Mississippi Burning

[Hampton]

http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/9168/FBI.jpg

In 1964 the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) organised its Freedom Summer campaign. Its main objective was to try an end the political disenfranchisement of African Americans in the Deep South. Volunteers from the three organizations decided to concentrate its efforts in Mississippi. In 1962 only 6.7 per cent of African Americans in the state were registered to vote, the lowest percentage in the country.

On 21st June, 1964 James Chaney (21), Andrew Goodman (20), and Michael Schwerner(24), went to Longdale to visit Mt. Zion Methodist Church, a building that had been fire-bombed by the Ku Klux Klan because it was going to be used as a Freedom School.

On the way back to the CORE office in Meridian, the three men were arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Later that evening they were released from the Neshoba jail only to be stopped again on a rural road where a white mob shot them dead and buried them in a earthen dam.

On 13th October, Ku Klux Klan member, James Jordon, confessed to FBI agents that he witnessed the murders and agreed to co-operate with the investigation. Aware that it would be impossible to persuade a white Mississippi jury to convict the murderers, the government decided to arrange for nineteen of the men to be charged under an 1870 federal law of conspiring to deprive Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney of their civil rights. This included Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price.

On 24th February, 1967, Judge William Cox dismissed seventeen of the nineteen indictments. However, the Supreme Court overruled him and the Mississippi Burning Trial started on 11th October, 1967. The main evidence against the defendants came from James Jordon, who had taken part in the killings. Another man, Horace Barnette had also confessed to the crime but refused to give evidence at the trial.

Jordan claimed that Price had released Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney at 10.25. but re-arrested them before they were able to cross the border into Lauderdale County. Price then took them to to the deserted Rock Cut Road where he handed them over to the Ku Klux Klan.

On 21st October, 1967, seven of the men were found guilty of conspiring to deprive Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney of their civil rights and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to ten years. This included James Jordon (4 years) and Cecil Price (6 years) but Sheriff Lawrence Rainey was acquitted.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAburning.jpg

Coalition seeks to reopen case of civil-rights workers (http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/civilrights0624.php)

Hundreds mark 40th anniversary of Mississippi civil rights slayings (http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-miss21.html)

U. S. vs Cecil Price et al. (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/Ftrials/price&bowers/price&bowers.htm)

1964 slayings far from forgotten (http://www.indystar.com/articles/2/156350-2832-010.html)

FBI FOIA Papers (http://foia.fbi.gov/miburn.htm)

More Burning (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAburning.htm)

[Pawn Power]

yea, i saw the movie Mississippi Burning, i thought it was ok, but it dident really show how horrible these crimes where. It also didient go into the awful week punishments the police got afterwards, like you talked about! and the fucking sheriff dident get anything!!! :angry:

[Hate Is Art]

quite interesting, did anything ever happen to the killers?

[Hampton]

About the Sheriff:


Rainey's term as sheriff ended in November, 1967. After his trial, Rainey was unable to find employment in law enforcement. He accepted work as a security guard first at a supermarket, then at the Meridian Mall. Rainey complained in the mid-seventies, "The FBI set out to break me of everything l had, then keep me down where I could never get another start, and they done it."

Rainey suffered from throat cancer and tongue cancer. He died on November 8, 2002 at age 79.

Link. (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&bowers/Rainey.htm)

About Ceceil Price:


Price was found guilty at trial and sentenced by Judge Cox to a six-year prison term. He served his time at Sandstone federal penitentiary in Minnesota. After his release in 1974, Price returned to Philadelphia where he worked as a surveyor, oil company driver, and as a watchmaker in a jewelry shop.

Price has refused to speak publicly about the events of 1964 to 1967. In 1977, however, he told a reporter for the New York Times magazine that he enjoyed watching the television show "Roots." On the subject of integration Price said, "We've got to accept this is the way things are going to be and that's it."

Price died on May 6, 2001, three days after falling from a lift in an equipment rental store in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He died in the same hospital in Jackson where thirty-seven years earlier he helped transport the bodies of the three slain civil rights workers for autopsies.

At the time of Price's death, Mississippi's attorney general, Mike More, and Neoshoba County prosecutor, Ken Turner, were considering bringing state murder charges against some of the surviving defendants in the 1967 federal trial. Attorney General Moore saw Price's death as a harmful to the ongoing investigation: "If he had been a defendant, he would have been a principal defendant. If he had been a witness, he would have been our best witness. Either way, his death is a tragic blow to our case."

Link. (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&bowers/Price.htm)

Wayne Roberts, who pulled the trigger:


Wayne Roberts was the triggerman who killed Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney on Rock Cut Road on the night of June 21, 1964. He was identified at trial as the killer by fellow Klansman James Jordan, Roberts was convicted, and sentenced to ten years in pison by Judge Cox. Roberts served his sentence at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. He later found work in a car dealership in Meridian.

Link (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&bowers/Roberts.htm)

Sam Bowers, imperial wizard of The White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan of Mississippi:


Evidence in the Mississippi Burning trial indicated that Bowers played a lead role in planning the killings. Delmar Dennis testified that Bowers had overseen the entire operation. Bowers was quoted as saying after the murders that "It was the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew." Bowers was found guilty and served his sentence in Washington state. After his release from prison, he resumed his management of Sambo Amusements in Laurel.

Bowers was also charged with ordering the 1966 murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer, Dahmer had earned the Klan's enmity by allowing his store to be used by blacks to pay the $2 poll tax necessary to register to vote. Dahmer was killed on January 10, 1966 in a firebombing of his home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. After four previous trials had ended in deadlocks, Bowers was finally convicted in August, 1998, over thirty-two years after the killing, by a jury of six blacks, one Asian-American and five whites. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Link. (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&bowers/Bowers.htm)

James Jordan:


After several weeks James Jordan, a liquor-store owner and member of the local Ku Klux Klan, decided to become a federal witness in return for a lighter sentence. He led the FBI to a dam where the men's bodies were found under tons of earth piled up by an excavator. He had been on the scene when the murders occurred: Price and several other men had chased the men's stationwagon, got it to stop, and then shot them one by one.

Link. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1241556,00.html)

[Hate Is Art]

cheers hammie, good stuff!