Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [163]
“What did he mean by elimination? ”
“He meant killing a person.”
Eight lawyers rose to defend the accused and, by proxy, Mississippi. Delmar Dennis was “a Judas witness” who “instead of thirty pieces of silver . . . got $15,000!” The FBI’s tactics had resembled the Soviet system, “neighbors informing on neighbors.” More than a hundred witnesses swore to seeing the defendants late that Father’s Day evening. Preacher Killen had been at a funeral home. Triggerman Wayne Roberts was with his aunt, playing canasta. The accused were “salt of the earth kind of people . . . as innocent and pure as the driven snow.” Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers was “in church every time the doors are open.” But Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were “low-class riffraff. . . . Mississippians rightfully resent some hairy beatnik from another state visiting our state with hate and defying our people.” As for the murders, “It may well be that these young men were sacrificed by their own kind for publicity or other reasons.”
Summing up, John Doar sought to defuse lingering resentment of “the invasion”: “The federal government is not invading Philadelphia or Neshoba County, Mississippi. . . . These defendants are tried for a crime under federal law in a Mississippi city, before a Mississippi federal judge, in a Mississippi courtroom.” But the defense tapped resentments as old as Confederate culture. “The strong arm of the federal government” had come to Mississippi to prove “that there is a group of people here in Mississippi so filled with that hate that they conspire together . . . to do away and murder outsiders.” Would the tired old bitterness still work? Even if the charge was a “civil rights violation,” could a Mississippi jury convict “good ol’ boys” of killing two “outsiders” and a “nigger” ?
While the jury deliberated, the defendants yucked it up in the hallway. Only Sam Bowers seemed concerned, smoking and brooding on his own. When the jury deadlocked, the judge ordered them back into deliberation. Finally, a verdict was reached. When read to the court, it left Klansmen visibly shaken. Seven men—Bowers, Roberts, Price, and four others—were found guilty. Seven more, including Sheriff Rainey, were acquitted. A hung jury was declared for four, including Edgar Ray Killen. Claiming she “could never convict a preacher,” a Meridian secretary had been the lone juror defending the organizer of the lynch mob. For the next two months, jurors’ homes were guarded. Many received death threats. Crosses blazed in their hometowns. But in late December 1967, Judge Cox sentenced Wayne Roberts and Sam Bowers to ten years, the rest to three to six. “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man,” the judge declared. “I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”
Outside the courtroom, an onlooker called the verdict “the best thing that’s ever happened to justice in Mississippi.” In Manhattan, Carolyn Goodman hailed the “landmark decision.” Nathan Schwerner hoped Mississippi would soon bring murder charges. Fannie Lee Chaney remarked, “They did better than I thought they would.” After two years of appeals, the convicted went to federal prison in 1970. The case marked the first time since Reconstruction that any white had been convicted of civil rights violations in Mississippi, yet the state still had a generation to travel down the long arc of justice.
Shortly after his