It was an old- fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration. Dead were three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. All three were shot in the dark of night on a lonely road in Neshoba Country, Mississippi. Many people predicted such a tragedy when the Mississippi Summer Project, an effort that would bring hundreds of college-age volunteers to “ the most totalitarian state in the country” was announced in April 1964.  The trial of the murderers took place in the courtroom of one of the most determined segregationist judges.

 

Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, sent word in May 1964 to eliminate the despised civil rights activist Michael Schwerner, called Goatee or “Jew Boy.” Schwerner had earned the enmity of the Klan by organizing a black boycott of a white-owned business and aggressively trying to register blacks in and around Meridian to vote.  

 

On June 22, the police in collusion with the Klan killed the three civil rights workers. Immediately thereafter the Justice Department launched a full-scale investigation into the crime.

 

In December 1964, federal agents arrested nineteen men for conspiring to deprive Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman of their civil rights. Trial in the case of United States versus Cecil Price et al. began on October 7, 1967 in the courtroom of Judge William Cox, an ardent segregationist. Judge Cox referred to a group of African-Americans set to testify as a “bunch of chimpanzees.” A defense attorney, Laurel Weir, launched into a series of outrageous questions culminating with a question whether the civil right workers had sought to “get young Negro males to sign a pledge to rape a white woman once a week during the hot summer of 1964?”

 

John Doar who was the prosecution’s leading attorney in his summation to the jury said to the jurors that what he said “ would soon be forgotten, but what you twelve do here today will long be remembered.”

 

On the morning of October 20,1967, the jury returned with its verdict. The verdict on its face appears to be the result of compromise. Seven defendants were convicted, included Sheriff Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, and several other triggermen. Eight men were acquitted, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. The convictions were the first ever for the killing of a civil rights worker.

Two of the defendants got ten years; others got six and four years.  The presiding judge Cox said of his sentences, “ They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man—I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”