"Mississippi Burning" murders resonate 50 years later
These FBI photos show civil rights workers, from left, Andrew Goodman, James
Chaney and Michael Schwerner. The three, who disappeared near Philadelphia, Miss.,
on June 21, 1964, were later found buried in an earthen dam in rural Neshoba
County.
The postcard looks ordinary enough. It's a message written
from a 20-year-old to his parents, informing them that he'd arrived
safely in Meridian, Mississippi for a summer job.
"This is a
wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here," Andrew
Goodman wrote to his mom and dad back in New York City. "The people in
this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love,
Andy."
The card was postmarked June 21, 1964. That was the day Andy Goodman was murdered.
Fifty years have passed since Goodman and two other civil
rights workers, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were ambushed and
shot dead by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their bodies
were found buried in an earthen damn in rural Neshoba County - 44 days
after they went missing.
The three young men had been
volunteering for a "Freedom Summer" campaign to register
African-American voters. Their efforts helped pave the way for the
passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 1965 and their murders were
dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."
Andy
Goodman's fateful journey to Mississippi began in Manhattan, where he
grew up in an upper-middle class family on the Upper West Side. His
younger brother, David, says Andy was focused on fairness from an early
age - whether it was protecting a little sibling from bullies or
protesting social injustices around the country. As a teenager, Andy
would take his younger brother to Woolworths, where people demonstrated
against school segregation in the south.
Andrew Goodman in a 1963 family photo.
Courtesy: David Goodman
"He
just said ... it's unfair that because of the color of your skin, you
should go to a lousy school," David Goodman said. "It was an issue of
fairness to him."
That sense of social justice led Andy Goodman to
Ohio in June 1964. It was there, at a training session for the Congress
of Racial Equality, that the Queens College student would meet James
Chaney, a black 21-year-old from Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner, a
white 24-year-old from New York. They were training hundreds of other
volunteers on how to handle the racial turmoil and potential harassment
awaiting them in Mississippi.
While in Ohio, Schwerner got word
that one of the freedom schools he had set up in a church had been
burned down. He and Chaney needed a volunteer to help them investigate
the fire and they were quickly impressed by the level-headed Goodman.
The three men drove down to Mississippi on June 20. The next day, they
were stopped by the police and accused of speeding. After being released
from jail that night, they disappeared - and a nation was riveted. President Lyndon Johnson ordered the FBI to
assist local law enforcement officers in the search for the missing
men. Johnson's aide Lee White told the president that there was no trace
of the men and they had "disappeared from the face of the earth." Civil
rights colleagues worried they had been nabbed by the KKK. Some locals
dismissed their disappearance as a publicity stunt.
Finally, on
August 4, 1964, their bodies were found buried on the secluded property
of a Klansman. All three men had been shot at point blank range and
Chaney had been badly beaten.
In
this Dec. 4, 1964 file photo civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King
displays pictures of three civil rights workers, who were slain in
Mississippi the summer before, from left Michael Schwerner, James
Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, at a news conference in New York.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
During
the six-week search, the bodies of nine black men had been dredged out
of local swamps. Though numerous African-Americans had been missing and
presumed dead with little media attention in Mississippi during that
time, the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney rocked the nation.
Said
David Goodman, who was 17 years old when his brother was killed: "It
took two white kids to legitimize the tragedy of being murdered if you
wanted to vote."
It took four decades - and a determined reporter - to achieve a measure of justice in the case.
In
1964, the Justice Department, then led by Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, knew they were up against segregationist authorities who would
never charge the alleged attackers as well as all-white juries who would
refuse to convict the suspects of murder. So the feds prosecuted the
case under an 1870 post-reconstruction civil rights law. Seven of the 18
men arrested - including the Neshoba County deputy sheriff who tipped
off the KKK to the men's whereabouts - were convicted of civil rights
violations, but not murder. None served more than six years in prison.
Three Klansmen, including Edgar Ray Killen, were acquitted because of
jury deadlock.
In
this Oct. 19, 1967 file photo, Neshoba County Sheriff Deputy Cecil
Price, right, with Edgar Ray Killen as they await their verdicts in the
murder trial of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman
and Michael Schwerner in Meridian, Miss.
Jack Thornell, AP
But Killen's name would surface decades later, in large part thanks to Jerry Mitchell,
an investigative reporter at the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson. Mitchell's
interest in the case had piqued after watching a press screening of
"Mississippi Burning" in 1988. A pair of FBI agents at the screening
dissected the film for Mitchell and told the reporter what really
happened.
"The thing that was horrifying to me was you had more
than 20 guys involved in killing these three young men and no one has
been prosecuted for murder," Mitchell recalled.
Mitchell, whose
reporting also helped secure convictions in other high-profile civil
rights era cases, began looking closely at the "Mississippi Burning"
case. His big break came when he obtained leaked files from the
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a segregationist group that
tried to curb growing civil rights activism. Mitchell found out that the
state had spied on Michael Schwerner and his wife for three months
before he, Goodman and Chaney were murdered.
Mitchell was also
able to obtain a sealed interview with Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, one
of the men convicted in the initial trial. In that interview, Mitchell
said, Bowers bragged that he was "quite delighted" to be convicted and
have a preacher who planned the killings walk out a free man. That
preacher was Edgar Ray Killen.
In 2005, Killen was arrested and
charged with murder for orchestrating the slayings of Goodman, Chaney
and Schwerner. At the trial, 89-year-old Carolyn Goodman took the stand and read the postcard that her son had written to her on the last day of his life.
Reputed
Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen responded loudly with "not guilty"
three times, Jan. 7, 2005, as he was arraigned on murder charges in
the slayings of three civil rights workers, at the Neshoba County
Courthouse in Philadelphia, Miss.
AP Photo/Rogelio Solis
On June 21, 2005 - 41 years to the day after the murders - Killen was found guilty of manslaughter.
Now 89 years old, he is serving 60 years in the Mississippi State
Penitentiary in Parchman - the same prison that housed hundreds of
Freedom Riders in the early 60s.
The year after the Killen verdict, the FBI reached out to local authorities and other organizations to try todig up information on other racially motivated murders
that were unsolved from the civil rights era. Mitchell says that task
is increasingly hard given the dearth of solid leads and decades that
have passed.
The courts had finally acknowledged the "Mississippi
Burning" killings but the public sentiment was mixed. After Killen was
arrested, Mitchell says he was threatened by some residents in an area
where a "let-sleeping-dogs-lie" mentality prevailed. One man wrote a
letter in 2005 to the Clarion-Ledger editor, saying Mitchell "should be
tarred, feathered and run out of the state of Mississippi."
But
Mitchell says others were grateful for the belated justice as
Mississippi tried to shed its racially charged past. While it was a
struggle for African-Americans to vote in 1964, Mississippi now has more elected black officials than any other state in the country.
"Mississippi
has come further really than any other state I think, but it had so
much further to go than any other state too," Mitchell said. "There's
still a tremendous amount of work to be done."
David Goodman believes that sentiment holds true across the country as the issue of voter ID requirements is still hotly debated. After the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act just last year, Andy Goodman's brother can't help but remember the summer of 1964.
"It's
like 50 years back to the future. ... Here we are a half a century
later, basically talking about the same thing," Goodman said. "It's
certainly a different incarnation in that no one's getting killed, as
far as I know, because they want to vote but they're being kind of
spiritually assassinated or restrained. It's in this day and age just as
bad, relatively speaking. It's wrong."
But Goodman does not
dwell on injustice. Instead he is following in his brother's footsteps
and taking action. He runs the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a group
launched by his mother that pushes civic engagement and social justice
through voting initiatives and journalism scholarships. Goodman says if
his brother were alive today, he'd be doing the exact same thing.
"What
we're doing is - what I expect he'd be doing - is to get together with
your friends and to create an action - a back-to-the-future kind of
voter consciousness platform so you can get voter rights back on track,"
he said.
David Goodman will be in Philadelphia, Mississippi on
Saturday to talk about pressing social issues like voting rights. He
will have a copy of his brother's 50-year-old postcard with him.
The postcard that Andy Goodman wrote to his parents. It is postmarked June 21, 1964, Meridian, Miss.
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