Mississippi and the Neshoba County killings
By By Terry R. Cassreino / assistant managing editor
Nov. 17, 2002
Mike Moore didn't have to spell it out last week it's been obvious for months that the state likely won't reopen its most notorious civil rights murder case.
But the four-term state attorney general nevertheless made it clear less than a week after the death of another key player in the 1964 Neshoba County slayings.
That reality sank in further on Nov. 8 when former Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Andrew Rainey Sr. died.
Rainey was one of eight people acquitted in a 1967 federal court trial of charges they violated the federal civil rights of three men who went missing in Neshoba County in the summer of 1964.
Rainey's chief deputy at the time, Cecil Price Jr., was one of seven people on trial in the same case who were found guilty. Price recently had been cooperating with Moore and was willing to testify if the case was reopened.
Price, though, died in May 2001.
The case began in June 1964. Civil rights activists James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner disappeared after going to Neshoba County to investigate a church bombing.
Their bodies were found Aug. 4, 1964, buried in an earthen dam.
The murders are legendary and have taken on a life of their own. It's a story people tell over and over again like the Ole Miss riot of 1962 to show how insensitive and racially backward Mississippi was and still is.
Of course, that's not case because the state has come a long way since 1964.
But thanks to films like "Mississippi Burning," many people wouldn't know that. That 1988 fictionalized account of the Neshoba County killings shined a bright spotlight on the racist Mississippi of the past.
And the production, a buddy cop movie that tried to pass itself off as a "serious film," was the first of a string of civil rights movies featuring white heroes. What happened to the black leaders who fought the system?
A more factual and realistic take on the story was presented in the little-seen 1990 television film "Murder in Mississippi." But that movie was hindered by low-scale TV production values.
At about the same time, something more significant was happening Mississippians were about to see two high-profile civil rights cases reopened and two white supremacists convicted of murder.
First was Byron De La Beckwith, convicted in 1994 for the 1963 killing of NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Next was Ku Klux Klan leader Sam Bowers, convicted in 1998 of the 1966 killing of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer.
Beckwith died in prison in 2001; Bowers is now serving a life sentence in prison.
Meanwhile, prosecutions for murder in the Neshoba County slayings continue to elude law enforcement officials just like they have for 38 years.
But even though a conviction was never won, Moore said, one thing is certain: the man who has long been considered the person who planned the killings none other than Bowers already is serving a life sentence.
Musgrove's budget
Gov. Ronnie Musgrove unveiled his proposed, $3.45 billion state general fund budget last week for the fiscal year that starts July 1.
The only problem: Musgrove can talk and talk about his budget and the $2.4 billion he wants to spend on education, but lawmakers likely won't listen. Historically, they pay little attention to a governor's proposed budget.
Instead, when legislators return in regular session in January, look for them to work from their own fiscal plan rather than one from a governor many of them would rather avoid at all costs.
