Edgar Ray Killen
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Edgar Ray Killen (January 17, 1925 - January 11, 2018) was an American white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan recruiter convicted of instigating the 1964 Freedom Summer murders. Killen had assembled a lynch mob which abducted and murdered civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Killen escaped conviction in a 1966 Federal trial for violating the victims civil rights, but was convicted for his role in the murders in a state court 41 years later in 2005.
Biography edit
Killen was born in Philadelphia in 1925. At the time of the murders he was working as a sawmill operator and Baptist minister. A member of the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist organization, he held the rank of kleagle, a Klan member whose main role is recruiting more people into the group.
On June 21, 1964, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, members of the Congress of Racial Equality, arrived in Neshoba County to protest for voting rights. Upon arrival, they were arrested for speeding by local Sheriff's Deputy Cecil Price. With local Klansmen under orders from Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers to deal with the three, Deputy Price contacted Edgar Killen and the two of them went down to nearby Meridian, where they rounded up a group of Klansmen to intercept Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner when they were released.
Once the activists were released, the mob followed them down the interstate in three cars driven by Price, Billy Posey and Horace Barnette. Price eventually caught up and forced the activists to pull over and get in his car, driving them to a secluded intersection where they were executed by Alton Wayne Roberts and James Jordan. Chaney, the only African-American among the three, was beaten and castrated before he was killed. Their bodies were buried in an earthen dam.
The disappearence of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner soon became a national news story and was investigated by 150 Federal agents. The bodies were found on August 4 thanks to an anonymous tip, but no further leads were forthcoming and the FBI allegedly resorted to hiring mobster Greg Scarpa to torture Klan members for information. 21 white men, including Killen, were eventually identified as suspects and interviewed until James Jordan confessed and agreed to testify against his co-conspirators in return for immunity.
Eighteen suspects were arrested on Federal charges of conspiring to deprive Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner of their civil rights through murder. Killen was one of them. Federal judge William Cox, who was notoriously pro-segregation, attempted to dismiss the indictments against all but two of the defendants but was overruled by the Supreme Court. Ultimately, seven of the defendants were found guilty, eight were found not guilty, and the jury deadlocked 11 - 1 in favour of conviction on Killen and two others. It was later reported that the lone holdout had said she "could never convict a preacher". The prosecution decided not to re-try the three men and they were released from custody.
More than 20 years later, journalist Jerry Mitchell, who had written extensively on civil rights cases, wrote extensively about the Freedom Summer murders. With the help of high school teacher Barry Bradford and several students, he located new witnesses relating to Killen's role in instigating the murders and focussed national media attention on re-opening the case. The students interviewed the elderly Killen about the murders, showing him to be mentally competent and still harbouring segregationist views. Eventually, Neshoba County authorities convened a grand jury which indicted Killen for three counts of murder on January 6, 2005, forty-one years after the murders. Killen's trial, scheduled for April, was delayed until June after the 80-year-old Killen broke both his legs in a fall. Attending court in a wheelchair, Killen was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, with the jury rejecting murder charges because it could not be proved that Killen had been aware the mob he assembled intended to kill the activists. Despite his advanced age he received the maximum sentence of 60 years in prison. Multiple appeals against his conviction were denied and Killen eventually died at the Mississippi State Prison in January 2018 at the age of 91.