The Mississippi Burning Case and Trial
Freedom Summer
The Mississippi Summer Project also known as the Freedom Summer, took place in the summer of 1964. It was organized with the help of the NAACP, SNCC, CORE and Robert Moses. The purpose of the Freedom Summer was to increase African American voting registration in the state of Mississippi. One of their main goals was to organize the Freedom Democratic Party. They hoped to challenge the white-only Mississippi Democratic Party, and set up Freedom Schools, with the intent to open community centers to African Americans seeking medical and legal assistance.
Over 800 volunteers moved to Mississippi to work on the Summer projects. There was a great loss that the members of the project faced. Three members and were found dead six weeks later. And so began the case of Mississippi Burning.
Mississippi Burning
The case of Mississippi Burning dealt with the incident of three Mississippi Summer Project Volunteers disappearance: Andrew Goodman, 20, Michael Schwerner, 24, also called “Goatee” or “Jew-Boy “by the KKK, , and James Chaney, 21. These young men were shot and killed on a road in Neshoba County because of their active involvement in fighting for African American civil rights and their voting rights. Neshoba County of Longdale had a reputation for “being hard on the blacks” (www.core-online.org). Lawrence Rainey, Neshoba County Sheriff, and his deputy, Cecil Price, were both members of the KKK. They initiated Plan 4 to do away with Michael Schwerner on Memorial Day and any other activists, so along with thirty men armed with shotguns they showed up to Mount Zion Church to kill him. They were unsuccessful as they did ...
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...ineteen men were arrested for “conspiring to deprive Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman of their civil rights under color of state law” (www.core-online.org). A jury of seven white men and five white women, ranging in ages from 34 to 67were selected as jurors. One man during jury selection even said he was a former member of the KKK, and was allowed as a juror. This biased jury was challenged. But the challenge was denied.
In the end, On December 29, Judge Cox imposed sentences. Roberts and Bowers received ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four years. Cox said of his sentences, "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man-- I gave them all what I thought they deserved"(www.core-online.org). Price only served four years and returned home to his family saying he was changed after watching the TV show, “Roots.”
The details disclosed that the prosecution highlighted the names of the potential black judges and tinted every black potential juror’s name in a different color. There were four different duplicates of the record of all of the individuals summoned for the task in the case. Evert record had a key, which indicated that the highlighted names represented the blacks. Besides, there were no any blotches made for the white jurors on the lists. There were also many marks made on the black people’s names on the juror questionnaires, and there was no any other race that was
The class and regional tension separated African-American leaders of that period. A black prosecutor named Scipio Africanis Jones, tried to set free the twelve black men’s who were imprisoned. After the days of the massacres, a self-proclaimed group of foremost white citizens allotted a report. The committee demanded that Robert Hill, the union organizer, was an external protestor who had deceived native blacks into organizing an insurgency. The Negros were told to stay out of Elaine, by the wicked white men and deceitful leaders of their own race who were abusing them for their personal achievements. The black farmers that were muddled in the original firing had been consulting to work out the facts that involved the massacre of white ranchers and the eliminating the white’s possessions. Thus, the firing and the fatal riots that trailed were esteemed involvements that saved the lives of numerous white citizens, although at the outlay of many black
Months before Emmett's death in 1955, two African American activists in Mississippi had been murdered. An NAACP field worker, the Reverend George Lee, was shot and killed at point blank range while driving in his car after trying to vote in Belzoni. A few weeks later in Brookhaven, Lamar Smith was shot and killed in front of the county courthouse -- in broad daylight and before witnesses -- after casting his ballot. Both were active in black voter registration drives. No one was arrested in connection with either murder
The Moore’s Ford lynching shows that the Ku Klux Klan was still very powerful in Georgia just after the Second World War. Blacks who lived in these areas which were overwhelmingly rural and contained large plantations owned by white men were regularly browbeaten into submission by the white minority and sporadic outbreaks of violence were not uncommon. There was a wealth of evidence against several white men who were prominent citizens of the county, but no prosecution was ever conducted and the murderers went to their graves without having paid for their crime....
On March 25, 1931 nine African American youths were falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned for the rape of two white girls. Over the next six consecutive years, trials were held to attempt to prove the innocence of these nine young men. The court battles ranged from the U.S Supreme court to the Scottsboro county court with almost every decision the same---guilty. Finally, with the proceedings draining Alabama financially and politically, four of the boys ...
Voting is one thing that was still around when Freedom Summer came; and when I say around I mean available. Let me explain… during the Reconstruction era blacks were able to vote. But most of them didn’t due to a number of factors. A couple of these being: poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, etc. And if that weren’t enough you still had the Klan that would destroy any black polling booth and/or shoot, intimidate, and kill any black person trying to vote; especially in Mississippi. In the months leading to Freedom Summer the same thing was going on except the rules had changed. These new rules, to keep the black community from voting, were the same as the old except very vague. In document 2 it details these new requirements to become a registered voter. Some of these requirements included being able to read and write a section of the new Constitution, are able to demonstrate a reasonable understanding of citizenship, make a sworn written application for registration. So as you can see just like in Reconstruction, the voting power shifts back to the white race. Even if every black could read and write, who’s to say what a “reasonable” understanding of citizenship is.
Occurred on March 1, 1959. R. Jess Brown a well-known African American lawyer represented Parker. On April 13th an all white grand jury indited Parker for rape and two counts of kidnapping. On April 17th Parker pleaded not guilty to each charge. Next Parker’s trial date was set for April 27th. Then Brown asked Judge Sebe Dale’s to drop the case because a black man was not on the grand jury. Brown did this because of a recent ruling made by the 5th U.S. circuit court of Appeals. The ruling stated that it was unconstitutional for a jury of an all white people to convict a black man. The ruling went on to say that one African American had to be on a jury when an African American was on trial. This defense tactic by Brown was a legally intelligent thing to do but this actually became the motive for the mob to kill Parker.
On July 25, 1946, two young black couples- Roger and Dorothy Malcom, George and Mae Murray Dorsey-were killed by a lynch mob at the Moore's Ford Bridge over the Appalachee River connecting Walton and Oconee Counties (Brooks, 1). The four victims were tied up and shot hundreds of times in broad daylight by a mob of unmasked men; murder weapons included rifles, shotguns, pistols, and a machine gun. "Shooting a black person was like shooting a deer," George Dorsey's nephew, George Washington Dorsey said (Suggs C1). It has been over fifty years and this case is still unsolved by police investigators. It is known that there were atleast a dozen men involved in these killings. Included in the four that were known by name was Loy Harrison. Loy Harrison may not have been an obvious suspect to the investigators, but Harrison was the sole perpetrator in the unsolved Moore's Ford Lynching case. The motive appeared to be hatred and the crime hurt the image of the state leaving the town in an outrage due to the injustice that left the victims in unmarked graves (Jordon,31).
In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Batson. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids the prosecutor from challenging potential jurors solely on account of their race or on the assumption that black jurors as a group will be unable to consider the state’s case ag...
After his clients were found guilty of rape and sentenced to the death penalty for a third time, Sam Leibovitz noticed a disturbing trend in the courtroom. Out of the multitude of jurors used in each hearing, none of them were black. Every single one was a white southerner, and Leibovitz felt as though the jury was rigged in favor of the prosecution. This was exceedingly common in the South at this time, as many states excluded people of color from sitting on a jury. In Norris versus Alabama, Leibovitz voiced his concerns to the United States Supreme Court. This landmark case was unorthodox, as Leibovitz had the jury rolls from the cases brought up all the way from Alabama to be read by the justices. The preponderance of the names on the lists were those of whites, but there were a few names belonging to blacks at the bottom of some of the pages. These were all hastily scrawled, as if they were added recently. Leibovitz argued that they were written there merely to show that Alabama did not intentionally influence the jury against the boys, when they actually did. The Supreme Court voted for Leibovitz, and ruled that all people, no matter their skin color, should be able to vote on a jury. This verdict would be instrumental for later race-based proceedings in the future. During the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, many crucial cases were won because of empathetic, equal
killing of seventeen whites. These blacks were sought out as wrong to many whites, and
In August, 1955, an african american boy, Emmett Till, who was 14 from Chicago had just arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit family. He went to the grocery store and while he was in there a white women was working behind the counter and Emmett Till whistled and was making flirtatious things. While he was doing this he didn't realize he was violating racial codes. Three days later, the woman's husband- Roy Bryant- and his half brother - J.W Milam- had drug Till from his ucleś house in the middle of the night. At first they were just repeatedly beating him, then ended up shooting him and killing him. After killing Emmett the men threw his body in a river called Tallahatchie which is also located in Mississippi. Roy Bryant and J.W Milam came
A study of race and jury trials in Florida published last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that “conviction rates for black and white defendants are similar when there is at least some representation of blacks in the jury pool.” But all-white juries are a very different story—they convict blacks 16% more often than they convict whites (2).
History was often displayed in the film Mississippi Burning. For example, three civil rights workers known as James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in the year 1964. These young men were real human beings visiting Philadelphia, Mississippi to help register African-Americans’ voting rights. Throughout the 1960’s,...
In the summer of 1964, SNCC organized the Mississippi Summer Project, which was an urgent call to action for students in Mississippi to challenge and overcome the white racism of their state. The Mississippi Summer Project had three goals: registering voters, operating Freedom Schools, and organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) precincts. SNCC organized Freedom Days where they gathered black people together to collectively try to register to vote and Freedom Schools where they taught children, many of who couldn't yet read or write, to stand up and demand their freedom.