Mississippi Burning: June 21, 1964

On the evening of June twenty-first, nineteen sixty-four, Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price pulled over a blue Ford station wagon on State Highway Nineteen near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Inside were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Price arrested them on a pretext: a traffic stop. He held them in the Neshoba County jail until after dark, then released them.

He followed them out of town.

Price coordinated with members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The three men were stopped again on a dirt road, taken from the vehicle, and shot. Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time Baptist preacher and Klan organizer, had recruited and directed the group that carried out the killings. The bodies were taken to an earthen dam on the Olen Burrage property near the Old Jolly Farm, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia, where a bulldozer covered them in fresh clay. The station wagon was burned.

The FBI investigation, code-named Mississippi Burning and known as MIBURN, was the largest federal investigation in Mississippi history to that point. The agency offered rewards and used informants inside the Klan. The bodies were found on August fourth, forty-four days after the disappearance, after a paid informant identified the location.

In nineteen sixty-seven, eighteen men were tried by the federal government on civil rights conspiracy charges. Seven were convicted. None served more than six years. Killen was acquitted when one juror said she could not convict a preacher.

In two thousand five, the state of Mississippi tried Killen on three counts of manslaughter. He was convicted on all three counts and sentenced to twenty years on each, to run consecutively. He was eighty years old at sentencing. He died in prison in two thousand eighteen. He was ninety-two.

The civil rights workers whose murders he organized were twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-four years old in June nineteen sixty-four.