Ex-Klan leader guilty in '64 slayings

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — Forty-one years to the day after three civil rights workers were beaten and shot to death, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman was found guilty of manslaughter Tuesday in a trial that marked Mississippi's latest attempt to atone for its bloodstained, racist past.

The jury of nine whites and three blacks took less than six hours to clear Edgar Ray Killen of murder but convict him of the lesser charges in the 1964 killings that galvanized the struggle for equality and helped bring about passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Jeanetta Williams, president of the Salt Lake Branch NAACP, said she was pleased with the guilty verdict.

"It doesn't matter about the color of one's skin; what does matter is they were all three trying to register people to vote," she said. "They shouldn't have lost their lives."

She added that it's important to reflect on the Ku Klux Klan's past intimidation of black voters and those who tried to register them.

"A lot of the history was very gruesome . . . but it's history and it should be taught and it should be talked about," she said.

Killen, a bald figure with owlish bifocals, sat impassively in his wheelchair, an oxygen tube up his nose, as he listened to the verdict.

"Forty-one years after the tragic murders . . . justice finally arrives in Philadelphia, Miss.," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, Mississippi's only black congressman. "Yet, the state of Mississippi must see to it that the wrongs of yesterday do not become the albatrosses of today."

The murder charge carried up to life in prison. But Killen could still spend the rest of his life behind bars; each of the three manslaughter charges is punishable by up to 20 years. Judge Marcus Gordon scheduled sentencing for Thursday.

Civil rights volunteers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — two white New Yorkers — and James Chaney, a black Mississippian, were intercepted by Klansmen in their station wagon on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam, in a case that was dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."

Prosecutors said Killen — a part-time preacher and sawmill operator — organized the carloads of Klansmen who hunted down and killed the three young men.