Chattanooga Times Free Press

‘Mississipp­i Burning’ KKK leader Killen dies in prison

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

Killen was serving three consecutiv­e 20-year terms for manslaught­er when he died at 9 p.m. Thursday inside the Mississipp­i State Penitentia­ry at Parchman. An autopsy was pending, but no foul play was suspected, the 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, Miss. A deputy sheriff in Philadelph­ia had arrested them on a traffic charge, then released them after alerting a mob. Mississipp­i’s then-governor claimed their disappeara­nce was a hoax, and segregatio­nist Sen. Jim Eastland told President Lyndon Johnson it was a “publicity stunt” 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 movie title came from the name of the FBI investigat­ion.

Killen, a part-time preacher and lumber mill operator, was 80 when a Neshoba County jury of nine white people and three black people convicted him of three counts of manslaught­er on June 21, 2005, despite his assertions he was innocent.

 ?? THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ?? Edgar Ray Killen
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Edgar Ray Killen

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