A Crime Called Conspiracy

Holstered pistols and blackjacks humped against their hips and red mud clung to their boots as Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price got out of their squad car and walked into the Philadelphia, Miss., courthouse one chill morning last week. Just back from a dawn search for a moonshine still in backwoods country, neither seemed to notice four men in trench coats waiting in cars parked near the courthouse.

Moments after the lawmen entered their office, the four FBI agents left their cars, went into the courthouse, quietly told Rainey and Price they were under arrest. Unsurprised, the sheriff removed his pistol and badge, handed his keys to his secretary. Then Rainey and Price walked out with the agents, down through a cursing gauntlet of local rednecks who had gathered as soon as they spotted the FBI men, now as familiar as neighbors after months of work in the area. The crowd knew perfectly well that at last the long-awaited event had occurred: Neshoba County's two top law officers had been charged with complicity in the murder of three civil rights workers--Michael Schwerner, 24, James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20.

On that same grey morning, some 60 other FBI men had fanned out through the area. In quick, efficient visits to piney woods, farms, back-road gas stations and roadside house trailers, they collected a motley crew of 19 more men--including a Freewill Baptist preacher, a tavern bouncer, a 71-year-old Philadelphia cop, and a 17-year-old high school dropout. The 19 were charged, too, in connection with the killings. Whatever the outcome, the trial will certainly become one of the most celebrated in years--if only because the murder of the three young civil rights workers had been so shameless, shocking and senseless a crime.

Marked for Death. On June 21, a scorching, oppressive day, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman had driven a blue station wagon through Neshoba County to investigate a burned-out Negro church near Philadelphia. All worked with the Council of Federated Organizations in Meridian, Miss., setting up voter-registration projects. Chaney, a Negro, was a native of Meridian. Goodman, a New Yorker, had begun work only that day. Schwerner, a bearded youth from New York, had been a COFO worker in Philadelphia for six months. Because of his civil rights aggressiveness and because he was Jewish, he had been marked for death as early as May by an occult, segregationist organization called the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Founded just last March, the Knights dedicated themselves to carrying out terrorist tactics against civil rights workers coming in from the North.

After visiting the church, the three workers were stopped by Cecil Price, who claimed that they were speeding near Philadelphia. He jailed them until long after dark, then released them. They disappeared. Price insisted that he followed them to the edge of town, saw them drive away.

Two days later, their burned-out station wagon was found. On Aug. 4, FBI men, acting on a tip, dug a single hole in a new earthen dam on Old Jolly Farm six miles from Philadelphia and uncovered the three bodies. Each man had been shot to death with a .38-caliber weapon; Chaney had been beaten so horribly that a pathologist who performed an autopsy said he had never seen such injuries except in a highspeed auto accident or a plane crash.

"The Plan & the Purpose." The FBI beefed up its Mississippi forces to 153 men--ten times the normal complement. The contingent was headed by able Roy K. Moore, 50, a native of Oregon and a 26-year FBI veteran. Around Philadelphia agents met almost as much hostility as the civil rights workers had--one found several snakes in his car one morning. But the FBI built its case persistently. Agents infiltrated the White Knights of the Klan and paid out several thousand dollars for information.

When the FBI finally made its arrests, it outlined the charges in chilling tones. Said the FBI report last week: "It was part of the plan and purpose of the conspiracy that Cecil Ray Price, acting under the color of his office," would arrest Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman "without lawful cause, and detain them in the Neshoba County jail." Then, said the FBI, Price arranged it so that when they left the jail he and nine other men--members or warm admirers of the White Knights of the Klan--could intercept them outside town. The killers forced them into other cars, drove down an isolated road, "and did threaten, assault, shoot and kill them." The lynchers hauled the bodies to the Old Jolly Farm, dumped them in a shallow grave. A few days later, tons of dirt for the dam were piled atop the grave. Rainey himself was not involved in the killings, said the FBI, but was well aware of the conspiracy.

Despite the agents' certainty that they had nailed the men who had plotted the murders, they still could not directly charge them with the slayings. Murder is a state offense, except on federal property, and the Mississippians were therefore beyond the jurisdictional reach of the Federal Government so far as murder was concerned. So 19 of the 21 arrested--including Rainey and Price--were charged under a section of an 1870 law that was passed, ironically, to control Klan terrorism nearly a century ago. Titled "Conspiracy Against Rights of Citizens," it reads: "If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same . . . they shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both." The other two were charged with failing to give information about a felony--which carries a maximum $500 fine and three-year prison term.

Back at Work. Within hours after the arrests, U.S. Commissioner Esther Carter fixed bond at $5,000 for those charged with the rights violation, and at $3,500 for the other two. All of them quickly posted it. Price and Rainey were back at work in the Neshoba County sheriff's office that afternoon.

At week's end Mississippi officials refused to charge anyone with murder. FBI charges will be heard in a federal court in Meridian. There can be no change of venue unless the defense asks for it--which will not happen. Thus the 21 will be judged by a jury of their Mississippi peers, and Mississippi juries are not noted for convicting people accused of civil rights crimes.

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