DLR'sCock
01-08-2005, 05:20 PM
Suspect in '64 Civil Rights Killings Pleads Not Guilty
By Robert D. Mcfadden
The New York Times
Friday 07 January 2005
The most infamous unresolved case from America's civil rights struggle four decades ago - the 1964 abduction and killing of three voter-registration volunteers by nightriders on a lonely rural road in Mississippi - was revived Thursday night with the arrest of a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Edgar Ray Killen, the authorities in Mississippi announced.
Mr. Killen pleaded not guilty today and was ordered held without bond, The Associated Press reported from Philadelphia, Miss.
Mr. Killen, a 79-year-old preacher who, investigators say, organized and led two carloads of Klansmen on the night of the killings, was arrested at his home in Philadelphia, and charged with the murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, Sheriff Larry Myers of Neshoba County said.
The sheriff said there would be more arrests in the notorious case, which helped to cement Mississippi's image as a haven of hatred and violence in the 1960's, when black churches, homes and businesses were firebombed and civil rights volunteers were beaten by white mobs. The case was the subject of several books and was dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."
At his arraignment today, Mr. Killen loudly responded "not guilty" three times to the charges read against him, The AP said. Handcuffed and dressed in a loosely fitting orange jail jumpsuit, he lowered his voice when asked if he could afford a lawyer. He said that he could not but that he did own some property. The judge said he would decide later whether he would appoint a lawyer to represent Mr. Killen, who will be held in the Neshoba County Jail until his next hearing, set for Wednesday.
Shortly after Mr. Killen was led away in handcuffs, the authorities cleared the courthouse, saying they had received a bomb threat. They later said it appeared to be groundless, The AP said.
The murders four decades ago provoked an outpouring of national support for the civil rights movement, and in the ensuing investigations federal officials gathered enough evidence to prosecute 18 Klansmen in 1967 on charges of violating the civil rights of the three slain men.
Seven Klansmen were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 3 years to 10 years, although none served more than 6 years. Mr. Killen was released after there was a deadlock by an all-white jury.
But the state never brought murder charges in the case, and it was not until 1999 that the state's attorney general reopened the matter, after The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., published exposés, including excerpts from a secret interview given to a state archivist by Sam Bowers, the onetime imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, America's most violent white supremacist group in the 1960's.
In the interview, Mr. Bowers, who was serving a life sentence for ordering the 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a prominent civil rights leader, said he had thwarted justice in the killings of Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Chaney.
Mr. Bowers also said in the interview that he did not mind going to jail because a fellow Klansman had gotten away with murder.
A grand jury last year found sufficient evidence after 40 years to go ahead with the case, and its indictments led to Mr. Killen's arrest.
The slain civil rights workers - Mr. Chaney, 21, a black man from Meridian, Miss., and two white New Yorkers, Mr. Schwerner, 24, a Cornell graduate, and Mr. Goodman, 20, who had attended Queens College - were participating in what became known as Freedom Summer, the climax of an intensive voter-registration drive in the South.
Mr. Goodman's mother, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, said in a telephone interview from her apartment on the Upper West Side, "This was something that had to happen - there was no question."
Dr. Goodman, 89, has been actively involved in civil rights work since her son's death and has just completed a documentary about the killings, "Freedom Now." She said that her two other sons were out of the country and that she had not yet spoken with them about the arrest.
Dr. Goodman spoke from the apartment where, one day in 1964, Andrew told her that he was going to the South to do civil rights work.
"He said, 'Mom, you know, I was raised in an era of terrible things that have happened in my lifetime, so I have to go,' " she recalled.
She added: "It wasn't easy for us. But we couldn't talk out of both sides of our mouths. So I had to let him go."
Reached by phone at her home in Willingboro, N.J., Mr. Chaney's mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, said, "Mighty long time." Of those who took part in the killings, Mrs. Chaney said, "Most of them dead about now."
The victims were working with the Congress of Racial Equality at a community center in Meridian. Mr. Chaney had been a volunteer there for months. Mr. Schwerner had gone to Mississippi with his wife, Rita, in January 1964, having been hired as a CORE field worker. Mr. Goodman, a graduate of the Walden School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, arrived in Mississippi only a day before he was killed.
On June 21, 1964, the three men set out together in a Ford station wagon to inspect the ruins of a black church near Philadelphia, Miss., that had been firebombed by the Klan. Mr. Chaney was driving. In the afternoon, they were arrested for "speeding" by a Neshoba County deputy sheriff, Cecil Price. They were held at the sheriff's office in Philadelphia for several hours.
During those hours, according to testimony at the federal trial, Deputy Price sent out word that the three in custody included a man who had been designated Goatee - the Klan's code for Mr. Schwerner, who had a goatee and had been marked for death by Mr. Bowers. Mr. Schwerner had infuriated the Klan by organizing a boycott of a white-owned variety store until it hired a black, and by his intensive work to register black voters.
According to testimony in the federal trial, Deputy Price held the men long enough for Mr. Killen to round up a group of Klansmen. The civil rights workers were released from jail and were never seen again, although their subsequent movements were later established.
Leaving the jail that night, they drove down Route 19, tailed by Deputy Price and two carloads of Klansmen. After a frantic chase, they were caught and taken to an isolated spot on Rock Cut Road, where they were killed: Mr. Schwerner on Mr. Bowers's orders, and Mr. Chaney and Mr. Goodman because they were witnesses.
Mr. Chaney was beaten to death, while Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Goodman were each shot once in the chest. Their station wagon was set ablaze, and the bodies were buried under an earthen dam on the farm of a prominent Philadelphian, Olen Burrage.
Six weeks later, after one of the largest searches ever undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, helped by 200 American sailors, the bodies were discovered. In the ensuing federal investigation, 19 men were arrested on charges of violating the victims' civil rights, and 18 were eventually brought to trial three years after the killings. Mr. Bowers, Mr. Price and five others were convicted; three others were released because the jury found itself deadlocked. The rest were acquitted.
Mr. Killen, the man charged on Thursday, is one of eight suspects still alive. He was identified during the 1967 trial as the Klan leader who had received the orders from Mr. Bowers to kill Mr. Schwerner, and as the man who had coordinated the Klansmen's activities on the night of the killings. But he was released with the jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of conviction. The lone holdout insisted she could never convict a preacher.
Mr. Killen's arrest followed grand jury testimony that reportedly included accounts of people who had direct knowledge of the killings. Sheriff Myers declined to comment on the proceedings, but said Mr. Killen had been arrested first because he was prominent in the case and available.
"We went ahead and got him because he was high profile and we knew where he was," the sheriff said.
Mr. Killen has always denied any involvement in the slayings. In an interview with The Clarion-Ledger last year, he spoke about the killers of the civil rights workers. "I'm not going to say they were wrong," he declared. "I believe in self-defense."
Jerry G. Killen, the suspect's brother, told The Associated Press that he had no knowledge of the arrest but was quoted as saying he thought it was "pitiful." He said his brother never mentioned the slayings. "He won't talk about it," Jerry Killen said. "I don't know if he did it or not."
Mississippi has reopened some old civil rights murder cases. In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A critical piece of evidence in the murder of the civil rights workers has been the 3,000-page transcript of the 1967 federal trial. Under the court rules in Mississippi, even the testimony of witnesses who have died or are unavailable can be put before a grand jury. Indeed, such testimony was used to convict Mr. de la Beckwith, who died in prison in 2001.
While the killings of the civil rights workers have remained in the public eye over the years, there was little progress in the case until it was reopened by Attorney General Jim Hood. Last month, an anonymous donor posted a $100,000 reward for information leading to murder charges.
Outside the grand jury room on Thursday, Billy Wayne Posey, one of the men convicted in the federal trial, leaned on a cane and complained about being subpoenaed.
"After 40 years to come back and do something like this is ridiculous, like a nightmare," Mr. Posey said. He refused to talk about what he expected to be asked by the grand jury.
Efforts to bring about a trial for the murder of civil rights workers in Mississippi have been enhanced in recent years by the opening of the long-secret files of the State Sovereignty Commission, which was founded in 1956 to defend the state from "encroachment" by federal authorities. Before it was abolished in 1977, the commission monitored anyone suspected of promoting racial integration. Containing 87,000 names, the files detail a series of Klan killings in the 1960's, including those of Mr. Evers and Mr. Dahmer, as well as those of Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney and Mr. Goodman.
They also detail the profound hatred that many white Mississippians held for civil rights workers. In 1964, a wave of thousands of civil rights activists, many of them white college students from the North, went to Mississippi and other states in the South as part of a broad coalition to end the political disenfranchisement of black people.
Within a month of the murders, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry Mitchell contributed reporting from Mississippi for this article, and Michelle O'Donnell from New York.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
'Still a Long Ways From Justice'
By Josh Getlin and Elizabeth Mehren
The Los Angeles Times
Saturday 08 January 2005
An arrest in the 1964 slayings of civil rights workers brings families new hope and old pain.
New York - At 11 years old, Ben Chaney lionized his older brother James. He believed he was immortal. Even when James vanished in Mississippi with fellow civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, Ben was certain James would come home alive.
"Never until his burial did I believe he could die," Chaney said.
On Friday, a widow, a brother and a mother spoke with love and pride of the three men who went to Mississippi to register black voters 40 years ago. When reputed Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, 79, pleaded not guilty in their killings, it took these family members back to an era when the push for equality in the Deep South often clashed violently with racist hatred.
Ben Chaney, a 52-year-old paralegal here, said the arrest gave him a small semblance of hope - a sentiment he termed "barely, partial optimism." But, he said, "We are still a long ways from justice."
At her apartment on the Upper West Side, Carolyn Goodman sat surrounded by pictures of her son - a portrait of Andrew, photographs taken when he was a young man and snapshots of him as a child with brothers Jonathan and David. Goodman said Killen's arrest was good and bad news.
"Good because there might be some justice," said Goodman, 89. "Bad because you still don't know what's going to ultimately happen."
In Seattle, the widow of Michael Schwerner said she thought justice would be served only if the Killen trial provoked a larger discussion about race.
"Racism is the elephant in the living room of this country," said Rita Bender, 62. "And we pretend it does not exist. Until we acknowledge it, until we acknowledge the past, we are not moving forward."
Ben Chaney runs a foundation named for his brother and a summer voter-registration program modeled after the effort that cost James his life. Chaney said he spent much of Friday morning on the phone with his 83-year-old mother, who lives in New Jersey. Fannie Chaney kept hoping that Killen would turn state's evidence against eight others linked to the killings in earlier investigations, her son said.
"I had to tell her, 'Mama, they have the evidence against the rest of them, it's whether or not they are going to use it,'" Chaney said. "It's like there is a void, because not all of the murderers have been indicted. And I don't think it is going to be fulfilled with just this prosecution."
Mindful of the significance of the term, he continued: "This is going to be a whitewash. They are going to use the most unrepentant racist as the scapegoat, leave the others alone because they are more powerful, more wealthy and more influential - and then move on."
Chaney said the death of his brother "defined and controlled" his life. He pursued a life in social justice because "the best way to remember my brother and his companions is to do what they were doing."
The expectation that no one would ever be called to reckon for the killings weighed heavily on his family, Chaney said. James Chaney was the sole black victim in the 1964 killings. Fannie Chaney was a little girl when her uncle was lynched by the Klan. No one was charged or prosecuted in that killing, leading her to believe her son's murder would go unpunished as well.
"For 40 years," Ben said, "she thought a prosecution in this case would never happen, because in Mississippi, you don't prosecute white people for murdering black people."
While calling 40 years an "outrageous" period of time to wait for a possible conviction, he said: "That is the thing about justice. It can take 100 years, but I believe eventually it catches up with you."
Forty summers ago, Carolyn Goodman recalled, her son drove down West 86th Street, past the building she lives in now, and went with friends to Mississippi.
"I didn't expect he'd never come back, that's for sure," she said. "I knew he was going into a world of risk. But I also knew that my husband and I had lived in a world of risk, we lived through all the terrible 'isms' of our youth, and we were willing to risk our lives — but not our children's lives."
But Goodman said her husband cautioned her: "Our children know what our thinking is, but now they have to take their own path. And if Andy wanted to go to Mississippi, that was up to him. He has to take that risk."
She said the family thought the worst thing that might happen was that Andy would end up in jail and his parents would have to bail him out.
On Friday, she said she might like to be alone in a room with Killen, to ask what was on his mind the evening her son died.
"All these years, I've been trying to understand what caused him to be part of a group of people who murdered three innocent young men," she said. "Could he tell me?"
Bender, who later remarried, is an attorney as well as a mother and a grandmother. She said that for her, the case was even more important than convicting Killen or anyone else involved in the murders.
"In many ways, those men were pawns," she said. "They were manipulated by a state apparatus that was determined to preserve a racist society by whatever means. That doesn't mean they are not individually liable for their acts, but there is a lot more liability and a lot more responsibility than just them.
"And so for me," she went on, "the importance of this case is to use it to talk about the result of racism and state-sponsored terror."
Bender accompanied her young husband to Mississippi that summer of 1964, as a volunteer for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. In her job application, she wrote of her hope "to someday pass on to the children we may have a world containing more respect for the dignity and worth of all men than that world which was willed to us."
The sadness and the injustice of the murders in Mississippi have remained with her, Bender said. But she still harbors that hope.
-------
By Robert D. Mcfadden
The New York Times
Friday 07 January 2005
The most infamous unresolved case from America's civil rights struggle four decades ago - the 1964 abduction and killing of three voter-registration volunteers by nightriders on a lonely rural road in Mississippi - was revived Thursday night with the arrest of a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Edgar Ray Killen, the authorities in Mississippi announced.
Mr. Killen pleaded not guilty today and was ordered held without bond, The Associated Press reported from Philadelphia, Miss.
Mr. Killen, a 79-year-old preacher who, investigators say, organized and led two carloads of Klansmen on the night of the killings, was arrested at his home in Philadelphia, and charged with the murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, Sheriff Larry Myers of Neshoba County said.
The sheriff said there would be more arrests in the notorious case, which helped to cement Mississippi's image as a haven of hatred and violence in the 1960's, when black churches, homes and businesses were firebombed and civil rights volunteers were beaten by white mobs. The case was the subject of several books and was dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."
At his arraignment today, Mr. Killen loudly responded "not guilty" three times to the charges read against him, The AP said. Handcuffed and dressed in a loosely fitting orange jail jumpsuit, he lowered his voice when asked if he could afford a lawyer. He said that he could not but that he did own some property. The judge said he would decide later whether he would appoint a lawyer to represent Mr. Killen, who will be held in the Neshoba County Jail until his next hearing, set for Wednesday.
Shortly after Mr. Killen was led away in handcuffs, the authorities cleared the courthouse, saying they had received a bomb threat. They later said it appeared to be groundless, The AP said.
The murders four decades ago provoked an outpouring of national support for the civil rights movement, and in the ensuing investigations federal officials gathered enough evidence to prosecute 18 Klansmen in 1967 on charges of violating the civil rights of the three slain men.
Seven Klansmen were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 3 years to 10 years, although none served more than 6 years. Mr. Killen was released after there was a deadlock by an all-white jury.
But the state never brought murder charges in the case, and it was not until 1999 that the state's attorney general reopened the matter, after The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., published exposés, including excerpts from a secret interview given to a state archivist by Sam Bowers, the onetime imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, America's most violent white supremacist group in the 1960's.
In the interview, Mr. Bowers, who was serving a life sentence for ordering the 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a prominent civil rights leader, said he had thwarted justice in the killings of Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Chaney.
Mr. Bowers also said in the interview that he did not mind going to jail because a fellow Klansman had gotten away with murder.
A grand jury last year found sufficient evidence after 40 years to go ahead with the case, and its indictments led to Mr. Killen's arrest.
The slain civil rights workers - Mr. Chaney, 21, a black man from Meridian, Miss., and two white New Yorkers, Mr. Schwerner, 24, a Cornell graduate, and Mr. Goodman, 20, who had attended Queens College - were participating in what became known as Freedom Summer, the climax of an intensive voter-registration drive in the South.
Mr. Goodman's mother, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, said in a telephone interview from her apartment on the Upper West Side, "This was something that had to happen - there was no question."
Dr. Goodman, 89, has been actively involved in civil rights work since her son's death and has just completed a documentary about the killings, "Freedom Now." She said that her two other sons were out of the country and that she had not yet spoken with them about the arrest.
Dr. Goodman spoke from the apartment where, one day in 1964, Andrew told her that he was going to the South to do civil rights work.
"He said, 'Mom, you know, I was raised in an era of terrible things that have happened in my lifetime, so I have to go,' " she recalled.
She added: "It wasn't easy for us. But we couldn't talk out of both sides of our mouths. So I had to let him go."
Reached by phone at her home in Willingboro, N.J., Mr. Chaney's mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, said, "Mighty long time." Of those who took part in the killings, Mrs. Chaney said, "Most of them dead about now."
The victims were working with the Congress of Racial Equality at a community center in Meridian. Mr. Chaney had been a volunteer there for months. Mr. Schwerner had gone to Mississippi with his wife, Rita, in January 1964, having been hired as a CORE field worker. Mr. Goodman, a graduate of the Walden School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, arrived in Mississippi only a day before he was killed.
On June 21, 1964, the three men set out together in a Ford station wagon to inspect the ruins of a black church near Philadelphia, Miss., that had been firebombed by the Klan. Mr. Chaney was driving. In the afternoon, they were arrested for "speeding" by a Neshoba County deputy sheriff, Cecil Price. They were held at the sheriff's office in Philadelphia for several hours.
During those hours, according to testimony at the federal trial, Deputy Price sent out word that the three in custody included a man who had been designated Goatee - the Klan's code for Mr. Schwerner, who had a goatee and had been marked for death by Mr. Bowers. Mr. Schwerner had infuriated the Klan by organizing a boycott of a white-owned variety store until it hired a black, and by his intensive work to register black voters.
According to testimony in the federal trial, Deputy Price held the men long enough for Mr. Killen to round up a group of Klansmen. The civil rights workers were released from jail and were never seen again, although their subsequent movements were later established.
Leaving the jail that night, they drove down Route 19, tailed by Deputy Price and two carloads of Klansmen. After a frantic chase, they were caught and taken to an isolated spot on Rock Cut Road, where they were killed: Mr. Schwerner on Mr. Bowers's orders, and Mr. Chaney and Mr. Goodman because they were witnesses.
Mr. Chaney was beaten to death, while Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Goodman were each shot once in the chest. Their station wagon was set ablaze, and the bodies were buried under an earthen dam on the farm of a prominent Philadelphian, Olen Burrage.
Six weeks later, after one of the largest searches ever undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, helped by 200 American sailors, the bodies were discovered. In the ensuing federal investigation, 19 men were arrested on charges of violating the victims' civil rights, and 18 were eventually brought to trial three years after the killings. Mr. Bowers, Mr. Price and five others were convicted; three others were released because the jury found itself deadlocked. The rest were acquitted.
Mr. Killen, the man charged on Thursday, is one of eight suspects still alive. He was identified during the 1967 trial as the Klan leader who had received the orders from Mr. Bowers to kill Mr. Schwerner, and as the man who had coordinated the Klansmen's activities on the night of the killings. But he was released with the jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of conviction. The lone holdout insisted she could never convict a preacher.
Mr. Killen's arrest followed grand jury testimony that reportedly included accounts of people who had direct knowledge of the killings. Sheriff Myers declined to comment on the proceedings, but said Mr. Killen had been arrested first because he was prominent in the case and available.
"We went ahead and got him because he was high profile and we knew where he was," the sheriff said.
Mr. Killen has always denied any involvement in the slayings. In an interview with The Clarion-Ledger last year, he spoke about the killers of the civil rights workers. "I'm not going to say they were wrong," he declared. "I believe in self-defense."
Jerry G. Killen, the suspect's brother, told The Associated Press that he had no knowledge of the arrest but was quoted as saying he thought it was "pitiful." He said his brother never mentioned the slayings. "He won't talk about it," Jerry Killen said. "I don't know if he did it or not."
Mississippi has reopened some old civil rights murder cases. In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A critical piece of evidence in the murder of the civil rights workers has been the 3,000-page transcript of the 1967 federal trial. Under the court rules in Mississippi, even the testimony of witnesses who have died or are unavailable can be put before a grand jury. Indeed, such testimony was used to convict Mr. de la Beckwith, who died in prison in 2001.
While the killings of the civil rights workers have remained in the public eye over the years, there was little progress in the case until it was reopened by Attorney General Jim Hood. Last month, an anonymous donor posted a $100,000 reward for information leading to murder charges.
Outside the grand jury room on Thursday, Billy Wayne Posey, one of the men convicted in the federal trial, leaned on a cane and complained about being subpoenaed.
"After 40 years to come back and do something like this is ridiculous, like a nightmare," Mr. Posey said. He refused to talk about what he expected to be asked by the grand jury.
Efforts to bring about a trial for the murder of civil rights workers in Mississippi have been enhanced in recent years by the opening of the long-secret files of the State Sovereignty Commission, which was founded in 1956 to defend the state from "encroachment" by federal authorities. Before it was abolished in 1977, the commission monitored anyone suspected of promoting racial integration. Containing 87,000 names, the files detail a series of Klan killings in the 1960's, including those of Mr. Evers and Mr. Dahmer, as well as those of Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney and Mr. Goodman.
They also detail the profound hatred that many white Mississippians held for civil rights workers. In 1964, a wave of thousands of civil rights activists, many of them white college students from the North, went to Mississippi and other states in the South as part of a broad coalition to end the political disenfranchisement of black people.
Within a month of the murders, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry Mitchell contributed reporting from Mississippi for this article, and Michelle O'Donnell from New York.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
'Still a Long Ways From Justice'
By Josh Getlin and Elizabeth Mehren
The Los Angeles Times
Saturday 08 January 2005
An arrest in the 1964 slayings of civil rights workers brings families new hope and old pain.
New York - At 11 years old, Ben Chaney lionized his older brother James. He believed he was immortal. Even when James vanished in Mississippi with fellow civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, Ben was certain James would come home alive.
"Never until his burial did I believe he could die," Chaney said.
On Friday, a widow, a brother and a mother spoke with love and pride of the three men who went to Mississippi to register black voters 40 years ago. When reputed Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, 79, pleaded not guilty in their killings, it took these family members back to an era when the push for equality in the Deep South often clashed violently with racist hatred.
Ben Chaney, a 52-year-old paralegal here, said the arrest gave him a small semblance of hope - a sentiment he termed "barely, partial optimism." But, he said, "We are still a long ways from justice."
At her apartment on the Upper West Side, Carolyn Goodman sat surrounded by pictures of her son - a portrait of Andrew, photographs taken when he was a young man and snapshots of him as a child with brothers Jonathan and David. Goodman said Killen's arrest was good and bad news.
"Good because there might be some justice," said Goodman, 89. "Bad because you still don't know what's going to ultimately happen."
In Seattle, the widow of Michael Schwerner said she thought justice would be served only if the Killen trial provoked a larger discussion about race.
"Racism is the elephant in the living room of this country," said Rita Bender, 62. "And we pretend it does not exist. Until we acknowledge it, until we acknowledge the past, we are not moving forward."
Ben Chaney runs a foundation named for his brother and a summer voter-registration program modeled after the effort that cost James his life. Chaney said he spent much of Friday morning on the phone with his 83-year-old mother, who lives in New Jersey. Fannie Chaney kept hoping that Killen would turn state's evidence against eight others linked to the killings in earlier investigations, her son said.
"I had to tell her, 'Mama, they have the evidence against the rest of them, it's whether or not they are going to use it,'" Chaney said. "It's like there is a void, because not all of the murderers have been indicted. And I don't think it is going to be fulfilled with just this prosecution."
Mindful of the significance of the term, he continued: "This is going to be a whitewash. They are going to use the most unrepentant racist as the scapegoat, leave the others alone because they are more powerful, more wealthy and more influential - and then move on."
Chaney said the death of his brother "defined and controlled" his life. He pursued a life in social justice because "the best way to remember my brother and his companions is to do what they were doing."
The expectation that no one would ever be called to reckon for the killings weighed heavily on his family, Chaney said. James Chaney was the sole black victim in the 1964 killings. Fannie Chaney was a little girl when her uncle was lynched by the Klan. No one was charged or prosecuted in that killing, leading her to believe her son's murder would go unpunished as well.
"For 40 years," Ben said, "she thought a prosecution in this case would never happen, because in Mississippi, you don't prosecute white people for murdering black people."
While calling 40 years an "outrageous" period of time to wait for a possible conviction, he said: "That is the thing about justice. It can take 100 years, but I believe eventually it catches up with you."
Forty summers ago, Carolyn Goodman recalled, her son drove down West 86th Street, past the building she lives in now, and went with friends to Mississippi.
"I didn't expect he'd never come back, that's for sure," she said. "I knew he was going into a world of risk. But I also knew that my husband and I had lived in a world of risk, we lived through all the terrible 'isms' of our youth, and we were willing to risk our lives — but not our children's lives."
But Goodman said her husband cautioned her: "Our children know what our thinking is, but now they have to take their own path. And if Andy wanted to go to Mississippi, that was up to him. He has to take that risk."
She said the family thought the worst thing that might happen was that Andy would end up in jail and his parents would have to bail him out.
On Friday, she said she might like to be alone in a room with Killen, to ask what was on his mind the evening her son died.
"All these years, I've been trying to understand what caused him to be part of a group of people who murdered three innocent young men," she said. "Could he tell me?"
Bender, who later remarried, is an attorney as well as a mother and a grandmother. She said that for her, the case was even more important than convicting Killen or anyone else involved in the murders.
"In many ways, those men were pawns," she said. "They were manipulated by a state apparatus that was determined to preserve a racist society by whatever means. That doesn't mean they are not individually liable for their acts, but there is a lot more liability and a lot more responsibility than just them.
"And so for me," she went on, "the importance of this case is to use it to talk about the result of racism and state-sponsored terror."
Bender accompanied her young husband to Mississippi that summer of 1964, as a volunteer for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. In her job application, she wrote of her hope "to someday pass on to the children we may have a world containing more respect for the dignity and worth of all men than that world which was willed to us."
The sadness and the injustice of the murders in Mississippi have remained with her, Bender said. But she still harbors that hope.
-------