Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. 

On 21 June 1964, two white and one African-American civil rights workers disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. They were later found murdered.

Marc Morial, MaximsNews Columnist

The Mississippi Arrest: Bending Toward Justice

by Marc H. Morial    

President and CEO, National Urban League

Marc H. Morial, President of the National Urban League, is the former two-term Mayor of New Orleans, former President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and author of TO BE EQUAL.  He is a Columnist for MaximsNews.com.  Hear his weekly Radio Commentary Online.    See Marc Morial's  bio.    MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com

Please see All of Marc Morial's MaximsNews columns below.*

      UNITED NATIONS  -  11 January 2005   / www.MaximsNews.com / Thursday, Mississippi authorities arrested a reputed longtime leader of the state’s Ku Klux Klan for one of the most dastardly crimes that struck the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s:  the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi in June, 1964.

The suspect, Edgar Ray Killen, now 79, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment today in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the county seat, according to news reports and is being held without bond. 

The three activists—James Chaney, a 21-year-old black Mississippian, Michael Schwerner, 24, and Andrew Goodman, 21, two New Yorkers—were abducted on June 21, 1964 by Klan members with the connivance of law officers of Philadelphia, and the surrounding Neshoba County and brutally murdered because they, like their co-workers during the Movement’s “Mississippi Freedom Summer” campaign, had been fearless in challenging the perverted laws and the extra-legal violence white racists used to rule Mississippi.

Killen, a preacher, was one of eighteen white men—some reputed Klan members, others local law officers—brought to trial in 1967 in that small town on federal charges of, not murder, but of violating the victims’ civil rights. 

Seven of the men were convicted; none of them spent more than six years in prison.  

Eight were acquitted of the charge; and three were released because the jury deadlocked in reaching a unanimous verdict about them.

Killen was one of those three.  

According to news reports, he was identified during the trial as having been the coordinator of the Klan’s role in the crime and having been specifically ordered by a top Klan official to kill Schwerner.  

According to a dispatch in the New York Times, Killen has always denied being involved in the crime. 

Nonetheless, the story noted, he referred to the killers of the three during an interview last year in the Jackson (Miss) Clarion-Ledger by saying, 

“I’m not going to say they were wrong.  I believe in self-defense.”   

Edgar Ray Killen is of course entitled to the presumption of innocence.

But I am heartened by this signal that Mississippi authorities do not intend to let those who murdered the three civil rights workers so long ago—eight of the suspects are still alive—escape the judgment of contemporary society and of history, for they in their old age remain the face of the evil that ruled the American South for two-thirds of the twentieth century.

During that time it was often referred to with obscuring euphemisms, from “Jim Crow” to “the Southern way of life.” 

But now let us speak plainly:  It was an era of a reign of terror.

The whole of America now has a broad and deep understanding of what “terrorism”—the amoral targeting for violence of innocent civilians—is. 

Many African Americans, and Black America in general, have long known what terrorism is—because for a century after the Civil War black Americans endured a reign of terror throughout the Old Confederacy:  

thousands of them, bereft of protection from local, state and federal governments, had their homes and businesses and churches burned, and grieved for their neighbors and members of their own families who were beaten and murdered.

The perversion of democracy and of human decency that produced in the White South has been poignantly documented in many books and articles by black and white authors.  

Certainly, one cannot read such accounts of this case as William Bradford Huie’s 3 Lives for Mississippi, and Jack Mendelsohn’s “Brotherhood Beneath an Earthen Dam” in his The Martyrs:  Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice, without realizing the enormity of the evil Southern segregationists were fighting—and murdering—to preserve.      

For decades many civil rights veterans, and many segregationists, too, no doubt, were convinced the civil rights murders of these years in Mississippi and elsewhere would never be truly pursued.  

But since 1989 prosecutors in the Deep South have re-examined at least 19 civil rights-related killings, and gained nearly ten convictions, one mistrial, and one acquittal.

Equally important, that these long-ago crimes are being pursued shows a determined refusal on the part of black and white prosecutors and other law officials, and ordinary citizens in the South to let the great crimes of the region’s past go unpunished. 

We trust—and we use the word deliberately and sincerely—that Mississippi state authorities will continue their pursuit of justice for the murder of the three civil rights workers.  

Their actions are another example of the power of the insights of the Movement’s chief spokesman, Martin Luther King, Jr., who said in one of his speeches that “the arc of the moral universe in long, but it bends toward justice.”

Yesterday’s arrest in a crime that still pierces the heart of any decent person is a sign that at last in this case we are bending toward its proper resolution:  justice.

            MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com

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*Marc Morial's Columns in MaximsNews 

The Mississippi Arrest: Bending Toward Justice... 11 January 2005

Reforming America’s Obsession with Incarceration...  7 December 2004

A Pre-Election Snapshot of Black America...  26 October 2004   

Issues for the Candidates—and for Us...  19 October 2004

The “Routine” Tragedy in the Sudan...  2 September 2004

A Wonderful Life...  26 August 2004  

 America, We Have A Problem...  19 August 2004

Looking Forward; Leaving No One Behind...  28 July 200428 July 2004

Empowering Communities, Changing Lives...  8 July 2004

July: The Other Black History Month...  30 June 2004

Justice for History’s Sake—and Our Own...  24 June 2004

Let America Be America The Beautiful...   16 June 2004

Quiet Activism on The Movement’s Front Lines...  8 June 2004

Vernon Jarrett, Dreamer and Doer ...  2 June 2004 

Buddy Fletcher’s Gift...  26 May 2004

 The Murder of Emmett Till: Still Seeking Justice...  20 May 2004

  The Meaning of the Brown Decision...  12 May 2004

  The Complexity of Black Achievement...  4 May 2004

 USA Today’s Con Artist...  27 April 2004 

  The “Moving Target” of Black Educational Progress ... 13 April 2004

  Elaine Jones: Energized by Adversity...  6 April 2004

  The Urban League in Washington: Bringing Reinforcements...  30 March 2004

   The Pain of Those Left Behind...  17 March 2004

   Deeply Desiring Denial...  9 March 2004

    One Step Forward; Two Steps Back...  3 March 2004 

    Innocent of the Crime, But Almost Executed Anyway...  24 February 2004

    Civil Rights: America’s Unfinished Business...  17 February 2004

     What Will They Do Now?   2 February 2004