Mississippi: A Crime Called Conspiracy

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Holstered pistols and blackjacks humped against their hips and red mud clung to their boots as Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price got out of their squad car and walked into the Philadelphia, Miss., courthouse one chill morning last week. Just back from a dawn search for a moonshine still in backwoods country, neither seemed to notice four men in trench coats waiting in cars parked near the courthouse.

Moments after the lawmen entered their office, the four FBI agents left their cars, went into the courthouse, quietly told Rainey and Price they were under arrest. Unsurprised, the sheriff removed his pistol and badge, handed his keys to his secretary. Then Rainey and Price walked out with the agents, down through a cursing gauntlet of local rednecks who had gathered as soon as they spotted the FBI men, now as familiar as neighbors after months of work in the area. The crowd knew perfectly well that at last the long-awaited event had occurred: Neshoba County's two top law officers had been charged with complicity in the murder of three civil rights workers—Michael Schwerner, 24, James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20.

On that same grey morning, some 60 other FBI men had fanned out through the area. In quick, efficient visits to piney woods, farms, back-road gas stations and roadside house trailers, they collected a motley crew of 19 more men—including a Freewill Baptist preacher, a tavern bouncer, a 71-year-old Philadelphia cop, and a 17-year-old high school dropout. The 19 were charged, too, in connection with the killings. Whatever the outcome, the trial will certainly become one of the most celebrated in years—if only because the murder of the three young civil rights workers had been so shameless, shocking and senseless a crime.

Marked for Death. On June 21, a scorching, oppressive day, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman had driven a blue station wagon through Neshoba County to investigate a burned-out Negro church near Philadelphia. All worked with the Council of Federated Organizations in Meridian, Miss., setting up voter-registration projects. Chaney, a Negro, was a native of Meridian. Goodman, a New Yorker, had begun work only that day. Schwerner, a bearded youth from New York, had been a COFO worker in Philadelphia for six months. Because of his civil rights aggressiveness and because he was Jewish, he had been marked for death as early as May by an occult, segregationist organization called the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Founded just last March, the Knights dedicated themselves to carrying out terrorist tactics against civil rights workers coming in from the North.

After visiting the church, the three workers were stopped by Cecil Price, who claimed that they were speeding near Philadelphia. He jailed them until long after dark, then released them. They disappeared. Price insisted that he followed them to the edge of town, saw them drive away.