Senselessness in Georgia

During the two weeks that he was at Fort Benning, Ga., on Army reserve duty as a lieutenant colonel last month, Lemuel Penn, 49, Negro director of vocational high schools for the District of Columbia school system, never set foot off the base. Reason: he did not want to be responsible--even inadvertently--for causing a racial incident. On the night of July 10, his training completed, Penn set out for home with two other Washington Negroes. They planned to drive straight on through, stopping only for food and fuel.

They rolled through Atlanta, on through Athens, and into the lonely hills of northeast Georgia. They were about 23 miles outside Athens when a car pulled alongside. A white man poked a sawed-off shotgun toward the Negroes' car, leveled the end of its barrel only three feet from Driver Penn's head. He pulled the trigger. Penn died instantly.

To FBI agents who moved swiftly into the case, the utter senselessness of such a murder was in itself an important clue. They did not have to dig far to discover that Athens is a center of activities for one of the most senseless organizations imaginable: the Ku Klux Klan. Sure enough, a little more detective work led them to one James Lackey, 28, an Athens gas station attendant. According to U.S. authorities, Lackey confessed that he was in on the ambush and implicated three fellow Klansmen--Garage Owner Herbert Guest, 37, a short, fat gun fancier; textile Yarn Plucker Cecil Myers, 25, who strutted around Athens toting a pistol; Machinist Joseph Sims, 41, a quick-tempered segregationist who was arrested in March for flourishing a pistol during a Negro demonstration. All are members of Clarke County Klavern No. 244.

The FBI arrested the quartet on the only federal charge applicable in the case--violation of the Civil Rights Act. The maximum penalty for that is ten years in prison and a $5,000 fine. But the state of Georgia also issued warrants charging murder. Maximum penalty for that: death in Georgia's integrated electric chair.

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