It was Meridian, Mississippi, the summer of 1976. Preacher Killen was nine years past his federal conspiracy trial in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in nearby Philadelphia, twelve years from the actual murders, and in 1976 that seemed like a long time, though I realize now it wasn’t and that choosing to interview him in my motel room was not the smartest thing I have ever done.
The viciousness behind the murders was of a magnitude that to utter the words “murders of the three civil rights workers,” even the names Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, was sufficient for most people to summon the gruesome details of the trio’s disappearance and the discovery forty-four days later of their decomposing bodies on the farm of one of the town’s wealthier residents. They were of a magnitude, too, that J. Edgar Hoover opened a field office in Jackson, Mississippi, to investigate the murders and two hundred other unsolved cases of racial violence—all suspected to be the work of a new, particularly virulent Klan known as the White Knights of Mississippi.
The three workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—were engaged in a massive drive to register black voters and had that Sunday, June 21, 1964, driven the forty miles from Meridian to examine the ruins of a burned-out black church that was to have been used as a training school. Chaney was black and a Meridian native; Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish and from New York, and in that charged climate of 1964 they were not welcome in Mississippi, or in most of the South. All three worked with the Congress of Racial Equality. All three were in their early twenties, “hardly more than boys,” the government prosecutor would say at the eventual trial of Killen and seventeen other men.
The trio’s smoldering Ford station wagon was recovered two days after their disappearance, but the search for bodies stretched into weeks, the weeks into a month, with the Mississippi River giving up the corpses of two black males who in some real or imagined way had dared cross the color line—but not the bodies of the three voting-rights workers.