Murder in Mississippi

United States v. Price and the Struggle for Civil Rights

Howard Ball

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700613168, 9780700613151
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624348
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Law

Few episodes in the modern civil rights movement were more galvanizing or more memorialized than the brutal murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—idealists eager to protect and promote the rights of black Americans, even in the deep and very dangerous South. In films like Mississippi Burning and popular folk songs, these young men have been venerated as martyrs. Even so, the landmark legal dimensions of their murder case have until now remained largely lost.

Howard Ball reminds us just how problematic the prosecution of the murderers—all members of the KKK—actually was. When the State of Mississippi failed to indict them, the U.S. tried to prosecute the case in federal district court. The judge there, however, ruled that the federal government had no jurisdiction and so dismissed the case. When the U.S. appealed, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the lower court decision, claiming that federal authorities did indeed have the power to police civil rights violations in any state. United States v. Price (1967) thus produced a landmark decision that signaled a seismic shift in American legal history and race relations, for it meant that local authorities could no longer shield racist lawbreakers.

Ball weaves the tales of victims and perpetrators into a single compelling story in which the legal process becomes as much personal as political. Readers will learn how deputy sheriff Cecil Price and his accomplices planned the execution of the young freedom riders and how prosecutors and judges brought them to justice under conspiracy charges. Along the way, Ball introduces readers to a host of characters from the heyday of the civil rights era—with the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC on one side, and the KKK and its fellow travelers on the other, and politicians sitting squarely on the fence.

Although to this day the murderers have never faced murder charges, United States v. Price emphatically declared that the federal government would no longer tolerate the complicity of local and state authorities in the suppression of the constitutional rights of southern blacks. As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the murders in June 2004, Murder in Mississippi provides a timely and telling reminder of the vigilance democracy requires if its ideals are to be fully realized.

CHAPTER 1

Driving on Highway 19 to Philadelphia, Mississippi

This is a terrible town, the worst I’ve seen. There is a complete reign of terror here.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., 1964

It is October 1976, and I have been in Mississippi since July, having moved down to Mississippi State University from the New York metropolitan area, where I had been on the political science faculty at Hofstra University since 1965. I began teaching political science at Rutgers University in the summer of 1964, the “Mississippi Freedom Summer.” I started in June 1964, the month in which three civil rights workers—Mickey Schwerner, J. E. Chaney, and Andy Goodman—were murdered by Klansmen outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. A dozen years later I was living in Mississippi, and on a warm and very humid Friday evening in October, I was traveling from Starkville, Mississippi, to Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Although I was soon to become involved in a variety of civil rights activities in the Magnolia State, this ride to Philadelphia had nothing to do with civil rights or justice or anything of importance. Put simply, I was the referee of a crew of high school football officials, and the five of us were on our way to officiate a game between bitter rivals: Philadelphia versus Neshoba County. For the others in the car, longtime residents of the state, the trip was uneventful, and their talk focused on reviewing football rules and such. I was not listening to the chatter because I was about to travel a historic road, one that scared the living daylights out of me.

After leaving Starkville, we went south on Highway 25, a state highway, for about thirty-five miles through the sleepy town of Louisville, Mississippi. By this time, it was quite dark. There were no overhead lights on these two-lane roads; the white line dividing the roadway was so worn that it was invisible most of the time. The only illumination was provided by the car’s headlights. It was another seventeen miles south on Highway 25 before I spotted the sign for Philadelphia: “Philadelphia, 18 miles, Left on Highway 19.” I made the turn. I was now on Highway 19, the road taken by the three young civil rights workers a dozen years earlier as they traveled to Meridian, Mississippi (in neighboring Lauderdale County). I remember tightly gripping the car’s wheel, half in fear, half in remembrance. My body was one large goose bump, and the hair on the back of my neck and on my arms was standing upright.

A few miles before I reached Philadelphia, the car crossed Highway 21. Had I traveled on that road a few miles southwest of the city of Philadelphia, I would have come upon a gravel road where the three civil rights workers’ bodies were buried under a fifteen-foot earthen dam in late July 1964. Had I, instead, turned northeast on Highway 21, after driving about thirteen miles I would have entered the Choctaw Indian Reservation and quickly come upon Bogue Chitto Swamp. It was at this spot in June 1964 that the FBI found the charred car the three civil rights workers were driving the day they were stopped for speeding on the very road I was traveling, Highway 19.

For the first time in my life, I was in Neshoba County, on the road to Philadelphia, Mississippi, which Martin Luther King Jr. called a “terrible town, the worst [he had] seen.” I was traveling on that same highway, where at least eighteen Klansmen waylaid and murdered Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman only a dozen years earlier. I was actually traveling on the road to Philadelphia, the county seat of Neshoba County, and it was, and remains, the eeriest, scariest moment of my life.

Neshoba County, 570 square miles in area, is one of the smallest of Mississippi’s eighty-two counties. It was created in 1833, as a result of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. “Neshoba” is the Choctaw word for “wolf.” In 1964, there were around 20,000 residents in the county, and Philadelphia’s population was a little more than 4,000 persons. It was the only large town in Neshoba County, and all the lawyers living in the county, a total of five, practiced and lived there. (All of them would soon be retained as defense counsel for the men charged by the federal government with conspiring to murder Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.) There were about 14,000 whites in the county, with another 3,000 or so blacks and fewer than 3,000 Choctaw Indians. It was, like so many counties in Mississippi, dirt-poor, consisting of pastureland and piney woods, with the accompanying sawmills and terrible-smelling pulp mills. Most of the county residents were poor, with more than 25 percent of them living below the poverty level. More than half the population had less than a high school education. (In 2000, 21 percent of Neshoba County residents lived below the poverty level, the majority of them either children younger than eighteen or seniors over sixty-five years of age. And, in 2000, more than 65 percent of the population had graduated from high school.)

The state of Mississippi was, as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Bob Moses said in 1961, the very “heart of the iceberg” of racism in America. W. J. Cash, in his classic portrayal of southern politics and culture, The Mind of the South, wrote of the state that it was “not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it.” In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) focused its Mississippi Freedom Summer project on that state because, in 1962, only 6.7 percent of Mississippi’s blacks were registered to vote, the lowest percentage in the nation. And the county seat, Philadelphia, Mississippi, wrote David Nevin in Life magazine in 1964, “was a strange, tight little town where fear and hatred of things and ideas that come from the outside is nearly pathological.”

Although blacks in the South had long been denied the right to vote by southern jurisdictions, even though the right to vote was guaranteed to all male citizens by the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870), there was no real effort to address that inequality until the 1930s and 1940s. Prior to the successful efforts by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to end the “white primary” in the South (Smith v. Allwright, 1944), there was little that advocates for the black community could do because of conservative U.S. Supreme Court decisions that went back to the 1870s. In great part the reason for the NAACP’s acquiescence was because the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1896, handed down a major opinion, Plessy v. Ferguson. That opinion validated segregation of the races in all social situations, from birth to death, and defused almost all efforts to achieve racial equality, especially but not exclusively evident in the South.

When, in the Brown decision of 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously concluded that the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal” was no longer applicable in the field of public secondary education, the South exploded in wrathful anger. May 17, 1954, “decision Monday” for the Court during that era, instantly became known as “Black Monday” by many southerners. For the very first time in the history of racial relations in the South, an opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court struck at the very heart of the southern way of life: segregation, the absolute separation of the races.

The response in the Deep South, which included Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and South Carolina, was swift and multifaceted. Massive resistance, from these states’ congressional representatives, state legislatures, and governors, from private citizens, from state judges and many federal district judges, was immediate and pervasive. For example, southern noncompliance with Brown was so extensive in this region that it was not until 1970, sixteen years after the watershed 1954 Brown decision, that Neshoba County finally began to integrate its public schools. (It would take another fifteen years until Mississippi’s last holdout counties, in the southeastern part of the state, under court orders, reluctantly began to integrate their public schools—three decades after Brown.)

Beyond questionable legal and political “states’ rights” arguments and strategies, other more financially threatening, violent, and more painful actions were taken to evade, avoid, and delay desegregation action in the Deep South. On July 11, 1954, less than two months after Brown, thirteen upscale Mississippi citizens met in Indianola, Mississippi, to create the Citizens Council. Within a year, chapters had been formed across the Deep South. Critics of the segregationists called these organizations “White Citizens Councils,” a name that quickly caught on (and will be used in this book). A White Citizens Council chapter was organized in Neshoba County in late 1954 by two of the county’s leading citizens. Florence Mars, a lifelong resident of Philadelphia and a vocal supporter of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, recalled in her memoir, Witness in Philadelphia, that “virtually everyone who was asked to, joined. Refusal would have been seen as an act of traitorous disloyalty to Mississippi and the South.”

Fear of the WCC and the KKK was not the sole possession of the black community in the South in the years after the Brown decisions. Most whites living in the South at that time, as Mars suggests, were nearly as frightened of these virulent segregationist groups as were the blacks. And so the white majority became, a decade before Vice President Spiro Agnew coined the phrase, the “silent majority.”

The White Citizens Council, labeled by outspoken liberal Mississippi newspaper publisher Hodding Carter Jr. the “uptown KKK,” was formed in the months immediately following the May 1954 Brown decision. Its membership roster included the white, powerful, middle- and upper-class social elites in the town or city: wealthy businessmen, bankers, professors, doctors, lawyers, clergy (including a number of rabbis in Mississippi), and politicians—including Mississippi’s former governor Ross Barnett. During the council’s heyday in Mississippi, 1954–1965, observed Donna Ladd, it had more than 250,000 members—with connections in every level of Mississippi government.

Much more ominously, however, was the third reincarnation, in February 1964, of the Klan in Mississippi, the White Knights of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan. The initial period of open Klan activity in America came at the close of the Civil War and ended a generation later. The second era of Klan activity in Mississippi and across the nation followed the end of World War I. During the 1920s the KKK was an extremely influential group in the electoral politics of the South. Many southern governors and U.S. senators (including Alabama’s Senator Hugo L. Black, 1926–1937) owed their victories to open Klan support of their candidacies.

The Neshoba County Klavern was described, in 1964, by Inspector Joseph Sullivan of the FBI, as “one of the strongest Klan units ever gathered [in the state] and one of the best disciplined groups.” In 1964, there were only two paid Neshoba County law enforcement officers: forty-one-year-old, six-foot-two, 250-pound Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, who was elected in 1963. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price was only a bit smaller, a lot younger (twenty-six years of age, a former Philadelphia fireman), and not as gregarious as Rainey. Both were early joiners of the Mississippi KKK and worked closely with the Neshoba County KKKers. Both attended meetings of the Neshoba Klavern and quite evidently supported the goals of the organization.

Rainey was born and raised in Neshoba County. He attended public school through the eighth grade and then quit to work as a mechanic before entering law enforcement. Before his 1963 election victory, Rainey served for four years as a policeman on the Philadelphia, Mississippi, police force. During that time he shot and killed two African Americans “in the line of duty.” Indeed, Rainey was elected in 1963 because he was clearly seen as “hard on Negroes.” After his election, a resident of Philadelphia, Mississippi, recalled:

Rainey swaggered around in Old West police get-up, complete with pointy boots, a menacing cowboy hat over his balding head, a six-shooter, a blackjack and a nightstick. He would spit his Red Man juice out of the window of the mammoth blue-gray Oldsmobile he drove around the town, shouting greetings to his friends and scowling at anyone, especially blacks, who got in his way.

Cecil Price had been a dairy supplies salesman and then the Philadelphia fire chief before his stint as deputy sheriff of Neshoba County. He had a reputation for terrorizing blacks in the county, and he was equally involved in beatings and brutality against blacks during his time in law enforcement. Given this raw reality of “law enforcement” in Neshoba County, blacks had no way to seek relief from the police brutality they were receiving from Rainey and Price.

For Sheriff Rainey and his fellow residents of Philadelphia and Neshoba County, there were two separate and unequal worlds: their white world and the “nigger” world. Rainey’s task was to maintain the absolute—and unequal—separation of the two races. If outsiders, referred to by Rainey and his friends as “Commies” or “Jews” or “nigger lovers,” invaded Mississippi to challenge the state’s racist folkways, then Rainey’s second task was to make sure they would not be comfortable while in the state and that they would be encouraged to quickly leave Mississippi.

On April 4, 1964, the Neshoba Democrat’s lead editorial, reflecting this view, was directed to Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) staffers such as Schwerner living and working in Lauderdale and Neshoba Counties, as well as to the hundreds of civil rights volunteers who, under the guidance and direction of COFO, were getting ready to come into the state in the summer of 1964. (COFO was the umbrella organization, created in 1963, for the three civil rights groups pledged to support the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project: the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC.) The piece was written by the editor of the Democrat, Jack Long Tannehill, a relative of Louisiana’s governor Huey P. Long, and himself a member of the White Citizens Council and one of the town’s most outspoken segregationists: “All races here enjoy the very best of relationships, and many of us count our Negro citizens as true and loyal friends. We hope our status quo remains, and feel that others do, too, regardless of race. Outsiders who come in here and try to stir up trouble should be dealt with in a manner they won’t forget.”

An NAACP branch was established in Philadelphia in the late 1950s. It was, however, a very small and quiet group of African Americans and did not have a visible presence in the city. A turning point in Neshoba County African American political activity came after CORE established a headquarters in Meridian, Mississippi (in Lauderdale County, about forty miles southeast of Philadelphia on Highway 19), in 1963. Mickey Schwerner and his wife, Rita, were the first paid leaders assigned (on Thanksgiving Day, 1963) to the Meridian CORE center by the organization’s leadership in New York City. They arrived in their VW van in late January 1964 to begin their civil rights work on February 1, 1964. One immediate task was to establish voting classes to prepare African Americans to register to vote. Another was to lay the groundwork for the Mississippi Freedom Summer project and the associated “Freedom School” activities for the dozens of volunteers who would be coming down to Lauderdale and Neshoba Counties during the upcoming summer of 1964.

The violent clash of unequal armies took place in the first half of 1964. On June 21, 1964, the three civil rights workers were brutally murdered by almost two dozen Klansmen in the dark of night off Highway 19, a few miles south of the town of Philadelphia. As a consequence, for the next three years a number of actions were taken by the federal government (the Department of Justice [DOJ] and the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]), the Mississippi state government, the White Knights of the Mississippi KKK, and the secretive Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC) investigators, as well as civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, SNCC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and CORE.

Between December 1964 and October 1967, the following events took place:

• Indictments were filed in federal district court in Mississippi.
• The indictments were thrown out by a federal magistrate and a federal district court judge (both sitting in and ruling from the federal courthouse in Meridian, Mississippi).
• The DOJ took an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, 1965, and, in 1966, the justices unanimously overturned the dismissal of the indictments.
• In October 1967, eighteen Klansmen were finally brought into federal court to face conspiracy—not murder—charges. (The State of Mississippi has never brought these Klansmen into a state court to face murder charges.)
• Seven Klansmen were convicted of conspiracy and, in 1970, after they had exhausted their legal remedies, went off to federal penitentiaries.

A decade later, all had been released, and all returned to Philadelphia and Neshoba County to continue on with their lives. One of them, former deputy sheriff Cecil Price, became a watch repair craftsman in the City Jewelry establishment on the main square in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s. In the early 1990s he would be elected vice president of the Neshoba County Shriners.

Murder in Mississippi examines all these pieces of the tragedy that took place after 11:00 P.M. on Highway 19 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964. It is a story that captures the almost Manichaean struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness that existed in America at that time in history.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Price, et al. was an important, unanimous one. The ruling enabled federal prosecutors to use nineteenth-century civil rights statutes to prosecute criminals who had escaped punishment for criminal acts in southern states. After the Supreme Court’s ruling, in 1967, for the very first time in Mississippi history, white men were convicted of conspiring to take the lives and liberties of American citizens—black and white civil rights workers.

The convictions in the Price trial, however, were unique—because of the mass publicity surrounding the disappearance and murder of the three men, two of whom were white. In the Annual Report of the U.S. Attorney General (1967), it was noted that the Civil Rights Division almost always lost in federal court. In that year “there were no conviction...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Driving on Highway 19 to Philadelphia, Mississippi
• 2. Genesis: Mississippi and the Struggle for Racial Equality
• 3. COFO’S “Mississippi Freedom Summer” Project: The Battle Line Is Drawn
• 4. Informants and Indictments
• 5. U.S. v. Price in the U.S. Supreme Court
• 6. The Trial in Federal District Court
• 7. Is There Justice in Mississippi?
• Chronology
• List of Relevant Cases
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index
• Back Cover