Lawsuit filed last week alleges civil rights violations
Jerry Mitchell and Ben Greenberg
The Clarion-Ledger
March 1, 2010
Convicted Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen says there wasn’t enough legal evidence to imprison him for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers and that God is going to get whoever helped put him away.
Those written remarks are among the most recent public stirrings from Killen, who also filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI, alleging his civil rights were violated.
“Almighty God … is listening and is recording your acts, thoughts and deeds. One by one you will give account to him,” Killen wrote in a six-page letter obtained by The Clarion-Ledger from a Klansman. His lawyer confirmed the letter is indeed Killen’s.
District Attorney Mark Duncan, who along with Attorney General Jim Hood prosecuted Killen, responded, “I don’t have any trouble standing before God with my role in it.”
In 2005, a Neshoba County jury convicted Killen, now 85, on three counts of manslaughter for his role in the Klan’s June 21, 1964, killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, commonly known as the Mississippi Burning case.
The FBI is now reexamining the killings. Four suspects are still alive in the case.
In his letter, Killen lambasted prosecutors and Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon, who sentenced Killen to the maximum 60 years in prison. Killen, a former Union sawmill operator and part-time preacher, is serving his time in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County.
Killen blamed the press and the people of Neshoba County. “You had all the news media that helped indict me for murder on three counts, which you had no legal evidence,” he wrote. “All your grand jury heard was slick tongue talk from a couple of politicians.”
Sally Beam, one of those grand jurors, said that’s not correct.
All the evidence led back to Killen, she said. “We were not out to get him, but he was the one every order went out from. The fact he’s still trying to blame somebody else just tells me his heart is still not in the right place.
“He’s still trying to cover up what needs to be exposed. If I were Edgar Ray Killen, I’d be thinking about my maker and where I’m going to be when I die. He’s a preacher. He knows about heaven and hell.”
Killen says mobster Gregory Scarpa Sr., pistol whipped “testimony” from from Clayton Lewis, a defense attorney in the 1967 federal conspiracy trial of suspects in the civil rights workers’ slayings..
The nearly 40,000 pages of FBI files in the Mississippi Burning case obtained by The Clarion-Ledger do not appear to mention Scarpa or list his informant number. Some other FBI records refer to Scarpa being brought in to help crack the Klan’s 1966 killing of Vernon Dahmer.
Killen said the FBI paid Scarpa $30,000 in reward money — an allegation FBI agents have disputed.
Retired FBI agent Jay Cochran said the reward money was delivered to Mississippi Highway Patrolman Maynard King, who told the FBI where the bodies were buried. Cochran said King was passing the $30,000 on to the person who informed King.
Philip Dray, co-author of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi, said he’s not surprised Killen invoked God’s name since the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi often did that.
Killen said God knows what he did and that he is at peace with God, but Dray noted Killen never actually said he was innocent. “Convicted Klansmen have a special problem with justice,” he said. “Their ‘crimes’ were, in their minds, righteous. They were aimed at specific targets — meddlesome Yankees.”
In Killen’s mind, he said, “It will always be 1865.”
In the letter, Killen says he read many hidden Justice Department files. “I only read those of interest, as I was not hired and I was not a pimp, but I had security clearance, so I read and obtained straight evidence,” he says. “I am not putting some names in this letter as some are still living and believe it or not I am not a betrayer of anyone, especially my friends.”
Exactly who he refuses to betray he didn’t say.
Larry Ellis, a former inmate who has been interviewed by the FBI, said some of what the letter says mirrors much of what Killen told him behind bars.
Ellis told the FBI that Killen said he had access to these files because of his relationship with then-U.S. Sen. Jim Eastland and “did jobs” for Eastland around the country.
Killen said in his letter he had traveled to “most major cities in America.”
On those trips, he said he bragged about his hometown, his home county and his home state. Now, he said, he wants to retrace those steps and apologize.
The Clarion-Ledger obtained the letter from Cole Thornton, Imperial Wizard of the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who attended Killen’s 2005 trial. Thornton said Killen authorized him to release the letter and shared a note that expert Thomas Vastrick of Memphis identified as Killen’s handwriting.
Thornton, whose real name is Charles Denton, said he wants to see “the scoundrels who railroaded this fine man pay up for their deceit.”
In his lawsuit in which he seeks millions of dollars, Killen is demanding all of the federal files in the case.
Hood responded that his office has given Killen’s lawyer “every document we have in our files. The federal prosecutors assured me that they gave us all of the documents in the possession of the federal government.”
Killen remains filled with venom, Hood said. “Hate will eat up a person’s soul. As with all criminals I have had to prosecute, I still hold out hope that their souls will be redeemed.”
Killen has repeatedly referred to the three victims as communists — something the victims’ families say isn’t true.
Ben Chaney, whose brother James was among the victims, said after reading Killen’s letter, “I sort of feel bad for Mr. Killen because he’s losing. The fact is he refuses to look at reality.”
Killen needs to come clean, he said. “God knows what he did, and he knows he did something contrary to what God wants. The truth will set him free.”
USA Today reports that the FBI Field Office in Jackson, Mississippi may soon be named after James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—the three civil rights workers murdered by Klansmen in Neshoba County, MS, June 21, 1964.
JACKSON, Miss. — This state, whose civil rights history is marred with negatives, wants to name its new Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters after slain civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
“Given our state and its history, it would do a lot to show that Mississippi has changed,” said U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat.
“I think it’s an excellent idea and one that I would support,” Thompson said.
The Jackson City Council will vote today on a resolution supporting the move. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were killed June 21, 1964, while participating in Freedom Summer, an intensive voter registration drive aimed at breaking Mississippi’s resistance to civil rights for African Americans….
“It could send a signal to the rest of the nation that we at least understand some of the things that have happened in the past and realize that this is in tune of correcting some of the negatives back then,” Smith said.
FBI spokeswoman Deborah Madden said the agency will defer to Congress for a final decision on naming the building, which the federal government is leasing….
Angela Lewis, Chaney’s daughter, said naming the building after the trio would be “a very nice gesture” that could contribute to a better understanding of the era.
I’m ambivalent about this possibility of a Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman FBI Field Office. In 1964, when the field office was established, attention to the three murdered civil rights workers precluded attention to most other of the numerous incidents that warranted investigation and response. In his book Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-72, historian Kenneth O’Reilly writes:
The reason for skepticism about the FBI presence was obvious. The violence had not abated. By COFO’s estimate 450 incidents makred the three months beginning June 15. Segregationists three voter registration workers in Hattiesburg as Hoover made his speech [at the opening of the Jackson Field Office]. (171)
Despite enormous resources expended by the Bureau on solving the Neshoba murders, there was much skepticism about that as well. As Dick Gregory remarked at the time:
If these Mississippi white Klansmen, who do not know how to plan crimes, who are ignorant, illiterate bastards, can completely baffle our FBI, what are those brilliant Communist spies doing to us?
Though Edgar Ray Killen was finally convicted in 2005 on manslaughter charges for his role in the murders, the case is far from resolved.
It is meaningful that US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who is a Mississippi Civil Rights Movement veteran, as well as the Mississippi NAACP and James Chaney’s daughter Angela, support the name change. It is worth noting, however, that journalist Chris Joyner has no quotes from Ben Chaney, brother of James Chaney, Rita Schwerner-Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, or David Goodman, brother of Andrew Goodman. All three regularly make public statements regarding the Neshoba murders and are outspoken advocates for a broad approach to justice for their murdered family members—and for the countless other victims, many still nameless to the world at large.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 29, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Exhuming James Chaney’s body could help identify others involved in the Ku Klux Klan’s 1964 killings of Chaney and two other civil rights workers, a world-renowned forensic pathologist says.
That’s because X-rays show two bullets were never removed from Chaney, said Dr. Michael Baden of New York City. “They’re still in his body, and they could be matched to the weapons that did it.”
The FBI contacted Baden last week about his findings.
Chaney’s brother, Ben, said he and his family support an exhumation. “If they (FBI agents) want to take the bullets from my brother, we’ll do that,” he said. “Whatever they need.”
This evidence first came to light in 2005, when Baden and pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne were studying the X-rays and other evidence for the 2005 prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen—the Klansman who was convicted that year on manslaughter charges for his role in orchestrating the killings of the three civil rights workers.
After the defense agreed to the facts, prosecutors didn’t call the two forensic pathologists as witnesses.
Baden said he decided to request the exhumation after hearing the FBI was now reinvestigating the trio’s killings.
No murder weapons were ever found in the trio’s killings, but former inmate Larry Ellis, who had a prison cell next to Killen in 2007, recently told FBI agents that Killen talked of a murder weapon being buried on his property. Killen, who was a part-time preacher, lived in Union.
If a gun was recovered, it still could be tested to see if it fired the fatal bullets into Chaney, Baden said. “And there might still be DNA and fingerprints on the weapon.”…
According to a confession by Horace Doyle Barnette, Klansman Alton Wayne Roberts grabbed Schwerner, 24, and shot him once, then grabbed Goodman, 20, and shot him once. Jordan then joined Roberts – and perhaps others – in shooting Chaney, 21, to death.
Ballistics confirmed that bullets removed from all three bodies came from two different .38-caliber pistols.
Why weren’t the pathologists called to the stand in 2005? Roberts is dead but, as noted in the article sidebar, four suspects are still living:
Olen Burrage of Philadelphia
Pete Harris of Meridian
former Philadelphia police officer Richard Willis of Noxapater
Jimmie Snowden of Hickory
In 2005, there were as many as 9 other living suspects. Not knowing all that was involved in accomplishing a successful prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen, I allow there may have been reason to limit testimony once the defense agreed to the facts in the case. But without more information important questions linger, pointing to possible cover-ups.
Ben Chaney has said that when pursuing the indictment of Edgar Ray Killen in 2005,
the District Attorney did not vigorously in the grand jury proceedings pursue the indictments against … the remaining people that participated in this crime.
After the Killen trial the prosecutors misrepresented crucial facts in the case. Prosecutors ambitious to right four decades of denied justice should have viewed the trial as an important discovery tool for bringing new evidence to light. Instead, new evidence has remained hidden four and a half years while suspects have been dying off.
Justice and the truth require swift, efficient and determined action. When it comes to these decades old cold cases, there is no time for selective disclosures of evidence.The Justice Department and the state of Mississippi must pursue this evidence without delay.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 22, 2009 at 3:27 pm
One of the themes of this blog is the pressing need to look not only at who pulled the trigger in decades old Civil Rights Era murders but also to look more broadly at how institutions, people in positions of power and others in the broader society enabled or encouraged the countless crimes against African Americans and their allies.
Jerry Mitchell’s journalism does both.
In the video above, Jerry discusses with Stephen Colbert some of the murderers his reporting has helped to put away. In their discussion, Jerry also touches on the corruption that he exposed in the handling of the two 1964 Byron De La Beckwith trials that ended in mistrials. Jerry exposed that the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was aiding Beckwith’s defense while the state was prosecuting him. The Sovereignty Commission was the spy agency established by the Mississippi State Legislature in 1956 to monitor and oppose civil rights activity. The Commission’s files were declassified in 1998 and are available online.
Informants told the FBI that Eastland met with Klan leaders and courted the Klan’s vote in his 1966 re-election race. The senator also talked with suspects in the Neshoba County case, including then-Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and defense lawyers, getting updates on the case.
In 1965, U.S. District Judge Harold Cox of Jackson – whose appointment to the bench Eastland engineered – threw out the indictments of all the suspects, except Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price.
An FBI memo said Eastland, who was a college buddy of Cox, “has been taking credit for the federal government dropping charges against those indicted in the Neshoba County slayings.”
According to the FBI, Rainey penned a letter saying, “I know for a fact that James O. Eastland helped prevent the trial of 16 other men.”
On March 28, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the indictments.
A “prominent local Klansman” in Meridian told the FBI that Eastland had appeared at a rally in Forest and invited Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers to speak with him: “Eastland stated that he would help the 17 defendants in the Neshoba County case and that he has been ‘pulling strings for them.’”
Jerry’s article also discusses soon to be published writings and statements by Killen, as well as other evidence, elaborating on the Klansman’s alleged ties to his US Senator.
Eastland grew up in Hillsboro and was buried in Eastern Cemetery in Forest.
Killen, who grew up in neighboring south Neshoba County, said he developed a relationship with Eastland after becoming friends with Leander Perez, an arch-segregationist in Louisiana.
Documents from the Eastland papers at the University of Mississippi show Eastland and Perez shared information on purported communists.
Ellis told the FBI that Killen said his work for Eastland was “to stop the communist Jews or their soldiers.”
Jerry Mitchell at the Crimes of the Civil Rights Era conference, Northeastern University Law School, April 28, 2007
A papermaker dedicated to preserving traditional Western and Japanese techniques; a scientist developing theories of global climate change; and a journalist who helps uncover details of unsolved murders from the civil rights era are among the 24 recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards,” to be announced on Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation….
Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter at The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., who focuses on cold-case murders from the civil rights era, said he would use the money to help write a book on the subject. “I never in all my life expected this,” Mr. Mitchell, 50, said of his award.
I have been following Jerry’s work almost as long as I’ve had this blog and more recently have had the honor and pleasure of getting to know him professionally. Here’s a bit more about him for those unfamiliar:
He has been called “a loose cannon,” “a pain in the ass” and “a white traitor.” Whatever he’s been called, Jerry Mitchell has never given up in his quest to bring unpunished killers to justice, prompting one colleague to call him “the South’s Simon Wiesenthal.”
Since 1989, the 47-year-old investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., has unearthed documents, cajoled suspects and witnesses, and quietly pursued evidence in the nation’s notorious killings from the civil rights era.
His work so far has helped put four Klansmen behind bars: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966, Bobby Cherry for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls and, most recently, Edgar Ray Killen, for helping orchestrate the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
So far in 2006, Mitchell has been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, the winner of the George Polk Award for Justice Reporting, the winner of the Vernon Jarrett Award for Investigative Reporting and the Tom Renner Award for Crime Reporting from Investigative Reporters and Editors. Last November, Mitchell became youngest recipient ever of Columbia University’s John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism for his 17 years of pursuing justice.
David Halberstam said in helping bestow the Chancellor award, “Mitchell pursued these stories after most people believed they belonged to history, and not to journalism. But they did belong to journalism, because the truth had never been told and justice had never been done.”
In 1989, Mitchell was a court reporter for The Clarion-Ledger when the film Mississippi Burning inspired him to look into old civil rights cases that many thought had long since turned cold. Through dogged reporting, which cut across the grain of his paper and many of its readers, he investigated leads long ignored or overlooked.
For example, Mitchell’s diligent attention to detail unraveled the alibi of Cherry, who claimed he was watching wrestling on television when the bomb was planted inside the Birmingham church. Mitchell had the newspaper’s librarian check the TV schedule in the old issues of the Birmingham News. There was no wrestling program on at the time.
His work inspired others. Since 1989, authorities in Mississippi and six other states have reexamined 29 killings from the civil rights era and made 27 arrests, leading to 22 convictions.
“It is fair to say that without Mitchell’s dogged and often courageous reporting … many murders from the civil rights era would have remained unvindicated, locked forever in the vaults of regional amnesia,” wrote Tribune syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker.
Billy Wayne Posey, a key suspect in the Ku Klux Klan’s killings of three civil rights workers in 1964 in Mississippi, has died, but Justice Department officials say they’re continuing their investigation of the remaining suspects.
The 73-year-old Posey died Thursday of natural causes, according to friends. That leaves four living suspects in the June 21, 1964, killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in the Justice Department’s investigation….
Goodman’s brother, David, of New York City, said Friday that he hopes the Justice Department will continue to pursue the matter. “This is still the country of law and order, and the laws are clear,” he said. “There is no statute of limitations on murder.”
Time is passing by, he said, “but I never rejoice over a person’s passing. I’ve never felt any animosity toward the specific individuals who murdered my brother. They just pulled the trigger.”
In the summer of 1964, hundreds of FBI agents investigated the trio’s disappearance, leading to the grisly discovery of their bodies buried 15 feet beneath an earthen dam. In 1967, 18 men went on trial on federal conspiracy charges, and seven of them were convicted.
But the only murder prosecution took place in 2005 when a Neshoba County jury convicted reputed Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen on three counts of manslaughter. He is serving 60 years in prison.
Civil rights activists repeatedly have called for the prosecution of others besides Killen.
Posey came within one vote of being indicted by that same Neshoba County grand jury that indicted Killen, with a deciding vote against indictment cast by his relative. In a 2007 series, “Buried Secrets,” The Clarion-Ledger revealed three potential new witnesses against Posey.
In a 2000 statement, Posey told investigators there were “a lot of persons involved in the murders that did not go to jail.”
He did not name those people.
Posey admittedly was among those who pursued the trio that night, was there when they were killed and helped haul their bodies to the dam to bury them.
But the statement could never be used against Posey in state court because he was given immunity.
Then-Neshoba County Deputy Cecil Price told authorities prior to his 2001 death that he told Posey in 1964 he had just jailed the three civil rights workers and asked Posey to get in contact with Killen, who helped to orchestrate the killings.
In 1967, Posey was one of the seven men who was convicted of conspiracy to deprive Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner of their civil rights. Though his admission of taking part in the Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner murders could not be used as evidence, state and federal charges were still possible.
[W]hat Posey said wouldn’t be barred from federal court if federal authorities could pursue a case, said former state and federal prosecutor Patricia Bennett, a professor at Mississippi College School of Law. “And even if there was a state prosecution, authorities may be able to develop other evidence and not use that particular statement.”
Earlier this year, Chaney’s brother, Ben, met in Washington with Justice Department officials, asking them to pursue the case against the living suspects: Posey and Pete Harris, both of Meridian; Olen Burrage of Philadelphia; former Philadelphia police officer Richard Willis of Noxapater; and Jimmie Snowden of Hickory.
I spoke with Ben Chaney in 2007, two days after he buried his mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, next to her murdered son, James. Ben Chaney said:
My mother grew up in the time and period of Mississippi where it was believed that the death the murder of a black man by a white man would never be prosecuted. She had a great uncle lynched. When she was child she watched she saw a black male hanging from a tree who was lynched. When she was bout 5 or 6 years old she saw this. In her time of growing up it was just natural…. You could kill a black man if you were white and get away with it.
And unfortunately she took that to her grave….
This should have been over 40 years ago. Most definitely it should have been over with 1989, and without a doubt it should have been over in 2005. Everybody should have been prosecuted in 2005 and it hasn’t happened.
It hasn’t happened; it needs to happen; time is running out.
45th Annual Mississippi Civil Rights Martyrs Memorial Service & Conference March for Justice in Philadelphia, MS, June 21, 2009. Marchers carry crosses with names of Civil Rights Era murder victims. (Brian Livingston/Meridian Star)
July 4, 1964 was the last time Julia Dobbins saw her brother, JoEd Edwards. Eight days later, he went missing. Rumors were that the Klan took away the 21-year-old Black man and murdered him. His mother died in 1990 never having learned what truly happened to her son.
July 4, 1964 was the thirteenth day James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were missing. One month later, on August 4, 1964, the three civil rights workers’ bodies were found buried in an earthen dam on the property of a wealthy local businessman, Olen Burrage.
July 4, 1964 was the sixty-third day Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two 19-year-old Black men, were missing. Eight days later, on July 12, partial remains of Charles Moore were found in the Mississippi River, near Vicksburg, MS and eastern Louisiana. The following day, partial remains of Henry Dee were also found in the river.
July 4, 1964 was the 127th day since fourteen-year-old Catherine Walker ran past the adults at the crime scene on Poor House Road in Woodville, MS to her father Clifton Walker’s car. Forever etched in her memory are the shattered windows, bullet holes in the door and her father’s blood still visible on the seat and car floor. Catherine’s mother Ruby died in 1992 never knowing who murdered her thirty-seven-year-old husband.
In 2005, after forty-one years, Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen, was convicted on three counts of manslaughter for his part in the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. In June 2007, after forty-three years, James Ford Seale was convicted on federal kidnapping charges for his part in the murders of Dee and Moore. No one has ever been charged with the murders of JoEd Edwards and Clifton Walker.
Numerous others were involved both in the Chaney, Schwerner Goodman and Dee-Moore murders. By 2007, all other known suspects in the Dee-Moore murders were dead, save one, named Charles Marcus Edwards, who testified against and helped convict James Ford Seale. In 2005 at least nine people were living who were arrested and/or indicted in the 1960s in connection with the murders of civil rights workers. Two weeks ago, just following the forty-fifth anniversary of the Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman murders, Jerry Mitchell reported that more might be prosecuted.
“This case is being actively reviewed by the Civil Rights Division and the FBI,” Alejandro Miyar, a spokesman for the division, told The Clarion-Ledger. “Our goal in investigating this case is to lend our assistance to authorities in Mississippi so that they may make a determination whether sufficient evidence exists for a state prosecution.”
Five suspects are still alive in the case, including reputed Klansman Billy Wayne Posey, who told Mississippi investigators there were “a lot of persons involved in the murders that did not go to jail.”
In February 2007, the FBI announced that it had approximately 100 Civil Rights Era cold cases that it was looking into. Each case seems inevitably to lead to others, including many not on the official lists. When, for example, Canadian documentary filmmaker David Ridgen set out to produce a film about the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, he soon found himself investigating the murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
As I watched Summer in Mississippi [a 1965 CBC documentary], sequences flew by of the hundreds of frantic searchers from the US National Guard, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and local authorities who’d been ordered to scour the entire state and surroundings for the missing civil rights workers, beating bushes, flying helicopters, dragging swamps and rivers. The whole country was on edge. Would their bodies be found?
Then, a curious silence descends in the 1964 documentary when cigar-smoking white men in shirt-sleeves fish decomposing body parts out of the Mississippi River with sticks and bare hands. We see ribs and a femur, knotted loops of wire or twine, and a transparent, body-size bag being emptied out of the fetid water. The lazy, ever-present Southern droning of katydids is silenced by the penetrating voice of the late, great CBC narrator John Drainie: “It was the wrong body. The discovery of a Negro male was noted and forgotten. The search was not for him. The search was for two white boys and their Negro friend.”
I stopped the film and wrote down five words and a question, “wrong body”, “Negro male”, “forgotten”, and then simply, “who?”
Ridgen located Charles Moore’s brother, Thomas, who agreed to work with Ridgen and be the main subject in Ridgen’s documentary film about their investigation of the murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. Ridgen and Moore’s work together led to the conviction of James Ford Seale. Their work also led to the other living conspirator in the murder, Charles Marcus Edwards, making an unprompted public apology in the courtroom to the families of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. Edwards apologized again in private, and both Thomas Moore and Henry Dee’s sister, Thelma Collins, accepted the apology.
When I first met Thomas Moore and David Ridgen in March 2007, they mentioned another murder they had learned about. During their investigation, they were told by a retired Natchez police chief that there was another murder from 1964 in Southwest Mississippi that could be solved: the murder of a Black man named Clifton Walker.
A few months later, I was in Woodville to meet with a local NAACP official about another case I was researching. As I walked back to my rental car following the interview, a Black woman in her early 70s approached me.
“You a reporter?” she asked.
She wanted to tell me about Clifton Walker and about a number of other murders of Blacks said to have taken place in her tiny southwest Mississippi town.
The following day, by odd coincidence, I got a hold of Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents on the Walker murder. A few months later, a Freedom of Information Act request yielded FBI documents on the case. In the Clifton Walker FBI file, there is passing mention of seven more murder victims. None of these seven names are on the current FBI lists of victims.
Other reporters who investigate Civil Rights Era cold cases have similar experiences.
Jerry Mitchell, who pioneered investigative journalism on this subject over twenty years ago, said in an email:
Working on an unpunished killing from the civil rights era inevitably leads to the discovery of more. I remember while working on the James Ford Seale case, I ran across a story in microfilm that showed that Seale had actually killed yet another African American, running over the elderly man in his truck in 1966, just a day after the man had voted for the first time. Seale was never prosecuted.
Four days later, Morris took his last breath in Room 101 at the Concordia Parish Hospital. He suffered a long, agonizing death with third degree burns over 100 percent of his body. A Baptist minister said he never saw a man so severely burned as Morris, who was blinded by the flames.
Nelson’s reporting has helped bring about the recent announcement that the case may go before the Concordia Parish Grand Jury. Nelson hadn’t looked into cold cases from the 50s and 60s before the Morris murder caught his attention, but inevitably others emerged. In an email to me, Nelson explained how he learned about JoEd Edwards.
I first heard about JoeEd in the lone article about the Frank Morris case written by John Herbers for the New York Times in December 1964. I called Herbers and he could vaguely remember mentioning JoeEd’s name in the story but did remember that a porter from a Vidalia motel had been missing a few months prior to the Morris arson. I started asking around in the black community and found a number of people familiar with JoeEd’s case. And the story took off from there and continues to take me in new directions—even this week.
Thompson said DeLaughter beat his three companions with a white fire hose throughout the night. Thompson said the young men screamed so loudly that their voices reminded him of “pigs squealing.”
There is much, much more of this, of course, and from other years and in other states. In 2005, for example, John Fleming, editor at large of the Anniston Star, discovered that James Bonard Fowler, the Alabama State Trooper who allegedly shot Jimmie Lee Jackson on February 18, 1965, is still alive and well and unrepentant. Jimmie Lee Jackson was the Black protester in Marion, Alabama whose murder sparked the Selma to Montgomery March. Several days after he was shot and beaten, Jackson died of an infection in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. Fleming interviewed Fowler, who, in 2005, admitted to the shooting. Fowler claimed self-defense and was confident he would not be prosecuted. In 2007, however, Fowler was indicted on state murder charges; the trial is currently on hold over procedural issues.
Fleming has recently uncovered new information about the racial murder of Willie Brewster in Anniston, AL and is working on many of the Alabama and Georgia cases on the FBI’s list; he has also heard of many others that have not been cataloged. Fleming cited two cases he has not yet looked into deeply, in an email to me:
a case in Perry County [where Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed] of a shopkeeper who shot a teenager in the back for back talking him and a Green County case of a man who had his tongue cut out and [was] left to die.
Fleming also learned of at least one other incident involving Fowler:
I discovered that he had shot another man in 1966, a drunk driver who he got into a fight with after he was arrested. It was ruled self defense at the time.
Nelson said to me:
There’s no question that one case leads to another. Individuals who had some information on JoeEd told me about cases of black men who were beaten. This led to some other arsons of black and white businesses and homes and so on. It’s hard to keep count, but the magnitude of these crimes is overwhelming and the leads never seem to end.
At one of the 45th anniversary memorials to Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner two weeks ago, Michael Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, said:
she hopes federal authorities will lend their assistance not only to [the Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman] case but also to any other case where enough evidence exists to pursue prosecution. “The clock is ticking,” she said. “Time is running out.”
***
Correction
I erroneously stated that “Nelson has reconstructed what were likely Edwards’ last hours—being brutally beaten with a firehose, allegedly by then Concordia Parish Sheriff Frank DeLaughter, inside the Ferriday jail.” That sentence has been replaced with the current passage, above, detailing allegations of Carl Ray Thompson concerning DeLaughter.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 3, 2009 at 2:24 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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