Word: klansmen
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This was not, however, a case where local lawmen winked and looked the other way. Forrest County, named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and patron saint of the K.K.K., charged 14 Klansmen with murder and arson. Five were convicted or pleaded guilty and received life sentences. But not Sam Bowers, the Klan's Imperial Wizard for Mississippi, whom prosecutors accused of ordering and planning the murder--and whom Klan experts describe as the most dangerous man ever to don a white hood...
Perhaps most important, the chief witness against Bowers in his earlier trials, who disappeared in 1971, was located and arrested in February. Billy Roy Pitts, one of the Klansmen who attacked the Dahmer house, was convicted on federal conspiracy charges. He served four years, but through circumstances that have never been fully explained, he was not sent back to Mississippi to serve his life sentence for murder. Pitts, who had been living in Denham Springs, La., has agreed to testify against Bowers one more time. Pitts has told of a Klan meeting at which Bowers ordered Dahmer killed. Pitts...
Still, Arrington worries that prosecutors will persuade several Klansmen to testify against Bowers. He fears the changes in state politics that, he says, are driving Moore and Lindsey to work so hard to convict Bowers. "Since the blacks are voting now, that has given them a boost," Arrington says. "I was district attorney before they could vote...
...another perversely racist organization whose members wore suits instead of sheets. One of the Commission's agents informed the Ku Klux Klan of the license plate number of the car which the Freedom Summer martyrs James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were driving. The car was stopped by Klansmen all three were murdered...
...belated act of contrition from the nation's largest Protestant denomination. Like most African Americans, I would have been more impressed if the revelation had come a generation ago, when prominent Southern Baptists like George Wallace were standing in the schoolhouse door and never-miss-a-Sunday Ku Klux Klansmen were murdering fellow Christians who believed in civil rights. Instead the message from many Southern Baptist pulpits was that God himself had ordained the separation of the races and that to tamper with it was to go against his will. "Just think of all the violence and bitterness we might...