Mississippi ex-Klansman convicted, sentenced in civil rights era murders

Jet, July 11, 2005

Edgar Ray Killen, 80, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who was found guilty of manslaughter for orchestrating the 1964 deaths of three civil rights workers, has been sentenced to 60 years in prison.

Killen, who was convicted on the 41-year anniversary of the killings, is the only person who has faced state murder charges in the case.

He faced three murder counts in the deaths of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, but at the request of prosecutors, Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon of State Circuit Court in Neshoba County, MS, allowed jurors to also consider the lesser charge of manslaughter, which carried a maximum of 20 years in prison for each death.

The jury took fewer than six hours to convict Killen of manslaughter.

As he sentenced Killen, Gordon said he knew his decision-which, at Killen's age-amounts to a life sentence in prison, but each of the lives of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman had equal value, and the law does not adjust sentence terms based on a defendant's age.

According to court records, published reports and the FBI, Chaney, 21, Schwerner, 24, and Goodman, 20, were participating in "Freedom Summer" (when young people from around the country came to the South to register voters).

On June 21, 1964, the men were driving on Mississippi back roads to see a torched church that was to have been home to a school. Ku Klux Klan members had beat several church members then burned the church to the ground. They never reached the church. Police arrested the men for speeding and tossed them into the local jail.

Prosecutors say when the three were in jail, a mob of Klan members plotted to kill them. Hours later, police released the civil rights workers, who drove away in their station wagon. Authorities said that after a chase, the mob forced the civil rights workers off the road, grabbed them from their car and shot them dead at close range. Their bodies were later bulldozed into an earthen dam.

Forty-four days later FBI agents found the bodies hidden beneath 15 feet of dirt.

Their killings were depicted in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.

Killen was tried in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims' civil rights, but the all-White jury deadlocked. Seven others were convicted, but none served more than six years.

Killen's case marked the latest attempt in the Deep South to deal with unfinished business from the civil rights era.

In 1994, Mississippi won the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers (JET, Nov. 1, 1993).

In Alabama, Thomas Blanton was convicted in 2001 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 (JET, May 2, 2001), as was Bobby Frank Cherry (JET, June 10, 2002).

State prosecutors also have reopened an investigation into the 1955 slaying of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta. Till was kidnapped from his uncle's home after he was accused of whistling at a White woman. Three days later, the 14-year-old's mutilated body was found in a river. Earlier this month, his remains were exhumed and autopsied (JET, June 27).