Just Curious

Mississippi Burning

I have followed this case for a while: the infamous murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi by local Klansmen including a sheriff deputy and a Baptist minister (!), in a fateful morning in 1964.

At first, the local authorities as well as their powerful patrons in Washington D.C., including Senator James "Big Jim" O. Eastland (D-MS), a most notorious segregationist and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, tried to cover this up. Senator Eastland personally called President Lyndon B. Johnson telling him that "them three kids" who disappeared that summer probably were sipping soda-pop somewhere in Chicago, laughing their ass off when the whole Nation has been rallying after their cause: namely, the right to vote for citizens of African ancestry.

But of course people knew that this was a big pack of lies. FBI stepped in, and J. Edgar Hoover sent more than a hundred agents down to Mississippi, where they finally found the body of the victims. Arrests were made, and the case was tried in a U.S. District Court, in a trial presided over by an avowed segregationist judge, the "Hon" William Cox (U.S. v. Cecil Price, et al)

At first the District Judge, being a good white supremacist himself who belived that the black witnesses to this case were "a bunch of chimpanzees," tried to throw the case out, until politicians from the North, like Senators Everett Dirksen (R-IL), Jacob Javits (R-NY) and Congressman Peter Rodino (D-NJ) tried to have him tried and impeached in the Senate. The U.S. Supreme Court also stepped in to reinstate the indictments. The 19 conspirators was finally charged for violating the civil rights of the 3 victims.

After a fairly lengthy trial, seven of the accused were convicted, nine acquitted and three received hung-verdicts. The convicted were sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison. The "Hon" Judge Cox remarked "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved."


The interesting thing is the mastermind behind all these, the Baptist minister, was never convicted, because a woman in the jury claimed that she could never convict a preacher (!)

But don't worry, the State of Mississippi is reopening this case this year, and the 81 year old minister is on trial again. Jim Hood, the Attorney General of Mississippi, will personally persecute him in Court. Yes, yes, we are not satisfied, and "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." (Martin Luther King Jr., citing the Prophet Amos)

Here's the link to a press interview given by the Mississippi AG:

http://www.ago.state.ms.us/news/index.php?use=jan10-2005

posted by James Chang @ 10:29 AM