Friday marked the 60th anniversary of the “Mississippi Burning” killings, when three civil rights workers were shot to death in Neshoba County and buried in an earthen dam in one of the most notorious crimes of the era.
It was also the 19th anniversary of the belated conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for orchestrating the killings.
The occasion brought back memories of the one time I met Killen, a nearly four-hour interview with him at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, where he would die in 2018 at the age of 92.
I had begun a five-month correspondence with Killen in May 2016. He had written me to complain about the reporting on the first jailhouse interview he had given, to then-Associated Press writer Jack Elliott, and asked that I send him a copy of the AP story.
He agreed to give me an interview, too. I have not read where he ever had another one with a member of the press.
We set it up for a Sunday morning in mid-August, a dreary, somewhat rainy day.
It was one of the most challenging interviews I’ve ever done, not only because of Killen’s notoriety but also because of the conditions under which it was conducted.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections visitation policies were strict. I was not allowed to bring with me a camera, a recording device, or even a pen and paper. Even the handkerchief I had in my pocket was considered contraband. About the only thing I was allowed to keep when I got on the bus carrying visitors over to Unit 31’s visitation room were the clothes I was wearing.
Killen was in Unit 31, the medical unit, because of his poor health. Heart problems and severe injuries he suffered in a logging accident about three months prior to his 2005 state trial had confined him to a wheelchair. An image that has stuck with me is the trickle of blood that oozed down the back of his bald head from a nasty abscess.
But he was plenty animated, and I worked hard as he spoke to try to memorize some of the things he said so that I could later use the direct quotes in my story. Adding to the challenge was his hearing loss and the noisy din of other inmates and their visitors.
When I returned to my car, I sat in the parking lot and wrote down the quotes that stuck out most. Then, while driving the roughly 50 miles back toward Greenwood, I did an audio recording of my recollections from the interview.
As during his sit-down with Jack Elliott, Killen professed to me his innocence in the killings of white New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman and black Mississippian James Chaney. He told me, though, that they deserved to die based on a spurious allegation, probably one that Killen himself had fabricated, that the three had been recruiting young Black males to rape white women. Actually what the three had been doing — and what cost them their lives — was recruiting Black men and women to register to vote and break the lock that white segregationists had on the state.
Killen also continued to deny being a Klansman, though he was unapologetic about being a segregationist. He lapsed toward the end of our interview into racial epithets as he talked about the Black inmates and guards whom he claimed mistreated him.
He referred to himself as the “most hated white man in Mississippi,” a designation in which he seemed to take pride, even while claiming it was not justified.
He meandered a lot in our conversation, and he did not talk as much about the 1964 case as I would have liked, nor about his two trials.
In 1967, a federal jury convicted seven Klansmen on conspiracy charges — that was the most the federal prosecutors could shoot for since the state refused to pursue murder charges — but Killen walked free due to a hung jury. It was learned many years later that one of the jurors said she “could never convict a preacher.” In addition to being a lumber mill operator, Killen was a part-time Baptist minister and had the nickname “Preacher.”
Thirty-eight years, a star-filled Hollywood movie about the case, dogged investigative reporting by Mississippi journalist Jerry Mitchell and changing racial sensibilities led finally to the state trial that resulted in Killen’s conviction on manslaughter charges.
As I was winding up my interview with Killen, he said to me, “Give me a fair shake. I’m not as bad as they make me out to be.”
About two months after my story and a related column published, I got a final letter from him. He didn’t compliment what I wrote, but he said he enjoyed the interview and asked me to come see him again. He signed the letter “Believe me or not your friend Edgar Ray.”
I didn’t take him up on the invitation. The first visit had worried my wife. Plus, short of an 11th-hour conversion or confession, I did not think there was a whole lot more he could tell me that was newsworthy.
We both moved on to other things.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
