Ku Klux Klansman Convicted of Murders 41 years after Committing his Crimes!

What took them so long…the jury that is?

Michael Schwerner, 24, of New York, James Chaney, 21, from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman, 20, of New York are profiles in courage and remain the haunting images of murderous racism in recent American history that claimed the lives of so many innocent and courageous people involved in the struggle for black civil rights.

Ku Klux Klansman (and appropriately named) Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty yesterday on three counts of manslaughter in connection with the killing of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in 1964. The facts clearly indicate that this was a case of justice delayed but not denied….

It is curious, however, that only 24 hours before reaching their verdict, the 12-member jury informed the presiding judge that they were deadlocked 6-6 on Killen’s guilt:

One has to wonder what gave the doubting 6 their reasonable doubts? And, what evidence persuaded them to overcome those doubts, literally, overnight?

The 1988 movie Mississippi Burning dramatized these murders. But the end of the story was never (and may never be) told. The facts as they are known, however, are simple enough:

Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney joined a corps of hundreds of young people who volunteered for the SNCC Mississippi Summer Project in the fall of 1964 to register blacks to vote in the die-hard segregationist state of Mississippi. But the God-fearing white folks there were not at all pleased by the “meddlesome interference by outsiders with Mississippi’s state-enforced policy of segregation”.

In fact, Schwerner earned the special enmity of whites in Mississippi by organizing a black boycott of their business to break their segregation practices – following the precedent set by the Montgomery Bus Boycott that virtually crippled white businesses in Montgomery, Alabama a decade earlier. For this reason, he was specifically targeted. Unfortunately, when the KKK mob that Killen – as Klan Kleagle (official recruiter) – summoned finally caught up with him, Goodman and Chaney were present and were simply murdered along with Schwerner in a 3 for 1 racial coup (Ku…).

Of course, since Klansmen were notorious for bragging about their dastardly deeds, it took the FBI little time to round-up the men involved. (It also helped that the bureau had informants planted throughout the KKK for years prior to these murders.) Nevertheless, for reasons that are no longer relevant today, of the nineteen men who were originally charged and tried in 1967, only seven were convicted. But, coincidentally, back then the jury proved hopelessly deadlocked on the charges against Killen. And thus his cold case remained – until yesterday.

Edgar Ray Killen: Now really, can anyone imagine this genial old man being responsible for murdering three civil rights workers. Of course, the fact is that the face of the KKK in 1964 looked as ordinary as this inveterate and unrepentant old KKK recruiter looks today. Indeed, it was the ordinariness of Southern racists that made their visceral hatred of and crimes against blacks seem so surreal…

Rest assured, that instead of sympathy, Killen deserves nothing but revulsion and condemnation for having escaped justice for so many years.

Long may he rot in his cell and then in hell!

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