Edgar Ray Killen
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Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen (born in 1925) is an American sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister who conspired to kill several civil rights activists in 1964. He was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime.
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Killen was kleagle, or klavern recruiter and organizer, for the Neshoba and Lauderdale County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, and one black Mississippian, James Chaney, 21, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen, along with Cecil Price (deputy sheriff of Neshoba County at the time) gathered the group of men who hunted down and killed the three civil rights workers. The Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders galvanized the nation and helped bring about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The killings are the basis of the movie Mississippi Burning.
At the time of the killings, the state of Mississippi made little effort to prosecute the perpetrators. A federal prosecution was therefore begun in December 1964, after the FBI had investigated the case. Killen was arrested with nineteen others and charged with conspiracy to violate the victims' civil rights (there were no federal murder statutes at the time) in U.S. vs. Cecil Price et. al.. Killen's 1967 trial in federal court ended in a hung jury, after the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction, with the lone holdout saying she could never convict a preacher. The prosecution decided not to retry him and he was set free.
In 2004, however, Killen created a public uproar when he declared that he would organize a Ku Klux Klan rally for the 2004 Mississippi Annual State Fair in Jackson, Mississippi. In response, the Hinds County sheriff, Malcolm MacMillan, reopened the case against Killen and he was arrested for three counts of murder on January 6, 2005. However, he was freed on bond shortly thereafter. His case drew comparisons to that of Byron De La Beckwith, who was charged with the killing of Medgar Evers in 1963 and arrested in 1994.
Killen's trial had been scheduled for April 18. It was deferred, however, after the 80-year-old Killen broke both of his legs chopping down lumber in his rural home in Neshoba County. The trial began on June 13, 2005, with Killen attending in a wheelchair. He was found guilty on June 21, 2005 of manslaughter, 41 years to the day after his crime, after a jury comprised of nine whites and three blacks rejected the charges of murder but found him guilty of recruiting the mob that carried out the killings. He is awaiting sentencing, though each of the three manslaughter convictions is punishable by up to twenty years of imprisonment.
External links
- Edgar Ray Killen (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&bowers/Killen.htm)
- Interview with Nationalist organization Nationalist.org (http://www.nationalist.org/docs/ideology/killen.html)
- National Public Radio trial-reaction interview (http://www.nationalist.org/docs/ideology/2005/rights.html)
- BBC Report on the conviction (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4116870.stm)de:Edgar Ray Killen
