Mississippians Wary of Civil-Rights Trial

[NVMojo]

related to the "Mississippi Burning" case ...justice a long time coming ...

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. Jun 11, 2005 — Hicks. Rednecks. Racists. People who live in this town of 7,300 have heard the epithets slung their way for decades. And many black and white cringe as they anticipate how the world will view their town when reputed Ku Klux Klansman and part-time preacher Edgar Ray Killen goes on trial Monday in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers.

snip...

The murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner helped focus the nation's attention on the struggle to register black voters in the segregated South. Chaney was a black Mississippian. Goodman and Schwerner were white Northerners.

They disappeared the night of June 21, 1964, when they were run off an isolated road nine miles south of Philadelphia. They were beaten and shot to death and their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam several miles to the west.

The case became symbolized by photos of the burned hulk of the civil rights workers' station wagon after it was dragged from the swamp where it was ditched after the killings and of the smirking Klansmen who went on trial in 1967, not on state murder charges but on federal charges of violating the workers' civil rights.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=840322

[merh]

1. dupe

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1541018

[NVMojo]

2. Revisiting '64 Civil Rights Deaths, This Time in a Murder Trial

This was during a time when those who believed in civil righta/voting right faced death or lynching ....in the grand ole USA ...

snip...

The trial will be one of the biggest of what some have called the South's "atonement trials" revisiting the most notorious atrocities of the civil rights era. One after another, new prosecutors have returned to these old crimes, spurred by news media investigations, relatives of the victims, the success of other prosecutors and even their own youthful memories.

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in the assassination of Medgar Evers, a leader in the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mr. Beckwith died in prison in 2001. Three years ago, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in Alabama for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four black girls. He died of cancer in prison last year.

In Chicago this month, prosecutors exhumed the body of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old who was kidnapped and killed in Mississippi in 1955. Two men were acquitted of his killing by an all-white jury but later admitted they were responsible. The men have died, but prosecutors believe others were involved and are seeking DNA evidence.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/12civil.html?pagewanted=print

[Moderator]

3. Locking

Please continue here - thank you!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1541018