Word: meridian
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...Charming Meridian...
...BROWN Meridian, Idaho...
Every morning the boys from Bill Gordon's barbershop in Meridian, Miss., staked out a big Confederate flag. Across the street, U.S. District Judge W. Harold Cox and a jury of white Mississippians were hearing charges against 18 of their neighbors named as plotters in the grisly 1964 murders of Civil Rights Workers Michael Schwerner, 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, and James Chaney, 21. The indictment did not specify murder-merely a conspiracy to deny the dead men their constitutional rights under a federal statute dating back to Reconstruction days. But the flag was a reminder that the Deep South...
After 14 hours of deliberation, it took less than three minutes for Courtroom Clerk Mrs. Sue Richmond to declare seven men guilty of a conspiracy that began when Meridian's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan voted to "eliminate" Schwerner for running a Negro community center and culminated when the lynch mob bulldozed three bullet-stitched corpses into an earthen dam. One of the men convicted was Neshoba County Chief Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, 29, who set up the killings by arresting the young activist for speeding; another was Samuel H. Bowers Jr., 42, the White Knights...
White-thatched Judge Cox, a native Mississippian and confirmed segregationist, conducted the trial with scrupulous fairness. Reacting angrily to a bomb threat-explosives had been stolen from a Meridian construction company the week before-the judge bundled Price and convicted Defendant Alton Wayne Roberts off to jail without bond. "I'm not going to let any wild man loose on a civilized society," he lectured Roberts. Roberts, a swarthy, former nightclub bouncer, had said earlier that the judge had given a "dynamite charge" to the jury. "Well," Roberts was overheard telling Price, "we've got the dynamite...