Exactly 41 years after the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, the state of Mississippi obtained its first homicide conviction in the case. On Tuesday June 21, 2005, 9 white and 3 black jurors convicted 80-year-old Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen of manslaughter for his role in orchestrating the nighttime roadside lynching, which transpired approximately a half-mile from his house. For his crime, Killen received the maximum sentence of 60 years.
Although this was the first state conviction, it was not the first in the case, as federal conspiracy charges had led to prison time for a few of the men involved in the murders. In October 1967 in federal court, an all-white jury convicted seven white men, including Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Eight others, including Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, were acquitted. The cases of three others—one of them involving Edgar Killen—ended in a mistrial. At the time, no one was brought to trial on state murder charges. Killen’s 2005 trial, like the recent trials of Byron De La Beckwith for murdering Medgar Evers and of Thomas Blanton for killing 4 black girls in Birmingham, has proved once again the epigram of Mississippi’s sage novelist William Faulkner that "The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” While the U.S. government is engaged in a struggle against terrorism worldwide, the Killen case offers a reminder of the realities of racial segregation and the use of terrorism at home to attempt to preserve white supremacy.
In 1964, the disappearance and presumed murder of these activists at the beginning of Freedom Summer captivated the nation and became a landmark moment in the history of the civil rights movement. The attention focused on Mississippi, however, did not stop violence against civil rights activists or black Mississippians. Over the course of Freedom Summer, three other bodies of murdered black men were found, each of them had been lynched (Charles Moore and Henry Dee were found in mid-July in a lake off of the Mississippi River; A young man wearing a CORE t-shirt, likely a teenager named Herbert Oarsby, was found in the Big Black River). There were also approximately 70 bombings or burnings, 80 beatings, and over 1,000 arrests of activists. The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) incident report, a single-spaced document that offered brief daily summaries, was over ten pages long.
On June 21, 1964, two days after the Senate passage of the Civil Rights Act and two weeks before President Johnson signed that landmark piece of legislation, a band of white supremacists associated with the Ku Klux Klan and the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department took political matters into their own hands and murdered Chaney and Schwerner—both veteran activists involved in political mobilization efforts, one an African-American from Mississippi and the other a Jewish social worker from New York City that some locals called "Goatee"—and Goodman—one of the idealistic white college students who had arrived in the state the day before as part of Freedom Summer.
The FBI's case became part of their investigation into church-burnings known as MIBURN or Mississippi Burning (see MIBURN documents in the FBI's online reading room). A controversial Hollywood film of the same name was released in 1988 (Mississippi Burning; dir. Alan Parker) that stirred further interest in the case, but caused many civil rights activists to shudder in horror at the heroic presentation of the FBI and at the downplaying of black activism in the movement.
Despite the existence of court records, news reports, oral histories, and documents relating to the investigation, the violent events of that summer will never be entirely clear, and students of history will continue to debate the ambiguities of evidence in attempting to understand that muggy, 80 degree Mississippi night. One resource, though, that captures the immediacy of their disappearance and the complications it presented for federal and state authorities--and for activists—is the collection of secret recordings made by President Lyndon Johnson.
Below is an abbreviated timeline of the incident and selected conversations recorded in LBJ’s Oval Office. These materials are from a forthcoming Miller Center volume, Kent Germany and David Carter, eds., Crisis of Victory: Lyndon Johnson, the Politics of Race, and the White House Tapes.
To listen to the audio press the PLAY buttons [
] or use the MP3, FLAC, or WAV links to download the audio file to your computer. More help on digital audio is available here. Click on the dates to see the President's Daily Diary for those days.
To augment the three year-old civil rights organizing efforts of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), the first contingent of Freedom Summer volunteers began arriving in Mississippi after training sessions in Oxford, Ohio. Approximately 250 activists made it to the Magnolia State from June 20-22. One of them was Andrew Goodman, the son of a prominent Jewish family from Manhattan. Before the students left Ohio, they had been briefed by John Doar, a representative from the Justice Department who informed them that the federal government could not provide them with protection and emphasized that local and state officials held the responsibility for maintaining law and order, an ominous assurance given Mississippi's track record for protecting civil rights. In Mississippi and elsewhere in the South, civil rights activists complained bitterly about the lack of federal protection and many believed that Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover was an enemy of the movement (and he certainly had many activists under FBI surveillance, particularly through COINTELPRO, of which some 50,000 pages of documents have been partially declassified by the FBI). A prominent feeling was that the FBI investigated white racial violence when pressed to do so, but those investigations often went little beyond intelligence gathering and thus served little deterrent value to would-be white terrorists. The tactics of Freedom Summer offered a challenge to the Johnson administration. In response, the planned movement of white students into Mississippi had stimulated serious concern in the administration that the situation might become unmanageable. To see two memoranda on the issue see, Robert F. Kennedy to President Johnson, 21 May 1964; and see Douglass Cater to President Johnson, 19 May 1964.
James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman went to investigate the burning of the Mt. Zion Church in the Longdale community in Neshoba County, near Philadelphia, Mississippi. While attempting to return to Meridian, Mississippi, they were arrested for traffic violations and jailed. After being released from jail at 10 pm, they disappeared. When they did not report in by phone as civil rights workers in Mississippi were trained to do, fellow activists began calling local and federal law enforcement officials. Although many feared the worst, none of them knew for certain that the activists had been killed on a rural roadway by a mob of white supremacists in conspiracy with Neshoba County law enforcement officials.
Mississippi civil rights activists contacted Mississippi-based FBI agents the night before and reached Justice Department official John Doar in the early morning, setting in motion a process to expand the federal presence in Mississippi, although activists believed the government worked too slowly. Additional FBI agents began to be added on the ground around 11:30 am and continued through the night. The lead inspector, Joseph Sullivan, arrived in the early evening. President Johnson had spent a busy day entertaining the Prime Minister of Turkey.
LBJ expanded the investigation into the disappearance by prodding J. Edgar Hoover, by seeking advice from Cabinet officers and congressional leaders, and by involving the Defense Department (eventually bringing in hundreds of sailors to scour the countryside, particularly its swampy areas where it was presumed bodies might have been hidden). The President received reports and held meetings throughout the day. Beginning around noon, he turned on his Dictabelt telephone recorders.
Johnson’s first recorded report was with Lee White, a holdover from the Kennedy administration who served as Johnson’s chief aide on civil rights matters. The two discussed how best to respond to James Farmer, the director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was one of the chief groups involved in the COFO voter registration campaign and Freedom Summer.
LBJ called Lee White, his chief aide on civil rights matters, to discuss how to respond to James Farmer, the director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
President Johnson: I asked [J. Edgar] Hoover last . . . two weeks ago . . . after talking to the Attorney General to fill up Mississippi with FBI men and infiltrate everything he could; that they’re hauling them in by the dozens; that I’ve asked him to put more men after these three kids; that he hauled them in last night.
Lee White: Right.
President Johnson: That I’ve asked him for another report today; that I’m shoving it as much as I know how; that I didn’t ask them to go, and I can’t control the actions of Mississippi people. The only weapon I have for locating them is the FBI. I haven’t got any state police or any constables, and the FBI is better than marshals, and I’ve got all of them I’ve got looking after them. I can’t find them myself—[section closed under the terms of the deed of gift]
~ Edit ~
President Johnson: . . .and that I’ve got—given them already a standing order to stay on it day and night. Now, have you . . . What do they think happened? Think they got killed?
Lee White: This morning they had had absolutely no trace. There’s no sign of the automobile. They have found nobody who’s seen the car or the three people. So, as far as they’re concerned, they’ve just disappeared from the face of the earth.
Over the next four hours, he spoke to the Speaker of the House (twice) and the Secretary of Commerce--southern native Luther Hodges--about the complications of using extensive federal force in the South. He also made several calls regarding campaign issues and received a message from Attorney General Robert Kennedy. At 3:35, he spoke to Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, expressing his reservations about setting the precedent of meeting with the parents of missing civil rights workers:
I’m afraid that if I start house-mothering each kid that’s gone down there and that doesn’t show up, that we’ll have this White House full of people every day asking for sympathy and congressmen too, because they want to come over and have their picture made and get on TV, and I don’t know whether the president of the United States ought to be busy doing that or not.
Johnson tried to return Attorney General Kennedy’s call, but had to settle for the deputy attorney general. This snippet is part of a 9-minute call.
President Johnson: What do you think happened to them?
Katzenbach: I think they got picked up by some of these Klan people, be my guess.
President Johnson: And murdered?
Katzenbach: Yeah, probably or else they’re just being hidden in one of those barns or something, you know, and getting the hell scared out of them. But I would not be surprised if they’d been murdered, Mr. President. Pretty rough characters.
3:59 p.m. To Senator James Eastland of Mississippi
Just before 4:00 p.m., the President made contact with arch-segregationist James Eastland, a colleague from Johnson’s Senate days who was a virulent opponent of the civil rights movement. In the call, Eastland, in his thick Mississippi Delta accent, mocked the idea that any violence had occurred and gave voice to a prevalent white southern belief that the disappearance was a “publicity stunt."
Johnson kept Eastland on the speakerphone for the entirety of this conversation, literally shouting into what he called the “squawk box” for over eight minutes.
President Johnson: Jim?
James Eastland: Hello, Mr. President, how you feel?
President Johnson: I’m doing all right. I hope you are. You got a lot of sunshine down there?
Eastland: Need some rain—we need rain mighty bad.
President Johnson: Well, we’re so dry in my country that we’re going to have to sell off all of our cattle if we don’t get rain.
Eastland: Well, I’m in the same shape: got a cotton crop just burning up.
President Johnson: I’ll be darned. I thought you’d be harvesting cotton pretty soon? When is it, July?
Eastland: Yeah.
President Johnson: I guess they’re harvesting in the valley right now.
Eastland: Uh-huh.
President Johnson: Jim, we’ve got three kids missing down there. What can I do about it?
Eastland: Well, I don’t know. I don’t believe there’s . . . I don’t believe there’s three missing.
President Johnson: We’ve got their parents down here.
Eastland: I believe it’s a publicity stunt. . . .
President Johnson: They say that their parents are here, and they’ve come down to see the Attorney General, and they’ve seen Burke Marshall ,and they’re going to be interviewed by the FBI—the parents. And they’ve got some newspaper people and some photographers with them and a couple of congressmen: Congressman [William] Ryan and this Republican congressman Ogden Reid, whose folks used to own the Herald-Tribune in New York.
Eastland: Yeah?
President Johnson: They want to come to the White House to see the president, and I told them that I thought that that would be better to let Lee White—who handles matters like that for me—to talk to them, and he’d go up to Ryan’s office and talk to them. I don’t know whether that’s going to be satisfactory or not.
The Attorney General called over while I was out. He thought I ought to make a statement on it. I made one at my press conference this morning. Scotty Reston said, “Mr. President, do you have any information about those three kids that disappeared in Mississippi?” I said, “The FBI has a number of men who are studying it, and we’ve asked them to spare no efforts to secure information and report to us. I’ve had no reports since breakfast, but at that time I understood that the FBI had forces in that area looking into it. Several weeks ago, I asked them to anticipate the problems that would come from this, and they have sent extra FBI personnel into the area. They have substantially augmented their personnel in the last few hours.” And that’s all I said.
Eastland: Well, that’s all right. Now, I’m going to tell you why I don’t think there’s a damn thing to it: They were put in jail in Philadelphia, in East Mississippi right next to . . . the county right next to John Stennis’s home county [Oktibbeha County], and they were going to Meridian. There’s not a Ku Klux Klan in that area; there’s not a Citizen’s Council in that area; there’s no organized White man in that area, so that’s why I think it’s a publicity stunt. Now, if it had happened in other areas, I would pay more attention to it, but I happen to know that some of these bombings where nobody gets hurt are publicity stunts.
This Nigra woman in Ruleville that’s been to Washington and testified that she was shot at 19 times is lying. Course, with anybody that gets shot at 19 times is [amused] going to get hit, and she hasn’t been shot at a time, and nobody’s tried to bother her. They let her sit in on the Democratic, in the Democratic county convention this morning.
President Johnson: Uh-huh?
Eastland: I don’t think there’s anything to it.
President Johnson: Well now, here’s what I’m calling you about as my friend: number one, they said I ought to make a statement. I’ve made this statement, and I think I’ll stand on it. Do you see any need of my going any further?
Eastland: No!
President Johnson: All right, that’s number one. Number two, they’ve suggested I see these parents. I’ve told them I thought that’d be a bad precedent. I’m going to try to get them to see an assistant of mine and get by with that if I can, so I don’t add to the fuel. Uh, do you . . . you . . . you . . . Don’t you think that’s the thing to do?
Eastland: Sure, and I think it’s going to turn out that there’s nothing to it. Now, I don’t know, but . . .
~Edit~
Eastland: Well, let me ask you this question about these three that are missing: who is it there to harm them? There’s no organ—There’s no white organizations in that area of Mississippi. Who would . . . Who would . . . could possibly harm them?
President Johnson: Well, might have some crank or some nut like . . . They locked [talking over Eastland] a man up in Minneapolis today for saying he’s going to kill me Friday when I go out there.
Eastland: [Unclear] it’ll take a crowd. . . . It’ll take a crowd to handle, make three men disappear.
President Johnson: Well, it depends on the kind of men, Jim.
Eastland: Huh?
President Johnson: It depends on the kind of men.
Eastland: Well, there’s nobody in that area to harm them.
President Johnson: They might take a big crowd to take three like you.
Eastland: [chuckling] Ah . . . Well . . .
President Johnson: I imagine it wouldn’t take many to capture me.
Eastland: [continuing to chuckle] Well, I’d run.
President Johnson: All right. Well, now you get that rain for both of us and send it on east when you get through using it.
Over the next week, Johnson continued to press for results in the investigation, while turning more of his attention to other matters of state, particularly the conference report on the Civil Rights bill. In a triumphal moment, he signed the act on July 2. The bill’s victory was bittersweet for activists in Mississippi and the loved ones of the three missing men. Despite exploring hundreds of leads, the investigation had yielded scant evidence of the men’s location and had led to no arrests. A major break in the case occurred in early August when an FBI informant (paid $30,000) pointed the Bureau to a farm pond just southwest of Philadelphia.
8:01 p.m.
From Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Assistant Director of the FBI
Assistant Director of the FBI Cartha “Deke” DeLoach called Johnson to notify him that the bodies had been found. That day, Johnson was also coping with racial disorders in New Jersey as well as the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Over the course of Freedom Summer, there were at least three murders, approximately 70 bombings or burnings, over 80 beatings, and over 1,000 arrests of civil rights activists. The COFO incident report, a single-spaced document that offered brief daily summaries, was over ten pages long.
October 1967
In October 1967, an all-white jury convicted seven white men, including Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, on federal conspiracy charges. Eight others, including Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, were acquitted. The cases of three others ended in a mistrial. No one was brought to trial on state murder charges. Edgar Ray Killen was released by a hung jury, 11-1, reportedly because one juror could not bring herself to convict a preacher.
June 21, 2005
Exactly 41 years after the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, the state of
Mississippi
obtained its first homicide conviction in the case. On Tuesday June 21, 2005, 9 white and 3 black jurors convicted 80-year-old Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen of manslaughter for his role in orchestrating the nighttime roadside lynching, which occurred approximately a half-mile from his house.
Two days later, he received the maximum sentence--60 years in prison.
Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (New York: MacMillan, 1988)
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1995)
Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-64 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998)
