Word: neshoba
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Holstered pistols and blackjacks humped against their hips and red mud clung to their boots as Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price got out of their squad car and walked into the Philadelphia, Miss., courthouse one chill morning last week. Just back from a dawn search for a moonshine still in backwoods country, neither seemed to notice four men in trench coats waiting in cars parked near the courthouse...
...with the agents, down through a cursing gauntlet of local rednecks who had gathered as soon as they spotted the FBI men, now as familiar as neighbors after months of work in the area. The crowd knew perfectly well that at last the long-awaited event had occurred: Neshoba County's two top law officers had been charged with complicity in the murder of three civil rights workers?Michael Schwerner, 24, James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman...
Marked for Death. On June 21, a scorching, oppressive day, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman had driven a blue station wagon through Neshoba County to investigate a burned-out Negro church near Philadelphia. All worked with the Council of Federated Organizations in Meridian, Miss., setting up voter-registration projects. Chaney, a Negro, was a native of Meridian. Goodman, a New Yorker, had begun work only that day. Schwerner, a bearded youth from New York, had been a COFO worker in Philadelphia for six months. Because of his civil rights aggressiveness and because he was Jewish, he had been marked for death...
...outlined the charges in chilling tones. Said the FBI report last week: "It was part of the plan and purpose of the conspiracy that Cecil Ray Price, acting under the color of his office," would arrest Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman "without lawful cause, and detain them in the Neshoba County jail." Then, said the FBI, Price arranged it so that when they left the jail he and nine other men?members or warm admirers of the White Knights of the Klan?could intercept them outside town. The killers forced them into other cars, drove down an isolated road...
Back at Work. Within hours after the arrests, U.S. Commissioner Esther Carter fixed bond at $5,000 for those charged with the rights violation, and at $3,500 for the other two. All of them quickly posted it. Price and Rainey were back at work in the Neshoba County sheriff's office that afternoon...