Word: neshoba
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...September, one month after the bodies of three civil rights workers were found hidden beneath an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss., a Justice Department lawyer went before a federal grand jury to seek indictments against several suspects. Instead, the jury indicted five Mississippians-among them Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price -not for involvement in the triple murder but for violation of the civil rights of local Negroes. Whatever evidence the Justice Department offered in connection with the murder of the civil rights workers was apparently insufficient to convince the jury. The Justice Department lost...
Last week 19 Neshoba County defendants, trailed by 14 defense lawyers, marched into a courtroom in the Meridian, Miss., Federal Building for the preliminary hearing. Looking on was a curious collection of backland farmers in overalls, local Negroes, big-city Northern reporters and a few young civil rights workers-many of whom badly needed haircuts and a fresh change of clothes. The Justice Department lawyer was young (34), crew-cut Robert Owen. At the front of the room sat U.S. Commissioner Esther Carter, a middleaged, Mississippi-born spinster...
...rallied them behind the defendants, who became town martyrs. This reasoning no longer holds weight. True, an angry mob of rednecks gathered to hiss the FBI agents upon the arrest of Sheriff Rainey. But that mob did not speak for the town. Rainey was no martyr to the ten Neshoba County clergymen, all of whom signed this statement: "There is an element of shame to all that there would be among us those accused of such a crime... We desire to see justice prevail...
...Neshoba Murders...
...Justice Department and the Federal government really wanted a fair hearing on the Neshoba murders, they would have gone to the Mississippi district court and asked for a different method of selecting Federal grand juries," he said. "If they don't do that, they are not really interested...