Revenge on the Ku Klux Klan

Baptist was convicted only 41 years later

A Philadelphia, Mississippi court found 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen guilty of organizing the murders of three African-American rights activists 41 years ago. Typically, such a crime is punishable by 20 years in prison. Now a Baptist preacher, Killen arrived in court in a wheelchair. But then he was a member of the racist organization Ku Klux Klan and a wealthy businessman. It has been proven that Killen paid money to several of his friends, including Ku Klux Klan leader Sam Bowers and Philadelphia Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, to kill human rights activists.

White New Yorkers, 24-year-old Michael Schwerner and 20-year-old Andy Goodman, along with their black comrade from Mississippi, 21-year-old James Chaney, paid with their lives for participating in the mass movement to grant voting rights to blacks in the United States. They were last seen alive on June 21, 1964. All three were from the Congress of Racial Equality. They were investigating the arson of the Mount Zion Church in Neshoba and its school. There, parishioners and black children were taught literacy and the “philosophy of the civil rights movement.”

On June 23, Schwerner’s burned-out car was found, and only a month and a half later, the secretly buried bodies were found. The investigation showed that Goodman was beaten to death and his comrades were shot in the heart.

The atrocity sparked a nationwide rise in the movement for the ultimate emancipation of African Americans. It was led by Baptist preacher Martin Luther King. He himself became the victim of a political assassination in March 1968, but even before that, in August 1965, blacks in the American South were given voting rights.

The killers of the Mississippi Three were sentenced in October 1967 to minor terms of imprisonment “for participating in a conspiracy.” Killen was then released. However, many years later they returned to the case, as new evidence appeared. In August 1998, then 73-year-old Bowers, a former Klan leader, was sent to prison for life for complicity in 60 political murders. Killen's turn has now come.

The Ku Klux Klan (the name imitates the sound of a rifle bolt being jerked) was created in 1864, after the American Civil War. It was fought by the North of the United States against the breakaway Confederacy of the South for the liberation of blacks from slavery. The stated goal of the secret organization is to “protect the honor and property” of the Dixie southerners who lost the war from former slaves and Yankee northerners. The clan dissolved itself in 1869, but was revived in the 1920s and expanded its activities throughout the country. In the first half of the 20th century, with his lynchings, costumed covens and burning crosses, he became the personification of racial intolerance.

The last leader of the clan, David Duke, was in Moscow in December 2000 and at gatherings of our chauvinists he spoke of his confidence that “from Russia, pride in the white race will spread throughout the world.” In March 2003, Duke was sentenced to 15 months in the United States for embezzlement of donations to the clan and non-payment of taxes, and at the same time was forced to undergo forced treatment for gambling addiction.

Alexander SAMOKHOTKIN