Mississippi: Time of Trial

On the evening of June 21, 1964, Civil Rights Workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney disappeared shortly after they were released from Neshoba County Jail in Philadelphia, Miss. Six weeks later, their bullet-punctured bodies were found. Not until last week, when 18 Mississippians went on trial in the Meridian courtroom of U.S. District Judge William Harold Cox, 66, did the public learn the Government's version of the young activists' journey to death.

The Next Victims. Though the Justice Department's case, in effect, sought to show that the defendants conspired to kill the civil rights workers, the official charge against them was the relatively minor crime of conspiracy to deprive the slain men of their constitutional rights. Only the state could have brought a murder charge, and it has failed to do so. Nonetheless, if the defendants thought they would get any extra legal break from Judge Cox, a native Mississippian, they soon learned better. While Cox presided firmly and fairly, the prosecution played its trump cards: two paid FBI informers, both former Ku Klux Klansmen, and a chilling eyewitness account of the killings.

Carlton Wallace Miller, 43, a Meridian police sergeant who received $2,400 from the FBI over a two-year period, testified that the Meridian chapter of the White Knights of the Klan had marked Schwerner for "elimination—the term for murdering someone." To lure Schwerner from Meridian, where he and his wife Rita were operating a Negro community center, said Miller, Klansmen burned down the Mount Zion (Negro) Church at Longdale, outside Philadelphia. Five days later, Schwerner and two companions, Goodman, a white man, and Chancy, a Negro, drove 50 miles to Longdale to inspect the ruins of the church.

Near Philadelphia, the three men were arrested on a speeding charge by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, 29. Soon, said James E. Jordan, 41, who received $8,000 from the FBI and has been living safely in Georgia and Florida since turning informer nearly three years ago, the word went swiftly around Meridian that there were some "civil rights workers locked up and they need their rear ends torn up."

Jordan and seven others, he said, armed themselves and drove to Phil adelphia. There they parked by the courthouse where Ethel Glen ("Hop") Barnett, 45, current Democratic nominee for sheriff of Neshoba County and one of the defendants, told them to wait. Two uniformed men in a city police car informed them that the prospective victims had been released. Later they were told by men in a highway patrol car that the victims would be stopped somewhere down the highway by Deputy Sheriff Price, who, along with Neshoba Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, is now on trial.