St. Louis, Missouri 2021-06-27 08:37:00 –
Jackson, Mississippi (AP) —A never-before-seen incident file, photo, or other record of an investigation into the infamous killings of three Mississippi civil rights workers, for the first time in 57 years after death. It was open to the public.
The murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County in 1964 heightened public anger and spurred the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They later became the subject of the movie “Mississippi Burning”.
Previously sealed material from 1964 to 2007 was transferred from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office to the Mississippi Archive History Department in 2019. As of last week, it was open to the public at William F. Winter Archives. And Jackson’s historic building.
Records include case files, Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandums, research notes, federal informant reports, and witness testimony. Photographs of the excavation of the victim’s body and subsequent autopsy, as well as aerial photographs of the burial site, are also available, according to the Mississippi Archives and History Department.
The collection is stored in three catalog records. Series 2870 contains the Attorney General’s investigation file, Series 2902 contains FBI notes, and Series 2903 contains photos.
All three Freedom Summer workers, all in their twenties, were investigating the incineration of a black church near Philadelphia, Mississippi, when they disappeared in June 1964.
Philadelphia’s deputy sheriff arrested them for traffic violations, warned the mob, and then released them. The then-Governor of Mississippi claimed that their disappearance was a hoax, and racist Senator Jim Eastland said a few weeks later before their bodies found in a soil dam were dug up. He told President Lyndon Johnson that it was a “promotional stunt.”
In the 1967 case, 19 men were charged with federal crime. Seven were convicted of violating the civil rights of the victims. No one has served for more than 6 years.
In 2004, the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office resumed the investigation. As a result, Edgar Reikilen, a 1960s Coquerk Scramble leader and Rev. Baptist, was convicted of manslaughter in June 2005.
At a state trial in 2005, witnesses witnessed Kiren going to Meridian on June 21, 1964, rounding up Clansman’s cart and ambushing Schwerner, Channie, and Goodman, with plastic or rubber gloves on some of the members of the clans. He testified that he had ordered him to bring. According to witnesses, Killen went to Philadelphia’s funeral hall as an alibi during a deadly attack.
Killen died in prison in 2018. Mississippi’s then Attorney General Jim Hood officially completed the investigation in 2016.
Case files on 1964 Civil Rights worker killings made public | St. Louis News Headlines Source link Case files on 1964 Civil Rights worker killings made public | St. Louis News Headlines
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