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Edgar Ray Killen
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Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen (born 17 January 1925) is a former Ku Klux Klan organizer who conspired to kill three civil rights activists (Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner) in 1964.
He was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter on June 21 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime. He appealed the verdict, but his punishment of 3 times 20 years in prison was upheld on January 12 2007 by the Mississippi Supreme Court.
en was a sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister.
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Encyclopedia
Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen (born 17 January 1925) is a former Ku Klux Klan organizer who conspired to kill three civil rights activists (Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner) in 1964.
He was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter on June 21 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime. He appealed the verdict, but his punishment of 3 times 20 years in prison was upheld on January 12 2007 by the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Biography
Killen was a sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister. He was also a kleagle, or klavern recruiter and organizer, for the Neshoba and Lauderdale County chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
Murders
During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, and one black Mississippian, James Chaney, 21, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen, along with Cecil Price (then deputy sheriff of Neshoba County), had assembled a group of armed men who hunted down and killed the three civil rights workers. The Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders galvanized the nation and helped bring about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The murders are the basis of the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.
At the time of the murders, the state of Mississippi made little effort to prosecute the guilty parties. The FBI, under the pro-civil-rights President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, directed a vigorous investigation. A federal prosecutor, John Doar, circumventing dismissals by federal judges, opened a grand jury in December 1964. In November 1965, Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall appeared before the Supreme Court to defend the federal government's authority in bringing charges. Eighteen men, including Killen, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate the victims' civil rights in U.S. v. Cecil Price et. al..
The 1967 trial in a federal court before an all-white juryconvicted seven conspirators and acquitted eight others. For three men, including Killen, the trial ended in a hung jury, with the jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. The lone holdout said that she could never convict a preacher. The prosecution decided not to retry Killen and he was released. None of the men found guilty would serve more than six years in prison.
Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, wrote extensively about the case for many years. Mitchell had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in other high profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer. Mitchell assembled new evidence regarding the murders of the three civil rights workers. He also located new witnesses and pressured the state to take action. Assisting Mitchell were high school teacher Barry Bradford and a team of three students from Illinois.
The students persuaded Killen to do his only taped interview (to that point) talking about the crime. That tape showed Killen clinging to his segregationist views and clearly competent and aware. They uncovered more potential witnesses, created a web site, lobbied Congress, and focused national media attention on reopening the case. Ben Chaney, father of one of the victims, called them "Superhero Girls".
Re-emergence of the case
In 2004, Killen declared that he would attend a petition-drive on his behalf, which was to be conducted by the Nationalist Movement at the 2004 Mississippi Annual State Fair in Jackson, Mississippi. The Nationalist Movement opposed communism, integration and non-speedy trials. The Hinds County sheriff, Malcolm MacMillan, conducted a counter-petition, calling for a re-opening of the case against Killen. Killen was arrested for three counts of murder on January 6 2005. He was freed on bond. His case drew comparisons to that of Byron De La Beckwith, who was charged with the killing of Medgar Evers in 1963 and arrested in 1994.
Killen's trial was scheduled for April 18 2005. It was deferred, however, after the 80-year-old Killen broke both of his legs while chopping lumber at his rural home in Neshoba County. The trial began on June 13 2005, with Killen attending in a wheelchair. He was found guilty of manslaughter on June 21 2005, 41 years to the day after the crime. The jury of nine whites and three blacks rejected the charges of murder, but found him guilty of recruiting the mob that carried out the killings. He was sentenced on June 23 2005 by Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon to the maximum sentence of 60 years in prison, 20 years for each count of manslaughter, to be served consecutively. He will be eligible for parole after serving at least 20 years, although it is very unlikely he will live this long given his age and health. At the sentencing, Judge Gordon stated that each life lost was valuable and he strongly asserted that the law made no distinction of age for the crime and that the maximum sentence should be imposed regardless of Killen's age.
On August 12, Killen was released from prison on a $600,000 appeal bond. He claimed that he could no longer use his right hand (he had to use his left hand to place his right one on the Bible during his swearing-in) and that he was permanently confined to his wheelchair. Gordon said he was convinced by the testimony that Killen was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. However, on September 3, the Clarion-Ledger reported that a deputy sheriff saw Killen walking around "with no problem".
At a hearing on September 9, several other deputies testified to seeing Killen driving in various locations. One deputy said that Killen shook hands with him using his right hand. Gordon revoked the bond and ordered Killen back to prison, saying that he believed Killen had committed a fraud against the court. On March 29, 2006, Killen was moved from his prison cell to a Jackson, Mississippi hospital to treat complications from the severe leg injury he sustained in a logging accident in 2005.
See also
- Mississippi civil rights workers murders
External links
- – Barrett is a Mississippi-based white nationalist, a vocal supporter of Killen, and believes that Schwerner and Goodman were communist operatives
- (audio)
- , the journalist whose work led to Killen's arrest (Mother Jones magazine)
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