Philadelphia, Miss. – Former Ku Klux Klans leader Edgar Ray Killen was wheeled before a judge Thursday, an 80-year-old relic of Mississippi’s hate-filled past, and sentenced to 60 years in prison for the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers.
Killen sat in his wheelchair in a bright yellow jail uniform and stared straight ahead, stone-faced, offering no remorse and no explanations, as Judge Marcus Gordon gave him the maximum sentence and closed one of the most shocking chapters in the movement to end segregation across the South.
In imposing the prison term, the judge noted that some people “would say a sentence of 10 years would be a life sentence.”
The judge asked if Killen had anything to say.
“None, your honor,” he said.
The Baptist preacher and sawmill operator was convicted of manslaughter Tuesday, exactly 41 years after the three civil rights volunteers were killed while working in Mississippi to register black voters.
The victims – black Mississippian James Chaney and white New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – were beaten and shot by a gang of Klansmen, and their bodies were found 44 days later buried in a red-clay dam. Witnesses said Killen rounded up carloads of Klansmen to intercept the three men and helped arrange for a bulldozer to bury the bodies.
The killings made headlines across the country and helped speed passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. The case was dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”
During the sentencing, more than 25 armed law-enforcement officers stood against the walls of the 200-seat, oak-paneled courtroom, with Killen’s relatives on one side of the aisle and the victims’ families on the other.
Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, blinked and nodded slightly as Gordon announced each sentence.
“I want to thank God that today we saw Preacher Killen in a prison uniform taken from the courthouse to the jailhouse,” said Chaney’s younger brother, Ben.
Killen was tried in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims’ civil rights. But the all-white jury deadlocked, with one juror saying she could not convict a preacher.
