'Mississippi Burning' Case Finally Goes to Trial

ByABC News
June 10, 2005, 1:52 PM

June 13, 2005 — -- Edgar Ray Killen doesn't hate civil rights activists. He hates communists. The problem is he's had a hard time distinguishing between the two. Fueling his paranoia were America's critics, who in the summer of 1964, cited southern mobs and the murder of a 15-year-old boy as evidence that democracy had failed.

Killen, his county's Ku Klux Klan recruiter, was an enemy of communism and, in his own eyes, an American hero. But history sided with the schoolchildren who walked past the mobs and the mother who left the casket open for the world to see what had been done to her son. Killen, in the end, didn't contribute to the country's good, but may have contributed to one of her worst crimes.

It was a crime that shocked the nation. Three civil rights workers -- Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney -- were murdered while helping to register black voters during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964.

That year Mississippi led the country in racially motivated crimes -- there was a popular saying among activists that "if you could crack Mississippi, you could crack the South."

Killen, a local sawmill owner and ordained minister, was determined not to let that happen. And 41 years later, a murder mystery may finally be solved. Killen, now 80, goes on trial today in Philadelphia, Miss., facing three counts of murder. He has pleaded not guilty.

According to an FBI informant, Killen instructed 18 Klansmen to ambush the activists on a deserted road. Marching the workers deep into the Mississippi woods, Klansman Wayne Roberts reportedly grabbed Schwerner and asked, "Are you a nigger lover?" Schwerner replied, "Sir, I know just how you feel."

For months, newspaper editorials lambasted the civil rights workers as "student invaders," claiming that communists were behind them and their "overall scheme to destroy the United States."

Locals felt like they were under siege, being attacked and judged by outsiders. They clung to the notion of their innocence. The state's collective amnesia meant that no charges were brought against the men involved.

When federal charges were filed, prosecutors tried to convince the jury that the government wasn't "invading" the state of Mississippi. The jury deadlocked after one juror admitted that she couldn't bring herself to convict a preacher.