The Killen case

Here are a couple of recent comments on the Killen case in Mississippi that are worthwhile.

Case history may play a strong part of trial in Neshoba killings by Bill Minor Jackson Clarion-Ledger 01/16/05.  Minor was around as a reporter in the 1960s to cover the civil rights controversies first hand. He recalls the federal trial of the killers in the 1964 case, in which some of the perpetrators were convicted by a Mississippi jury, but Killen was acquitted.  The whole thing is well worth reading.  This is an excerpt:

I watched the historic trial play out in the federal courtroom in Meridian back in 1967. Testimony was presented that Killen, then a 42-year-old balding hawk-faced part-time Baptist minister, was ring-leader in the assassination trap set for the three young men when they ventured into Neshoba County in 1964 to help black Mississippians assert their civil rights.

But, as Langdon Anderson, foreman of the federal jury that tried Killen and 17 others told me when I went to visit him two years later at his home in Lumberton, one woman on the jury had remained adamant that she would "never convict a preacher."

Her vote hung the jury on Killen's guilt and he walked free from the federal courtroom that day. Time has marched on and a new Mississippi generation has moved the wheels of justice to confront Killen, now a gaunt 79-year-old, for the most noted of the state's unresolved civil rights crimes.

But the world should not forget the courage it took for 12 white Mississippians on a federal jury nearly 38 years ago to convict seven persons in a time when racial tensions still ran high over the 1964 "Mississippi freedom summer" incursion of outside young civil rights activists.

Also, this comment uses the Killen indictment story to reflect on the murder of another Mississippi civil rights leader, Vernon Dahmer, in 1966: Crimes of past, left unresolved, keep pain alive by Ronnie Agnew Jackson Clarion-Ledger 01/16/05.