“So they began to work them over, the three,
But most the dark one,
Bones smashed like sugarcane
In a molasses of blood,
Reduced them, young man by young man,
To a sobbing retching mass, partly conscious,
Till the three hearts shuddered and stopped
To the five bullets they shared, unevenly.”
— Elizabeth Sewell, “This Land Was Theirs Before They Were the Land’s,” 1964
PHILADELPHIA, MISS. – It was a rhetorical question, but one freighted with implication for this town and the surrounding Neshoba County. For Mississippi and the South, as well.It was a question that should inspire those throughout the South who long for justice and reconciliation.
And it was a question that should haunt diseased souls, especially those of Mississippi’s two U.S. senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who still play the race card and see little need to heal the South’s wounds left from decades of terror, beatings, shootings, church bombings, cross burnings — and almost 4,800 lynchings between 1882 and 1964.
The question, sweeping in its simplicity, from retired Neshoba Democrat editor Stanley Dearman:
“Can you believe that this town produced Dick Molpus and Edgar Ray Killen?”
The polarity between the two men is an eloquent metaphor for the South — Killen the distilled, arrogant essence of evil; Molpus an ever-evolving archetype of what’s good in the Southland.
Ku Klux Klansman Killen was convicted last week on three counts of manslaughter for organizing the June 21, 1964, murders of three Civil Rights workers, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, Andrew “Andy” Goodman and James “J.E.” Chaney.
Garbed in a yellow prison outfit — his days of brightly embroidered Klan robes are likely behind him forever — Killen on June 23 was given a triple dose of 20-year sentences. Sixty years in the big house should ensure that the 80-year-old white supremacist never again befouls the streets of Philadelphia. Several times in the hours after his sentencing, Philadelphians remarked to me with verbal winks that they hoped Killen had a long, long life. Such as living to, oh, say, 140 years.
And who is Dick Molpus? Mississippians remember him as a former secretary of state and candidate for governor whose political aspirations crashed and burned after he denounced the state’s racist past.
Far more important than his resume, however, Molpus is credited with inspiring a citizens’ movement — the Philadelphia Coalition — that took root and grew into a quest for justice, culminating in Killen’s conviction.
“I think that without the courage Dick showed in 1989, when unscripted he told the families of the murdered Civil Rights workers that ‘I apologize’ for what happened in his town and his state, well, I’m not sure that all of the rest would have happened,” says Fent DeWeese, a lawyer and member of the Philadelphia Coalition.
The occasion of Molpus’ seismic-shock speech was the 25th anniversary memorial of the murders. In 2004, Molpus spoke again, at the 40th anniversary service. The scene was the Mt. Zion Methodist Church, which five days before the 1964 murders had been torched by the Klan, its congregation beaten by cowards in hoods.
In the audience last year was Gov. Haley Barbour — who had defeated an incumbent in 2003 by, in part, subtly invoking the emblems of segregation. Molpus took careful aim at Barbour, Lott and the other Dixiecrats in Republican clothing, and proclaimed:
“Few politicians today use outright race baiting, but we still have some that use the symbols and utter the phrases and everyone knows what the code is.”
Jim Prince, current editor of the Democrat, succinctly sums up Molpus’ assault on the state’s leading politicians: “courage.”
Molpus deflects the praise. “I’m flattered by what people say about me. And if the price I paid was that I got beat [in the 1995 loss to GOP incumbent Gov. Kirk Fordice], well, that’s small compared to what we’ve accomplished.
“But remember that I’m no different than most folks around here,” Molpus says. “I didn’t start out being who I am today. I grew. Our town and state have grown.”
So, let’s use Molpus’ trajectory as a guide to that most elusive of Southern grails: race reconciliation.
“[T]his investigation discloses that there appeared to be a conspiracy on the part of the prime suspects; namely, the Sheriff, his Deputy, and others who are closely associated with the Sheriff’s Office who either were in law enforcement or had formerly been in law enforcement, to deprive the colored population of their civil rights.”
— FBI memo in the MIBURN (Mississippi Burning) file, Sept. 18, 1964
I’ve made two pilgrimages to Philadelphia in the last three months, the most recent to witness Killen’s trial. During the first, I met Molpus at the house where he grew up, and where his mother still lives, During that visit, Molpus pointed and said, “That’s the Turner Catledge chair. Right there is where he sat.” Catledge is best known as a correspondent and managing editor for the New York Times. But he was raised in Philadelphia and began his newspaper career running errands for the Neshoba Democrat.
After the 1964 murders, Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld was dispatched to Philadelphia. He recounted his confrontation with its citizens three months ago in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:
“I would write about the social stratum that thought of itself as making up Philadelphia’s ‘responsible majority.’ These citizens may have been neither responsible nor a majority, but that’s how they saw themselves. Loosely defined, it was the stratum that embraced the country club members who … despised the idea of racial integration but couldn’t afford resistance, who never joined the Klan and wouldn’t have been asked — all of whom now seethed with resentment because the whole country associated their town with the lynchings of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. … Some were silent out of fear; most viewed the three murdered men as intruders and didn’t see anything wrong with confronting intruders.”
In other words, murder was a public relations problem for the town’s leading citizens.
Molpus’ father was one of them, a sawmill owner, but more progressive than most. “He taught me to call black people ‘mister’ and ‘missus’,” recalls Molpus, who as a boy worked at the mill and saw, among black laborers “a lot more kindness, compassion and decency than what was sitting at the First Baptist Church.”
The Philadelphia elders “had called Turner Catledge and demanded that Lelyveld be fired,” Molpus says.
Catledge trekked to Mississippi and held the meeting with the town gentry at the Molpus home. Lelyveld wasn’t fired, and Molpus says the reporter was on target.
“The Klan had joined forces with what we called the ‘uptown Klan,’ the White Citizens Council,” Molpus says. “They were offended they’d been portrayed as rednecks, when the real problem was a cancer in the community.”
“This is a terrible town, the worst I’ve seen. There is a complete reign of terror here.”
— The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 1966, after being confronted by a Philadelphia mob led by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, who later served six years in prison for complicity in the 1964 murders
Dick Molpus is sitting in a restaurant in Jackson, the state capital, about 90 miles southwest of Philadelphia. His round face is a road map of upward curving smile lines.Molpus is now in the business of managing timberlands. His clearly favorite years were 1980-’84, when he was an aide to Gov. William Winter, the first progressive to break the segregationists’ stranglehold on state politics.
The fact that there is a William Winter Institute of Racial Reconciliation at Ole Miss is a good measure of how far the former governor pulled the state out of the darkness. Now in the hands of lesser men, Mississippi is backsliding.
“The people Winter brought into state government, we were all young,” Molpus says. “They called us the ‘Boys of Spring.’ Another name might be the ‘Redneck Camelot.'”
Until he was 14 — the time of the murders — Molpus says he was much like other youths in the community. “Jim Crow was the way things were,” he says. “No one questioned it.” But the triple killing moved something in Molpus. “There was right and there was wrong,” he says. “It wasn’t always possible to reconcile what I knew to be right with what I’d been taught growing up.”
Later, when he was president of the Sigma Chi at Ole Miss, he cast a vote to integrate the fraternity. “That got me in a huge amount of trouble,” he says. “To be truthful, though, I had a foot in both camps.”
The turning point in his life was connecting with Winter. “I couldn’t identify with kids from Queens,” Molpus shrugs. “I had never known anyone who went to college out of state. But William Winter was a man I could relate to.”
Molpus won the secretary of state’s race in 1987 and served until 1995, when he lost the race for governor. Even Neshoba County sided with Molpus’ opponent, Fordice. Molpus had opened Mississippi’s darkest closet and showed the world the moldering skeletons when, while secretary of state, he made his 1989 “apology” speech. Fordice used that, in the well-established tradition of Southern race-baiters, to help claim victory.
Winter, meanwhile, ran for U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Thad Cochran. “I got ‘landslid’,” Winter quipped during a March interview with me.
Personally observed Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen this date while Killen was dressed in suit and tie at FGJ [Federal Grand Jury], Biloxi, Miss. Positively identified Killen as being the member of the abduction group referred to as “Preacher.”
— FBI teletype, MIBURN file, Sept. 23, 1964
“The minister stated, ‘No, they are at least 15 feet deep.'”
— Statement to the FBI by an informant, MIBURN file, Sept. 19, 1964
What must really gall Edgar Ray Killen is that it wasn’t the FBI that finally nailed him. It wasn’t the holier-than-thou reporters from the liberal New York Times. And it certainly wasn’t those bugaboos of yesteryear, the “outside agitators,” who thundered the guilty verdicts.No, it was his hometown, his own neighbors. The prosecutors were Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, from the nearby town of Houston, and the local district attorney, Mark Duncan. The 12 jurors were all bedrock Philadelphians, nine white and three black. And while the jurors split evenly at first on whether to convict Killen of murder or manslaughter, not one felt he was innocent.
In the past, most in the community — indeed, the state and the South — would have feared confronting the Klan. Or they would have fretted over what their neighbors would have said. Or they would have anguished that slapping down a man like Killen could cost them their jobs — maybe their lives.
Over four decades, Killen has remained the same malevolent Killen who rallied racists, threatened critics, organized vigilantes and masterminded murder. Even though now confined to a wheelchair and sucking on an oxygen bottle, Killen and his kin exude malevolence. He taunted and even struck reporters. His brother J.D. Killen also attacked a reporter earlier in the year.
Edgar Ray Killen snarled — literally — at the media, but didn’t give interviews, except to the website of the state’s reigning racist, Richard Barrett. A year ago, Barrett asked Killen, “Is there something folks could do for you, right now?”
Killen replied: “Just be my friend.”
This from a man who once could bend law enforcement to his will and dominate a whole county. But today, if Killen still has friends, they were absent from the jury of his peers and from the jury of public opinion.
“For once the state of Mississippi says, ‘We acknowledge the pain of the past,'” commented Deborah Owen, a longtime Philadelphia resident who took time to sit through the trial “because this is important. We need to reject Mr. Killen. We need to heal.”
Jim Prince, the Democrat editor, remarked, “In the 1988 movie [Mississippi Burning], when the imperial wizard, Sam Bowers, comes to Philadelphia, it’s depicted like a town meeting. Everybody in town attended. We knew that wasn’t so, that the Klan was a minority, but that movie is how people around the nation perceived us. Now we’ve shown them what the real Philadelphia is.”
“The nation was outraged and shocked through and through.
Call J. Edgar Hoover. He’ll know what to do.
For they’ve murdered two white men, and a colored boy, too.”
— Tom Paxton, folk singer, “Goodman and Schwerner and Chaney,” 1965
If there was a star during Killen’s trial, it was Rita Bender, who at 22 became the widow of Mickey Schwerner. Now 63, Bender is a Seattle attorney. But the decades haven’t blunted the sharp edge of the activist.”The reason this case gained such prominence,” she remarked to me on the 41st anniversary of the murders, “is that two of the men were white. How many unsolved murders are there, black men? Where’s their justice?”
That’s the same message she delivered in 1964, when she told reporters, “I suggest that if Mr. Chaney, a native Negro Mississippian, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, this case, like many before it, would have gone unnoticed.”
Searchers — hundreds of federal agents and Navy personnel — ripped up the Mississippi countryside looking for the three missing men. They failed; a tip finally led, 44 days after the slayings, to the corpses buried 15 feet under a dirt dam. But searchers did turn up other bodies, including one 14-year-old black youth, Herbert Orsby, wearing a Congress of Racial Equality T-shirt. His case was never pursued by state law enforcement.
Throughout the South, there are unsolved race-linked murder cases. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery counts 15 — but those are just the ones where there are investigative leads. Others, such as Rita Bender, put the number at about two dozen killed during the Freedom Summer of 1964 alone. Those simmering months also saw 200 churches burned in the South.
The most prominent cases are those of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old pulled from his bed and beaten to death for allegedly whistling at a white woman; and a 1946 Monroe, Ga., incident in which two black couples were murdered. Till’s case is currently being revived in Mississippi — five people linked to his death are still alive. Black legislators in Georgia are clamoring for the state to reopen the Monroe investigation; prosecutors, echoing the past, are lukewarm.
“If you want closure, however imperfect, all of these deaths must be answered,” says Howard Ball, a University of Vermont law professor who attended Killen’s trial and who authored a definitive book on the Philadelphia incident, Murder in Mississippi. “Reconciliation will only come about when the generation that held those crazy beliefs is gone. In the meantime, to heal, the truth must be exposed and the guilty brought to justice.”
The record has been encouraging, if limited. In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in the 1963 ambush killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi. Sam Bowers, the Klan imperial wizard who authorized the Philadelphia “eliminations,” was convicted in 1998 for ordering another murder, that of Vernon Dahmer, who had allowed his store to be used for voter registration of blacks. Two men were convicted in 2001 and 2002 for the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four young girls; a third man had been convicted in 1977.
“I believe in states’ rights. [I promise to] restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.”
— Ronald Reagan, launching his presidential campaign, August 1980, Philadelphia, Miss.
Ronald Reagan’s selection of Philadelphia for a stump speech was calculated. “State’s rights” is the well-worn crypto-phrase for segregation. Mississippi’s Ku Klux Klan endorsed Reagan. Much more important, disaffected white males were mobilized by the “wedge” issue of fear of African-Americans.”They’re still doing it,” says former Gov. Winter. “Look at all of the fake issues. Now it’s hating gays. Gay marriage has got everyone upset. They say unless we put the Ten Commandments in every building in the state, society will collapse.
“It’s the same technique that [former Gov.] Ross Barnett used with segregation. All it is is demagoguery.”
Jim Perry, Gov. Barbour’s policy chief, told me in March that “race is no longer a factor, but Winter wants to keep it plugged into every issue.”
Barbour, of course, castigated his opponent in 2003 for “attacking our flag,” a failed attempt two years earlier to remove the Confederate emblem from the state banner.
“We still have someone in state leadership who embraces the symbols of hate,” says Ben Chaney, brother to one of the three murdered activists.
Still, the tried-and-true appeal to race fears may have finally hit a brick wall in the form of the Philadelphia Coalition, the group Dick Molpus inspired.
“I call it a crack in the Southern strategy,” opines Donna Ladd, editor of the Jackson Free Press and a Philadelphia native. “We have the biggest inferiority complex in the nation because of the racist heritage.”
The coalition, which includes blacks, whites and Choctaw Native Americans, began as an effort to do something for the 2004 40th anniversary of the Philadelphia murders.
“Some of the white members wanted to just build a memorial,” Molpus says. “The black members looked at them, and said, ‘Whoa, that’s not enough.'”
Susan Glisson, director of the Winter Institute at Ole Miss, comments that “justice is a prerequisite to reconciliation. You have to do that groundwork first, and that’s what they did in Philadelphia.”
The going hasn’t always been smooth. Democrat editor Prince feels Fent DeWeese and many of the black members are “radical liberals.” DeWeese says Prince’s conservatism has alienated many.
And, after the coalition invited Barbour (“He is the governor of the state, after all,” DeWeese says) to the 2004 memorial service, some activists split off and started a rival annual commemoration.
DeWeese says moderation and seeking common ground were the secrets to the coalition’s success.
“You had to have protests, vitriolic protests, in the beginning to get attention,” DeWeese says. “But why things worked was because of relationship building. Bankers, business owners, politicians, city and county government — they all wanted justice. They joined arms with the activists.
“OK, maybe some wanted resolution because they thought it would benefit business development, but so what? We succeeded in getting the community involved.”
For several years, some Mississippi officials had been investigating reopening the Philadelphia murder case. The patient advocacy of the coalition pushed the process along, resulting in Killen’s indictment in January and conviction June 21.
“We simply did the right thing,” Prince says. “But now our greatest challenge lies ahead.”
Primarily the focus for the future will be education — a summit of teachers to deal with teaching Civil Rights history coincided with the trial. And more justice — seven Klansmen involved in the 1964 incident are still alive and loose.
“Clearly, there’s more work to be done,” Molpus says. “It began with redemption in Philadelphia. Next, we must get on to the issues today: poverty, literacy, inadequate schools, health care. All of those have issues that must be addressed through the process of race reconciliation.”
“So best we think ourselves
How all of us (and we are all Mississippians)
Will be called on to honor
In terms none can foresee
The gift outright”
— Elizabeth Sewell, “The Land Was Theirs before They Were the Land’s”
As I was preparing to leave Philadelphia last week, I was reading Elizabeth Sewell’s poem on Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. It had been given to me by the Rev. Ralph Edwin King, whose face still bears scars from a Klan attack decades ago. King was the only white clergyman with the courage to speak at James Chaney’s funeral 41 years ago.Today, as he did then, he urges forgiveness.
When Killen was convicted and sentenced, I, like most who witnessed the trial, rejoiced.
I was 17 in 1964, and I had desperately wanted to join Freedom Summer. Instead, I grudgingly followed my family’s tradition, joined the military and was at Navy boot camp. When I first read about the killings, I wanted revenge. I couldn’t understand how in America people were murdered for wanting to vote.
I still wanted retribution as I watched Killen on trial.
And then I read the words King gave me. There is a lot of work to be done. Crosses are still burned in North Carolina. Jeb Bush in Florida was still trying to intimidate black voters in the last election. Sonny Perdue and Georgia’s Republican-dominated Legislature have passed a voter ID law sure to disenfranchise many blacks, Hispanics, poor whites and the elderly. Our poor and minorities are fighting a war that British documents show is more a “grudge” between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein than anything else — and the rich and powerful profit. Our schools suck. Health care is increasingly an unaffordable luxury for many. Our old age safety net is threatened, and those most likely to perish if it’s ripped are, again, blacks, Hispanics, and the poor.
I can’t forgive Killen. I’m not his victim in any direct way. But I hope he seeks forgiveness from those he horribly wronged. I doubt “Preacher” will ever do that.
My last act in Philadelphia was mundane, picking up some laundry from Gipson Cleaners near the courthouse. Regina Hicks, the operator, calls her customers by name. “Mr. Sugg, we just saw you on TV.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I’m one of those annoying reporters who have invaded your town.”
Hicks gathered her staff — Ann Stubbs, Shirley Tingle, Shunda Horne, Penny Stewart, and Toby Gill, who asserts that he’s the “deputy mayor” of the town.
To a person, black and white, they told me how much the Killen case had meant to Philadelphia. “We can heal the wounds,” said Hicks, who qualifies as a member of the Philadelphia establishment. “We’re not the town in the movie. We have worked for justice and this is a great place to live now, even if it wasn’t always that way.”
I agree.
Senior Editor John Sugg’s daily reports on the Philadelphia trial can be found at www.johnsugg.com.
Senior Editor John Sugg has made two trips to Mississippi in recent months reporting on race reconciliation. Prior to the triple manslaughter convictions of Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, Sugg recounted on his blog about visiting the road where three civil rights workers were slain. He told about the courage of Rita Bender, widow of one of the workers. He reported on eyewitness accounts of the civil rights struggle by its veterans. And, he even let Mississippi’s reigning racist have his say. For photos of the 1964 crime scene, the 2005 trial, and all of Sugg’s posts while in Mississippi, visit www.johnsugg.com/mississippi_burning/.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2005.
