• Justice: let freedom summer ring Justice: let freedom summer ring St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 24, 2005 Three martyrs from the civil rights movement – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner – finally can rest in peace. On the
• Justice: let freedom summer ring
Justice: let freedom summer ring
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 24, 2005
Three martyrs from the civil rights movement – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner – finally can rest in peace. On the 41st anniversary of the day of their disappearances in Neshoba County, Miss., a state jury found former Ku Klux Klan organizer Edgar Ray Killen guilty on three counts of manslaughter in their killings.
The discovery of the three men’s bodies in an earthen dam in 1964 caused widespread revulsion and was a signal moment in the civil rights movement.
On Thursday, the 80-year-old Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison for masterminding the slayings, getting the maximum 20-year-sentence for each count.
Mark Duncan, the district attorney in Neshoba County, is a symbol of what has changed in Mississippi since the civil rights movement. Justice no longer is as elusive as it was in 1967, when an all-white jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of convicting Killen. Seven other men have been convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three victims, but none served more than six years in prison.
Since the 1990s, Mr. Duncan and other Southern prosecutors have reopened the violent era when hate groups weren’t above killing civil rights leaders and workers and bragging about their crimes because they were convinced no state prosecutor would bring them to trial and no jury would convict them.
That has changed slowly as this new generation of prosecutors reopened many of the controversial cases, including that of Byron de la Beckwith, who was convicted in 1994 in the assassination in 1963 of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader in Mississippi. Just as the Killen case was winding down, authorities were reviewing the murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi in 1955.
Mr. Chaney, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner went to Mississippi during Freedom Summer to help register blacks to vote. Their savage murders put the spotlight on segregation in Mississippi and helped to prod Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Relatives of the victims weren’t vengeful. Mr. Goodman’s mother, Carolyn Goodman, 89, said she simply wanted this evil represented by Killen to be removed from the streets of Mississippi. She told CNN she opposed capital punishment.
The three young men sacrificed their lives standing up for rights guaranteed all Americans under the Constitution. The murders and four decades of freedom that Killen has enjoyed show what happens when people, in the words of Mr. Schwerner’s widow, Rita Bender, “choose to look aside . . . choose to not see the truth.”
