This is interesting. Its one of the most historic events along with the four girls that died in the church basement and a few other events. I had not realized it was never resolved, but its been re-opened.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/01/08/reputed_klansman_denies_murders/ wrote:
Reputed Klansman denies murders
4 decades later, a hunt for truth
PHILADELPHIA, Miss. -- A reputed Ku Klux Klan member pleaded not guilty yesterday to state charges of murdering three civil rights workers more than 40 years ago in one of the most notorious crimes of Mississippi's troubled past.
Wearing handcuffs and an orange prison jumpsuit, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, loudly answered "not guilty" three times when asked how he pleaded to the charges that he killed James Chaney, 21, of Mississippi, and two New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24. The three were slain in 1964 while working to promote voting rights among Mississippi's blacks...
Known as "The Preacher," Killen is the first person to be arrested on murder charges in the 41-year-old case, which was dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning." The names of the three murder victims have long been synonymous with the horrors that often accompanied attempts to desegregate the Deep South and bring basic voting rights to the disenfranchised...
In 1999, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger published an interview with Sam Bowers, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who said he was glad to see the ringleader of the crime go free. Later, a group known as the Philadelphia Coalition pushed Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to reopen the investigation... But no arrests had been made.
Mississippi has had some success over the years in exorcising demons of its past with high-profile prosecutions of decades-old cases...
Avants had been acquitted in 1967, the same year that the men accused of killing Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney went on trial. One of those men -- Billy Wayne Posey, who was convicted of conspiracy in 1967 -- was among those who streamed into the grand jury room Thursday in Philadelphia, a town of 7,300 northeast of the capital city of Jackson.
Reopening the case has not appeased all the victims' relatives. Ben Chaney, the younger brother of James Chaney, has called the latest investigation a sham that may target one or two unrepentant Klansmen but spare wealthy, influential whites who he said had a hand in the killings.
The slayings of the multiracial trio -- Schwerner and Goodman were white and Chaney was black -- took place during the fabled Freedom Summer, when hundreds of idealistic young people flooded into the South to educate blacks about voting rights. The three friends disappeared but were found buried in the muck of a country dam. They'd been beaten and shot.
After a massive federal investigation, seven men were convicted by an all-white jury on federal conspiracy charges in 1967, but none of the men faced murder charges and none served more than six years in prison. Killen went free after the trial. One juror reportedly said he refused to vote to convict a preacher...
No details were givin about what his grounds were for pleading not guilty, so I can't really say. But it seems from the above statement about scapegoating and wealthy men who had a hand in it that clearly this is a much larger structure. Not that I have to say that, its kind of obvious, but its one of the reasons I still stand by the need for a distinction between "random" acts of violence and hate crimes.
