Klan Member Convicted for 1964 Murder of Three Civil Rights Workers in Mississippi
Edgar Ray Killen, a Mississippi Ku Klux Klan member, was convicted on this day for the murder of three civil rights workers –James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner– exactly forty-one years earlier on June 21, 1964.
Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were participants in Mississippi Freedom Summer, a major civil rights effort that brought several hundred mostly white volunteers to Mississippi to work on registering African-Americans to vote.
The prosecution was brought by the Mississippi attorney general as one of several “atonement” prosecutions throughout the south designed to atone for crimes against civil rights activists in earlier decades.
Killen was convicted of three charges of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He died in 2018 while still serving his sentence in Parchman State Penitentiary.
Learn more about Freedom Summer: Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy (2010)
And more: John Dittmer, et al., Freedom Summer: A Brief History with Documents (2016)
And still more: Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (1990)
Learn about the Andrew Goodman Foundation
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here