and extension of voting rights which are under pressure from a wave of suppression laws enacted across the Old South and states with Republican
governors and Legislatures. Andrew Goodman’s brother, David is the effective public face of the foundation.
Then there is the troubling
role of FBI informants within the Klan.
Although J. Edgar Hoover planted
spies in both the civil rights camp and
in various Klan groups and White
Citizen’s Councils, he was clearly more fixated on discrediting
the Civil Rights Movement, particularly its charismatic leaders like the Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr., than he was with White terrorists. He was
also loath to disclose how deeply his informants were involved
in several high profile cases,
including the murders of the Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo during
the Selma Campaign—so
deeply they may have been directly
complicit in brutal crimes.
Like the Molly Maguires this case got its own movie, a much more successful
film. 1988’s award winning Mississippi Burning told the brutal
tale of entrenched Southern Racism. It starred Gene Hackman and Willem
Dafoe as a pair of FBI agents
who diligently and doggedly investigate the crime. Widely
praised at the time of its release, the film set a pattern for other movies about the Civil Rights era which
always centered on white heroes relegating
black victims and civil rights workers alike to secondary roles in their own stories. And the irony
of the FBI as heroes was not lost on
many who lived through those times.
By the summer of 1964 the Civil Rights movement had matured.
The non-violent civil
disobedience campaigns of the Southern
Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE), Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other groups had won some local victories and the near passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had
cleared a 57 day long Senate Filibuster just
two days before the murders. But progress was painfully slow and everywhere
bitterly resisted, often with violence. The Movement
was experiencing internal stresses due
to tactical differences, jealousies and rivalries between groups and leaders, and the early stages of restiveness among younger militants over the limitations
of non-violence in the face of increasingly brutal attacks.
CORE was gaining a reputation for both a more confrontational approach than Dr.
King’s SCLC and for going into the heart
of the Black Belt to work in small towns and rural communities with long-term
organizing projects. It declared
that summer to be Freedom Summer and
publicly vowed to bring up to 30,000 volunteers
into Mississippi to set up Freedom
Schools and conduct voter
registration drives. Although that
number was wildly exaggerated, it
got the attention of Whites, many of whom flocked to join the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a splinter
group founded and led by Samuel
Bowers and which had a reputation
of being much more aggressive than
older Klan organizations. It was also
very active in recruiting among
local law enforcement officers.
Student volunteers for COREs Freedom Summer voter registration project in Mississippi join hands and sing as the prepare to head south. |
Andrew Goodman was a 20 year old New York student and activist
from a Red Blanket secular Jewish
background. Michael Schwerner was a
24 year old from a comfortable suburban
background who graduated from Cornel
University and was in graduate
school at Columbia University. Like Goodman he came from a Jewish
family. His classmate and friend at
Columbia, the diminutive Robert Reich,
remembers him as a “Gentle giant” who protected him from campus
bullies. Both young men became
involved with CORE while in school
and eagerly signed up to join the volunteers heading to Mississippi for the
Freedom Summer.
Once in state they were teamed with James Chaney, a 21 year old working class Black man from Meridian,
Mississippi who was already a Civil Rights veteran. Two years earlier
in 1962 he had participated in and endured the attacks on the Freedom Rides on interstate busses. He had
joined CORE and was already experienced
in organizing voter registration drives in his home town. Of the three young men Chaney was the only
one remotely aware of how dangerous their work would be.
Chaney and Schwerner were assigned to organize Freedom
School in Neshoba County to prepare local Blacks to pass the tough comprehension and literacy tests required by the state. These
tests were a huge hurdle to voting
and even answering every question
correctly did not guarantee that
it would be correctly marked and
many would be voters had to take the
test repeatedly. Part of the training at the school was in how to behave when turned down to prevent immediate arrest for causing a disturbance.
The pair kicked off their organizing attempt with
speeches at Mount Zion Methodist Church
in Longdale, Mississippi. Local members
of the White Knights of the Klan immediately got word of the effort and began monitoring the pair’s travels and
activities. They also wanted to attract
more CORE volunteers to the area with the intent
on targeting them. They burned the
Mount Zion Church knowing that CORE would respond. It did and Goodman soon joined the other two.
The ruins of the Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Mississipi where where James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner spoke on Memorial Day. |
Early on June 21the trio met in the Meridian offices of
CORE’s ally in the Freedom Summer
project, the Council of Federated
Organizations (COFO) to investigate the Mount Zion arson. Schwerner told the
staff to start searching for them if they were not back by 4 p.m. After visiting Longdale the began the return
to Meridian on State Rt. 16 to the county seat at Philadelphia where they planned to pick up Rt. 19 back to their base.
Just inside the Philadelphia city limits they experienced a flat
tire, probably the result of sabotage
to the vehicle or sharp objects strewn it its path. As the car limped down the road almost immediately they were pulled over by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price who
apparently had been following them. Price radioed
Harry Wiggs and E. R. Poe of the Mississippi Highway Patrol for
assistance. Chaney, the driver was arrested on the impossible
charge of speeding over 65 MPH. The other two were held for
investigation. All were taken to the Neshoba County Jail on Myrtle Street and held incommunicado.
By 4:45 alarmed
staffers began calling authorities, including the Highway Patrol, in search
of information on their whereabouts. They were given no information.
Still prevented from making a phone call, all three
were released at 10 that night. They
were followed by Deputy Price as they headed south on Rt. 19. A Highway Patrol car sitting conspicuously at
outside Pilgrim’s store dissuaded them
from trying to stop and use the phone.
Meanwhile a mob of White
Knights gathered in two cars drinking and
arguing who would have the privilege
of killing the men who were now literally fleeing
for their lives. Philadelphia Police Officer Burkes told the men in the
cars where to find the trio with instruction to “go get them.”
One of the two cars broke down and six of the men
jammed into Horace D. Barnette’s ’57
Ford Fairlane for the pursuit. Meanwhile Deputy Price stopped the CORE
station wagon which had turned west
on State Rt. 492 in an attempt to elude
any pursuers. He turned the men
around and moved them back on Rt. 19 to Philadelphia, strait into path of the
oncoming lynchers. The police cruiser
and Fairlane boxed in the station wagon and steered it onto nearly deserted Rock Cut Road where they stopped at a secluded intersection with another County Highway. The three
Civil Rights workers were dragged from
their car.
Alton W. Roberts,
26, a dishonorably discharged U.S.
Marine who worked as a salesman
in Meridian shot both Goodman and Schwerner at point blank range after asking Schwerner, “Are you that Nigger
lover.” Chaney was singled out for a beating and then shot in the stomach by James Jordan and then finished
off with another shot to the head by Roberts.
After the murders the bodies were loaded into their
station wagon which was driven by prior
arrangement to Old Jolly Farm owned by Olen L. Burrage southwest of Philadelphia and placed on a red clay dam on the property. Herman
Tucker, a heavy machinery operator,
was at the dam waiting for the lynch mob’s arrival with his bulldozer, which he used to cover the bodies.
Goodman was apparently
not yet dead when he was covered.
When his body was finally recovered red clay was found in his lungs and clenched
hands.
After the job was done Deputy Price told the men:
Well, boys, you’ve done a good job. You’ve struck a
blow for the white man. Mississippi can be proud of you. You’ve let those
agitating outsiders know where this state stands. Go home now and forget it.
But before you go, I’m looking each one of you in the eye and telling you this:
“The first man who talks is dead! If anybody who knows anything about this ever
opens his mouth to any outsider about it, then the rest of us are going to kill
him just as dead as we killed those three sonofbitches tonight. Does everybody
understand what I’m saying. The man who talks is dead, dead, dead!
The burnt out station wagon used by the Civil Rights Workers was quickly discovered confirming the worst fears for their fate. |
Tucker was assigned to dispose of the CORE station
wagon by driving it to Alabama. Instead he ditched it near a river along Highway 21 in northeast Neshoba
County and set it ablaze. That proved to be a fatal mistake. After the
Meridian COFO office, the initial target of an FBI surveillance team already stationed in town, reported its three
volunteer missing, J. Edgar Hoover reluctantly moved to begin a search. He was acting under pressure from Attorney General Robert Kennedy who
also ordered 150 additional agents
from New Orleans to the scene. The burnt out station wagon was accidently
discovered the next day by two Native
Americans who reported it to the Meridian Agent in charge, John Proctor. Kennedy then ordered hundreds of sailors from the Naval Air Station Meridian to search the swamps of Bogue Chitto for the bodies. Top Special
Agent Joseph Sullivan was brought in from Memphis to lead the investigation.
Proctor and Sullivan would be the models
for the fictional FBI agents in Mississippi Burning.
That search turned up unexpected results. The bodies of college student Charles Eddie Moore and sawmill worker from Franklin County, Mississippi were found badly decomposed in a river
chained to a Jeep motor. Although neither 19 year old Black man
was known to be involved in Civil
Rights work, they were picked up while hitch
hiking in May on suspicion,
beaten, tortured, and interrogated before being dropped into the river alive. The bodies of five other recently murdered young black men from rural towns in
the area who were never reported missing
were also turned up. It was grizzly evidence of a well-oiled and active night riding operation.
Acting on a tip
from a mysterious Mr. X the FBI
dispatched searchers to Burrage’s farm where their bodies discovered 44 days
after their abduction and murder. The
case unraveled from there.
National outrage
about the murder of the idealistic young
Northern volunteers was used by
President Lyndon Johnson to leverage final
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on July 2. As many noted even at the time, the death of
their Black comrade Chaney alone
would hardly have caused a ripple in
Congress. The case along with the
deaths of White volunteers the Rev. Rev.
James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo during the Selma
Campaign the next year was also credited with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
You may have noted the great and specific detail known
about exactly how the murders were committed and by whom. Exactly how
do we know so much? Good question. Although the FBI may not have had informants within the inner circle of those who plotted and
planned the murder as well as the lynch mob that carried it out—although some
historians believe that at least one of the men may have been a deep cover informant never revealed by
the agency because he was actively
involved in the killings—there were informants in the wider White Knights of
the Klan organization. Take Mr. X. Forty years after the fact he was identified
as Mississippi State Trooper and Klan member Maynard King who was enlisted as an informant by Agent Sullivan.
Other informants were on hand on for instance on June 7
when White Knights Imperial Wizard Bowers told a secret rally:
This summer the enemy [CORE] will launch his final
push for victory in Mississippi…there must be a secondary group of our members,
standing back from the main area of conflict, armed and ready to move. It must
be an extremely swift, extremely violent, hit-and-run group.
So the FBI was aware
that a serious and violent plot against Freedom Summer
volunteers was afoot weeks before the murders.
After the fact other informants associated
with the Klan but never identified by
Federal agents passed bits and pieces of
information they picked up from the loose
lips of participants or second hand
from others.
In late November 1964 the FBI accused 21 men of conspiracy
to injure, oppress, threaten, and
intimidate Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Most of the suspects were arrested by the FBI on December 4, 1964. Mississippi officials declined to prosecute any of the men for murder so Assistant Attorney General John Doar led
a star crossed Federal prosecution
for conspiring to deprive the three
activists of their civil rights. 18
men including Sherriff Rainey and Deputy Price were originally indicted. Travis
M. Barnette, owner of a Meridian
garage where much of the planning was done, and James Jordan who
was the first to shoot Chaney both confessed
and would testify at upcoming trials.
Jordan’s testimony was particularly
damming.
Despite strong
evidence, the case hit snag after
snag. After several false starts and bringing the case back
to a Grand Jury once, the U.S.
v. Cecil Price et. al. came to
trial on October 7, 1967 in the Meridian with Federal Judge William Cox, an ardent
segregationist presiding. An all-White jury included one admitted former Ku Klux Klan
member. When the jury deadlocked despite overwhelming
evidence, Cox admonished them with an Allen
charge for the minority to reconsider its judgement.
On October 20 Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Bowers,
Alton Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, Horace Barnett, and
Jimmy Arledge were convicted and Sentenced to between 3 to 10 years. After losing their appeal all went to prison,
but none served more than six years.
They were the first white men
convicted of a fatal crime
against civil rights workers. The cases
of E. G. Barnett, a candidate for Sheriff, and preacher Edgar Ray Killen, believed to
be the principal mastermind of the
plot ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors declined to re-try them. No charges were brought against several
other men known to be involved in
the wide-spread plot.
After years of investigation by intrepid journalist Jerry
Mitchell of the Jackson Clarian-Ledger and the work of High School teacher Barry Bradford at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire,
Illinois and three of his students,
Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany
Saltiel who produced a documentary
film on the case and helped uncover new evidence, Mississippi prosecutors
were finally pressed into bring murder charges against Killen. At age 80 he was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive 20 year
terms in 2005. He remains behind
bars.
Edgar Ray Killen, mastermind of the plot was finally convicted of the three murder in a Mississippi court in 2005. |
So what do these two very different cases have in common? To begin with both represent the desperate
struggle of the poor, despised, and powerless against seemingly overwhelming
entrenched power. Both, oddly, involved
secret societies and violent plots infiltrated to one degree or another by spies. In one case the oppressed formed the secret cabal. In
the other it was collusion between
terrorists bent on maintaining White supremacy acting in concert with local law enforcement. In both cases local courts, at least, blatantly sided with the oppressor.
And both cases are only examples of hundreds of such
struggles involving not just immigrant laborers and the labor movement or
the historic Black Civil Rights Movement, but dozens of other struggles ranging from abolition,
to women’s suffrage, to Native American resistance, to contemporary fight for LBGT rights.
The mass murder
last week in Orlando reminds us that
such struggles are ongoing. Even our past
victories—labor union rights, voting rights, legal access to abortion, and recently
won Marriage Equality are all
under fierce attack. The struggles
are never ending but must be taken
up anew by every generation.
After Orlando I noted a social media rush to dispute
claims that the killings there were the worst mass murder in American history. Other horrific examples were offered—Wounded Knee, the Tulsa Race Riot and Arkansas
sharecropper mass lynching, the Christmas
Eve suffocation of scores of
striking Iron Range worker’s Children, the Ludlow Massacre, etc. It devolved
into an unseemly more-oppressed-than-thou-contest. When I was a kid we would call this sort
of thing pecker contests. They only build resentments between the oppressed and are thus doing the work of the oppressor.
I was moved to create
a half-assed meme in response. Here
it is. Good advice if I do say so myself.
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