Edgar Ray Killen has been released from the hospital and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood says the state is ready to go in the murder case.
The script for popular liberal condemnation of Killen's crime is already written out. An advance draft was posted at the Neshoba Democrat. Take special note of these sentences; they are your Whitewash Rhythm Changes:
This will be an opportunity to showcase our state and community and tell about the profound, genuine change, not to recoil in denial and bitterness. . . .
Because the murders were such a major turning point in U.S. history, this case is very emotional and is a magnet for extremists on both ends of the spectrum, particularly now that a man known to associate with white supremacists has been accused.
The reputation of our community is on the line. Every, single action will be amplified under the microscope of worldwide media attention. . . .
For 40 years Philadelphia and Neshoba County have been synonymous with redneck vigilante justice, and we’ve been saddled with the “Mississippi Burning” stereotypes. The role of law enforcement in the murder conspiracy seems to amplify the disdain outside observers feel, a certain breakdown in civility and law and order.
Most decent people here have felt the shame of a crime unpunished and applaud justice.
Before us is an historic opportunity to once and for all set the record straight, to do the right thing by bringing the murder or murders to justice.
Last weekend, in Olympia, Washington, Rita Schwerner-Bender (widow of Michael Schwerner) spoke to the upcoming trial quite differently:
"This is still a racist society and racism is still the elephant in the living room of America," she said.
Schwerner-Bender, now 63, is a Seattle attorney practicing mostly in family law and adjunct faculty at the University of Washington Law School. In 1964, she and her husband moved from New York to Mississippi as part of an effort by the Congress of Racial Equality to register black voters. It wasn't long before they felt the angry stares, she said.
Federal authorities investigated her husband's slaying, but no one was convicted. Authorities reopened the investigation last year and arrested Edgar Killen, a former white supremacist leader once nicknamed "the Preacher."
Killen, now 79, allegedly rounded up the mob that ambushed the three men just after they had been released from a local jail.
"I think this is more than just about the trial of one old man. If that was all this is about, I would say we should all go home," she said.
Just after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, the state of Mississippi reacted by establishing the State Sovereignty Commission, which acted as an agency to investigate complaints about those suspected of undermining segregation laws, she said.
It investigated a range of issues, such as potential jurors in the trial of a white supremacist and a complaint from a white woman who was worried about a Black teenage boy who had shown an interest in her daughter.
Then, a state legislator asked the commission to investigate Bender and her husband. The local sheriff's office had them under surveillance and sent their license plate number to law enforcement agencies around the state, many of whose ranks were filled with Ku Klux Klan members, she said.
On the night they were killed, the three men had been stopped by a sheriff's deputy and temporarily jailed. He later released them into a trap set by Killen and a mob of Ku Klux Klan members who beat and shot them.
She urged the audience to realize that when they ignore acts of racism, they become complicit in it, or what she called the "banality of evil." (Emphasis added.)
Comments like Ms. Schwerner-Bender's will assuredly get much less play than the script over at the Neshoba Democrat. But what she says is what everyone ought to hear. Of course that might lead us back to those uncomfortable questions about where to place responsibility for the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner and why Killen is the only man being prosecuted.
Related News:
• New Orleans Man To Testify In Killen Trial
• Security High For Killen Trial
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