Abstract
THE FIRST DAY of perhaps the most significant civil rights trial since the 1960s hadn't yet begun, but the national press already had a colorful story. [EDGAR RAY KILLEN], charged with the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers near this small eastern Mississippi town, had emerged from a white sedan parked in front of the Neshoba County Courthouse just before 9 a.m. on Monday, June 13. The media thronged the car as the 80-year-old Killen was lowered into a wheelchair, a necessity given the two broken legs he sustained in a tree cutting accident in early March. Amongst the crush, a man in a dark pin-striped suit took Killen's hand, assuring him that he only need call if there was anything he could do to help. The man in the suit was J.J. Harper, the self- proclaimed Imperial Wizard of the Georgia-based American White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Harper's White Knights have a questionable membership base - the Southern Poverty Law Center stated in 2003 that he may be the sole member - and a penchant for using Klan iconography to win publicity. Killen, a reputed leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (an organization unrelated to Harper's KKK) during their mid-1960s heyday, had effectively been caught in bed with a current-day Klan figure. Back in the courtroom, Killen's lawyer offered the startling acknowledgment during his opening statement that, for the purposes of this trial, the jury could assume that Killen had in fact been a Klan member during the 1960s, something that Killen himself had always denied. But he also was quick to emphasize that the Klan wasn't being tried in this case. Killen "is not charged with being a member of the Klan," the defense lawyer told the jury in closing arguments. "He's being charged with murder." Last week, Killen was convicted on three lesser charges of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison, sparking another round of headlines focused on the "ex- Klansman." But little effort has been made to explain how and why the Klan took root and thrived in communities such as Philadelphia during the 1960s. In Mississippi and much of the South, the KKK's strength reflected not only the virulent racism of the broader political culture but also its members' deep alienation from the institutional centers of political and economic power. To understand the world that produced Edgar Ray Killen and his coconspirators, it's important to understand how class and social structure, as much as any racial dynamic, dictated the Klan's appeal in particular communities. . . . The prosecution's case against Killen generally followed the now well-known account of the crimes. On June 21, 1964, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner - three of the hundreds of young people engaged in voter registration and other civil rights work across the state of Mississippi - left the offices of the Congress of Racial Equality in Meridian, Miss., to investigate the burning of a black church in nearby Neshoba County. After visiting with a number of locals, they were stopped by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for speeding and, improbably, for "investigation" of their possible role in the church burning. By 4 o'clock that afternoon all three were detained in the county jailhouse in downtown Philadelphia. Later that evening, they were released, but never seen alive again. The murders were part of an alleged conspiracy involving at least twenty-one people tied to the Mississippi White Knights, including Price and Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. Edgar Ray Killen was the architect of the plot, which was the product of a Klan- authorized "elimination" order put out on Schwerner, whose civil rights work and facial hair had earned him the code name "Goatee" in Klan circles.