Trying Times
Scenes from the rural Mississippi town where a trial is reopening a dark chapter in civil rights history
PHILADELPHIA, MISS.--Edgar Ray Killen sat hunched in his wheelchair as he was pushed past a towering magnolia up a ramp into the Neshoba County Courthouse. Frail and silent, the 80-year-old Killen made a halfhearted swat at the media horde swarming around him on the opening day of his trial for murder.
More than 40 years have passed since the bodies of three young civil rights workers were discovered outside this tiny timber town in central Mississippi. The slayings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner on June 21, 1964, marked a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, riveting the nation and galvanizing the federal government into action. The FBI's inquiry into the murders was dramatized in the film Mississippi Burning .
Point blank. There is neither a bronze plaque nor a marble marker where Rock Cut Road meets a dusty country lane just outside Philadelphia--the spot where the young men were slain all those years ago. No prim memorial has been placed on the lush, pine-covered hill. "This has been a shadow over us for the last 40 years," says Nettie Cox, a 64-year-old retired teacher born and raised here. Cox was 23 years old when the three came to this town of about 7,000 to look into the burning of Mount Zion United Methodist Church. After leaving the church, they were pulled over by a sheriff's deputy for speeding and taken to the tiny town jail. Soon after their release late that night, a gang of Ku Klux Klan members ran the young men down on a back road. They were brought to the fork where Rock Cut Road meets the unmarked gravel trail and shot at point-blank range. Forty-four days later, the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were pulled from an earthen levee.
Killen, a former sawmill operator and Baptist preacher who lives on Rock Cut Road, had long been suspected of organizing the carloads of Klansmen who killed the threesome. In 1967, the federal government tried 18 men, including Killen. Seven were convicted. None served more than six years in prison. An all-white jury deadlocked on Killen; one juror said she just couldn't convict a man of the cloth.
Former state Attorney General Michael Moore reopened the case in 1999. He acted after the Clarion Ledger , a Jackson-based newspaper, reported that Sam Bowers, a Klan leader imprisoned for the 1966 murder of a prominent civil rights leader, Vernon Dahmer, told authorities that Killen had organized the mob that murdered the three men. In January 2005, Jim Hood, Moore's successor, filed the indictment against Killen.
At least four of the witnesses scheduled to testify in the Killen trial were defendants back in 1967. After the indictment, it was unclear if Killen would be fit to stand trial. In March, he broke his legs in a tree-cutting accident. Circuit Court Judge Marcus Gordon schedules pauses during the trial every two hours so Killen can rest. On the fourth day of the trial, Killen was wheeled out of the courthouse on a stretcher for an unknown ailment, and the judge put the trial on hold. Security is tight around the courthouse. Twelve jurors--nine white, three black--have been seated.
Fair trial? One of Killen's defense attorneys, James McIntyre, who represented former Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey when he was acquitted back in the 1967 trial, says his client can't possibly receive a fair trial after all this time: "His peers have all died. It's going to be extremely difficult to get a fair jury. They've had time to think about this for 40 years." Killen, if convicted, could face life in prison.
Some in Philadelphia say the trial can't fully erase the stain of the murders. The proceedings shouldn't be viewed as a way to "simply clear our name," says Jim Prince, editor and publisher of the Neshoba Democrat newspaper. Others call the civil rights workers outside agitators who didn't belong in the South. "I certainly don't condone murder," Hugh Thomasson, a prominent local businessman, wrote in a letter to the Democrat . "But when you have activists deliberately antagonizing extremists, you are going to have trouble."
After the long passage of years, there are still others in Neshoba County and across the South who stand behind Killen. As potential jurors were escorted by police through the side door of the courthouse, a Klan leader from Georgia, Joseph Harper, quietly greeted Killen out front. Meanwhile, an old sedan cruised slowly up and down Main Street. On the back window, painted in large white letters, were the words "Free Edgar Ray."
This story appears in the June 27, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.