Report for Sunday Monitor, KPFT Radio
Houston, June 26, 2005
by Pokey AndersonPhiladelphia, county seat of Mississippi's Neshoba County, is famous for a couple of things. That is where three civil rights workers -- Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman -- were murdered in 1964. And that is where, in 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan chose to launch his election campaign, with a ringing endorsement of "states" rights.
In the summer of 1964, the nation was still reeling from the assassination of Jack Kennedy the winter before. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were in Mississippi as part of a coordinated effort to educate blacks of their history, and register them to vote.
Congressman John Lewis worked with the three on Freedom Summer. He said it's very sad that it's taken all these years for this trial. During those years in MS it was hard, almost impossible, for a person of color to get to vote -- they had to interpret sections of the Constitution, a so-called literacy test. The state had a black population of 450,000, but only about 16,000 blacks were registered to vote.
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state's segregationist spy agency, played a role in the murders. It was a state agency set up to promote and maintain racial segregation - Mississippi officials had infiltrated and spied on the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of leading civil rights groups that targeted Mississippi in the early 1960s to promote voting rights and racial desegregation.
The people in the two towns involved, Philadelphia and Meridian, Mississippi, have known for years who did the murders. But, it took 41 years for anyone to be convicted of the killings -- previously, a handful were convicted of denying the victims their civil rights, and served a few years in prison.
Since the deaths, Edgar Ray Killen has lived under quiet suspicion just up Road 515 from the murder site, operating a sawmill and preaching racial segregation to a dwindling congregation of white supremacists.
In June, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of one count of manslaughter for each death, and sentenced to the maximum time in prison, 60 years total. Killen has been called the most unrepetant of the former Klansmen, and was seen to try to hit cameras and journalists as he was wheeled out of the courtroom.
"Unless you could understand the level of fear that existed, it is almost hard to imagine that it has taken this long," says Leroy Clemens, co-chairman of the Philadelphia Coalition and president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter. "The Klan basically controlled Neshoba County with an iron fist."
There were a number of twists and turns in this case. If Attorney General Robert F Kennedy had not sent an FBI investigator from outside Missississipi in, the case might not have moved forward at all, because the victims were buried 15 feet under, in an earthen dam. If someone hadn't tipped the FBI, they wouldn't have found them. If reporters like Stanley Dearman and Jerry Mitchell hadn't investigated for decades, there would have been no trial now. Those who fought to get the MS Sovereignty Commission papers released deserve credit too.
However, one Deep Throat in this case, to my knowledge, has not been identified -- that was a black man who was working undercover for the Klan -- giving them information as to the civil rights workers' plans, where they would meet, what they were going to do, their names, etc. The Klan, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission were busy keeping the entire civil rights movement in MS under surveillance, writing down license tags. They tapped the phone of the Schwerners. They investigated backgrounds of civil rights workers before they even got to MS.
BEN CHANEY, BROTHER OF JAMES CHANEY“What people in Mississippi are doing is a fraud,” Ben Chaney said. “They went after one individual, the most unrepentant individual. Yet the people involved in the cover-up have not been brought to trial. So no, this is not closure. It's more like the Civil War is being fought again.”
Chaney laid ultimate blame for the murders at the feet of an arm of the state government in power at the time.
“It was the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission,” he said of the agency created by the Legislature in 1957 for the purpose of preserving the autonomy of the state against the “encroachment” of the federal government.
Chaney said politicians, from the governor on down, "created an atmosphere where the state engaged in a cover-up. There was someone else pulling the strings.”
Agents of the commission spied on civil rights workers, harassed voter registration workers and developed watch lists of those thought to support civil rights.
“They had so-called investigators and people who went out into the field and sabotaged anything they could that didn't fit the party line,” veteran local journalist Stanley Dearman said.
A former mayor testified for the defense at the trial that the Klan was a "peaceful organization." Harlan Majure, who was mayor of Philadelphia, Mississippi in the 1990s, said Killen was a good man and that the part-time preacher's Klan membership would not change his opinion.
Majure said the Klan "did a lot of good up here" and said he was not personally aware of the organization's bloody past. "As far as I know it's a peaceful organization," Majure said. His comment was met with murmurs in the packed courtroom.
In the same way that Andy Stephenson was virulently accused of faking his own illness, civil rights activists SCHWERNER, CHANEY and GOODMAN were accused of disappearing themselves to gain attention.
In 1964, the three workers attempting to register African-Americans to vote were grabbed by the Mississippi police, then released to be taken by the Klan and killed. After the civil rights workers disappeared, it took 44 days for a tip to result in the discovery of their bodies. In the interim, the workers were accused of being Communists, and of disappearing to further their own cause.
JERRY MITCHELL of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, who has been reporting this case for 16 years, has published
a timeline. Here is an excerpt, from right after the 3 disappeared.
June 23, 1964
WASHINGTON - U.S. Sen. James Eastland suggests to President Johnson the missing men are part of a publicity stunt.
"There's not a Ku Klux Klan in that area. There's not a Citizens' Council in that area. There's no organized white man in that area," Eastland says. "Who could possibly harm them?"
PHILADELPHIA MS - Commission agent Andy Hopkins tramps through the edge of Bogue Chitto swamp and sees the burned-out shell of a station wagon.
"There was no evidence of bullet holes, blood stains or anything else that would indicate that the occupants had met with foul play," he writes.
Hopkins reports the trio may have been spotted in Alabama or Louisiana. The wagon "could very easily be part of a hoax," he says. "Everything indicates that the person that parked the car wanted it to be found soon."
Hopkins passes word on to Gov. Paul B. Johnson, who talks with Sen. Eastland, who tells President Johnson he has new proof the disappearances are a hoax.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tells the president his agents are chasing down all leads, including that the trio might have burned the station wagon themselves "to create an incident that would inflame the situation."
June 25
JACKSON - Gov. Johnson tells reporters for all he knows the missing men are in Cuba. Standing next to Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson, he jokes, "Governor Wallace and I are the only two people who know where they are - and we're not telling." A reporter looks up and spots Rita Schwerner: "That's the missing civil rights worker's wife."
When Rita approaches, the governor and the others duck inside the governor's mansion.
The Klan posts fliers all over the Neshoba County Fair: "Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were not civil-rights workers. They were Communist Revolutionaries, actively working to undermine and destroy Christian Civilization."~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After a 44 day search for the bodies of the three victims, they were found buried in 15 feet of dirt, in an earthen dam. The Klan had arranged for a bulldozer driver to do that, it was later discovered.
The website of a foundation in James Chaney's memory cites the August 5, 1964 headline of the Meridian Star, It said: "THE NIGGER WAS FOUND ON TOP."
The body of James Chaney was a "mangled mass". The injuries, besides the bullet holes, it was said "could only occur in a high speed airplane crash!"
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Mississippi's two Republican U.S. senators both refused in June to endorse a resolution apologizing for the federal government's refusal to enact anti-lynching legislations despite the holocaust of almost 5,000 murder victims during the Jim Crow period.
WYCKLIFFE DRAPERIn 1957, the state of Mississippi created the Sovereignty Commission. Operating on an appropriation of about $100,000 a year, the commission penetrated most of the major civil-rights organizations in Mississippi, even planting clerical workers in the offices of activist attorneys. It informed police about planned marches or boycotts and encouraged police harassment of African Americans who cooperated with civil rights groups. Its agents obstructed voter registration by blacks and harassed African Americans seeking to attend white schools.
Over the next year -- from July 1963 to July 1964 -- Mississippi leaders repeatedly claimed that the campaign was being financed by broad grass-roots support in Mississippi and across the U.S. In truth, contributions from Mississippi citizens never topped $30,000.
The money was derived from a wealthy New England heir to a textile fortune. Wycliffe Draper, a supporter of eugenics, secretly funded the Sovereignty Commission with his shares of the stock of Reynolds Tobacco, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Addressograph-Multigraph.
Mr. Draper's money buoyed a sweeping attack on the civil-rights bill. The Sovereignty Commission's Washington arm coordinated opposition efforts among less-organized groups, pushed trade associations to fight the bill and lobbied Congress.
It sent ghost-written editorials to newspapers around the country and bought ads in 500 daily and weekly papers. By April 1964, the group had distributed 1.4 million pamphlets and mailings, Sovereignty Commission records indicate.For more information on what really happened, check out the new book "Where Rebels Roost... Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited"
by Susan Klopfer. Links and excerpts can be read at:
Website:
http://themiddleoftheinternet.com/
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