Why Mississippians Must Tell Our Own Stories by Donna Ladd Photos by Kate Medley
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Kate Medley photographed Edgar Ray Killen in his home over the week leading to his trial. He is now in prison for the rest of his life. Why Mississippians Must Tell Our Own Stories by Donna Ladd photos by Kate Medley It was warm under the mammoth magnolia tree on “You’re here, you’re interested in this trial as the something—as he was back home in Toronto, planning the north side of the Neshoba County Courthouse, most important trial in the Civil Rights Movement a trip to Meadville, Miss., where we would meet up with just yards from where the Confederate soldier stood on because two of the men were white,” Bender told the him and Thomas Moore, the brother of Charles Moore, his marble pedestal until a storm knocked him over and media. “You’re still doing what was done in 1964.” who had long pined for justice for the murders. broke his arm off a few years back. There were two black men found in the Missis- We didn’t know then if justice was possible, being Natalie Irby, looking more rock ‘n’ roll than the rest sippi River the same year; where was the attention to that the primary suspect was reportedly dead, but we of the media with tattoos peeking out from under her that case, she asked? Natalie looked at me, and I twisted Mississippi natives desperately wanted to know the de- sleeves, stood in a circle of media, her pen poised over my head to look at photographer Kate Medley, who was tails of that case so we could tell the story. This was vital her notebook, not writing much. As cameras clicked all hopping around shooting photos of Bender. Mississippi history that deserved to be known, regardless around her, Irby stared intently at the petite, gray-haired We knew who she meant. of its potential for prosecution. woman in the middle of the media circle on the third We saw the Killen case as a beginning, not an end- day of the Edgar Ray Killen trial in June 2005. Eye on the Next Prize ing, as so many people seemed to believe. Rita Schwerner Bender was a widow who was get- Our team was at the Killen trial with an eye toward Forty-one years after her husband died a few miles ting close to a modicum of justice for the Klan murder the next civil-rights murders that we wanted brought to down Highway 19-South from a gunshot to his chest, of her husband, Michael Schwerner, along with James justice, or at least to light—the brutal Klan murders of Bender dressed down a community, a nation and a press Chaney and Andrew Goodman, on Father’s Day, 1964. Henry Dee and Charles Moore in South Mississippi on corps that had done too little over the years to bring Then, Bender was a 22-year-old who set up a Freedom May 2, 1964. Both black teenagers. Both nearly forgot- justice and closure for the families of those three men, or School in Meridian with her husband so that blacks ten. Both hardly covered by the media, unlike the mur- the hundreds like them killed in race violence in Missis- could learn to read and earn the right to vote. ders of Bender’s husband and his friends—a case often sippi alone. This was good, but it was not enough. And This did not please white Mississippi—a state referred to in places like New York City as the “murders it shouldn’t be the end, she told us. It was premature to where the upstanding citizens of the White Citizens of Schwerner and Goodman,” who were the two white declare it the “last case,” as media were prone to do. Council worked with the state-funded spy agency, men Bender referred to at the courthouse. “The discussion about racism in this country has the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to funnel Dee-Moore was a case that a Clarion-Ledger re- to continue,” Bender said. “If this is a way to do that, information like the license-plate number of Chaney’s porter had said would never be prosecuted; the paper then this trial has meaning.” station wagon to the enforcers of the Ku Klux Klan, had even reported in 2000 that the main suspect— After her talk, Natalie shyly walked up to the many of whom were offi cers of the law. James Ford Seale—was not alive, even though he lived woman she idolizes, simply asking to shake her hand. Natalie-the-JFP-blogger didn’t ask any questions; openly in Roxie, Miss., with his wife in a small mobile she just stared as Bender dressed down the press corps home next to his brother’s house. Two Steps Forward … May 31 - June 6, 2007 for not doing more to reveal, and undo the effects of, At the Killen trial, we were working with a Ca- There are two types of Mississippians—those who this statewide conspiracy to forcibly deny blacks the nadian fi lmmaker, quietly investigating Dee-Moore— want us only to look forward (to “quit apologizing for 14 same rights as white people. looking for information, people who might know the past”), and those who say we must look backward in order to move forward. Meantime, Greer, 74, has spent about 10 hours doing CBC would try to locate the brother of one of the victims, he OK, maybe there’s a third. Those of us—like Natalie and exactly that with the JFP—revealing the what and, to the best said; maybe we could all meet in South Mississippi and inves- the rest of the JFP team who are working on these cases—who of his ability, the why. He’s talked about the blue-collar culture tigate the case as a team. He would soon say in an e-mail that feel our past weighing down our state, and ourselves, so strong- at International Paper, where he and dozens of other Klansmen he planned to document a new generation of Mississippians ly that we are cursed until a new generation pulls every single worked, and the fears of blacks that were instilled in them as helping the brother of one of the young men look for justice. skeleton out of the closet and props it up in the front yard for children, passed down by the culture and their families, and That’s how Kate Medley and I became part of a team that all to ponder. We believe it’s akin to showing a kid a wrecked car seldom questioned by people around him. met up in Franklin County on July 8, 2005, one that Moore so he won’t go drink and drive. Based on what they had been taught all their lives, whites would months later write about on the Dee-Moore Coalition Then again, maybe there’s a fourth type—one that seems believed that school integration would hurt their children, Greer listserv, set up after our initial stories appeared: “On that hot to become more prominent by the day. Those are the people said. He also said that working-class whites believed that blacks rainy Friday in The Evil town of Meadville, Mississippi, two who are wrestling with the past-vs.-present false dilemma, the were going to take their jobs and, thus, their livelihoods. more team members came and joined this new team—a Cana- ones who wish we could leave it in the past, but are starting to “We was poor, and they were poor,” Greer said in 2005. dian, a retired soldier and two white southern women.” In the face that justice is justice, no matter who it’s for. The old argu- The former Klansman told me Sunday that he is still not same e-mail, Moore also thanked his friend Jerry Mitchell for ment—that the life of a black man, or someone fi ghting for sure he should have talked to me, and revealed so much, in July his past work helping him get information about the case. him, isn’t worth our full attention—is beginning to fade for 2005—but he seems eager to share more details so that the full But that wasn’t all I said to the fi lmmaker in early June these people. Thankfully. story be told, both about the ugly past and the progress the state ‘05. I also told him that I had two major goals: to reveal the “They should have done it already,” said Shirley Greer, is making. He is adamant, as I am, that both stories need to be truth about a little-known case while other media were patting sitting in her Natchez living room last Sunday, three days told together, though—and shakes his head at reporters who Mississippi condescendingly on the head for fi nally bring- before the James Ford Seale trial was set to start in Jackson. just come to Mississippi trolling for a Klansman. ing “closure” to old race wounds. And I wanted to show the “They’re old now.” Greer says he has black friends now, especially from his world—and especially the usually myopic national media Greer, sitting next to her husband and former Klansman years at “the mill,” including a dear friend from a later job at En- when it came to anything involving Mississippi—that many James K. Greer, had just repeated the sentiments of so many terprise Rent-a-Car—a man who came to his house and begged people in my state are passionate about telling the whole truth Mississippians—why go after old, sick Klansmen like Edgar him not to quit when he decided to leave the rental agency (and about our past, not to mention our present.