‘Mississippi Burning’ KKK leader Killen dies in prison

Edgar Ray Killen, a 1960s Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted decades later in the “Mississippi Burning” slayings of three civil rights workers, has died in prison at the age of 92, the state’s corrections department announced Friday.

The one-time Klan leader was serving three consecutive 20-year terms for manslaughter when he died at 9 p.m. Thursday night inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary. An autopsy was pending, but no foul play was suspected, the corrections’ statement said.

His conviction came 41 years to the day after James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, all in their 20s, were ambushed and killed by Klansmen.

The three Freedom Summer workers had been investigating the burning of a black church near Philadelphia, Mississippi. A deputy sheriff in Philadelphia had arrested them on a traffic charge, then released them after alerting a mob. Mississippi’s thengovernor claimed their disappearance was a hoax before their bodies were dug up.

The slayings shocked the nation, helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

The part-time preacher and lumber mill operator was 80 when a Neshoba County jury convicted him of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, despite his assertions that he was innocent. Killen was the only person ever to face state murder charges, and the only one to end up in state prison. “It wasn’t even murder it was manslaughter,” David Goodman, Andrew’s younger brother, observed on Friday.

“His life spanned a period in this country where members of the Ku Klux Klan like him were able to believe they had a right to take other people’s lives, and that’s a form of terrorism,” Goodman said. “Many took black lives without impunity.”