“They’re playing a very vicious game here; they’re seriously playing a game!”

$100,000 reward for Mississippi’s infamous Civil Rights murders
by KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO
Special to the AmNews
Originally posted 12/27/2004

Because 2004 marked the 40th anniversary of the Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner case, there has been an extra push to finally have justice served against these infamous race-based killings. Because James Chaney was an African American and a Christian, and Goodman and Schwerner were both white and Jewish, the three young men were murdered while investigating the firebombing of an African American church. Many of today's Mississippians say they feel that the unpunished Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner murders give their state a racist reputation.

But Ben Chaney, the younger brother of James, thinks that some of the people behind the new push to solve the 1964 murders may want to clean up the state's reputation by deceptive means.

James E. Prince III, the grandson of the former head of the White Citizen's Council, is currently publisher and editor of the Neshoba Democrat newspaper. Ben, who directs the James Earl Chaney Foundation, said that it appears as if Prince is using his new local citizens group, the Philadelphia Coalition, to go after only the most virulent racists who took part in the murders - former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers and Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen, the man said to have been the "main instigator" of the murders, who told the other Klansmen where to hide in order to capture the three young men, what to do with them once they'd been captured, and where to bury their bodies.

Convictions of Bowers and Killen could be used to promote the idea that racism no longer exists in Neshoba County, Chaney contends. But if there are to be convictions for the 1964 murders, Ben says his family would only support efforts to convict each of the still nine to ten living murderers. The problem is that some of those murderers went on to high stations in Mississippi society, and Chaney thinks that those murderers, as politically connected racists, would most likely be protected from prosecution.

"This is their desire to separate their group from the Klan," Chaney said. "They're promoting this image as if they're trying to seek justice, while in fact their true agenda is something else. "They're going to say they're seeking justice, but that's no justice there - even I know better than that. They're playing a very vicious game here; they're seriously playing a game!"

(Whole thing.)