Mississippi justice at last: the trials and convictions of Beckwith, Bowers and Killen.

• Author: Gill, Joseph W.
• Position: Bryon De La Beckwith, Sam Bowers and Edgar Ray Killen

SINCE THE RE-PROSECUTION of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers, which reopened in 1989 and resulted in a conviction in 1994, numerous states and the federal government have reopened long-dormant civil rights era murder cases. While nine cases have been reopened in Mississippi, including the Evers case, this article concerns only the re-prosecution of three murderers: Bryon De La Beckwith, Sam Bowers and Edgar Ray Killen. These are the three cases in which killers of civil rights activists have been successfully re-prosecuted by the prosecutors of the state of Mississippi.

THREE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA CASES

To begin to comprehend the magnitude of the crimes discussed in this article, first it is critical to call to mind the environment in which these travesties occurred, that is, the civil rights movement in the Deep South. The active social organizations involved in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s are perhaps best categorized as falling loosely into one of two groups: civil rights activists and white supremacists. The war between these two diametrically opposed groups of people and their competing agendas, equality and white supremacy, is the landscape in which these murders took place.

In response to the civil rights movement, white supremacists organized and struck back with a mixture of law, politics, and violence. The cycle of racial progress followed by violent backlash can be seen in events that occurred throughout the country, specifically the Deep South. For instance, just weeks after the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which purported to end segregation in public schools, the White Citizens' Council, a civic group determined to maintain segregation, was created in Indianola, Mississippi. The organization was routinely described as "a current version of the Klan," a "scrubbed-up cousin of the Klan," "a white collar Klan," "an uptown Klan," a "button-down Klan," and a "country club Klan." The citizens council movement quickly spread throughout the South.

In the 1960s, another segregationist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, boasted up to 10,000 members in Mississippi alone. While the Council of Federated Organizations, a conglomeration of civil rights activist organizations, was planning Freedom Summer in the early months of 1964, the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan came into being under the leadership of Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. The White Knights was known as the most clandestine and deadliest Klan in U.S. history. On one day in April 1964, the White Knights burned 61 crosses throughout Mississippi. The FBI blamed the White Knights of Mississippi for dozens of beatings, church burnings, shootings, and at least ten murders in the 1960s.

The effort to halt the progress of the civil rights movement was not limited to groups of individual citizens but was also taken on by the state government itself. Four months after Brown, the Mississippi legislature allowed for the abolition of the state's public school system and declared Brown invalid. The legislature also established the Sovereignty Commission to "protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government." Ultimately, the commission was a state-sanctioned spy agency with the objective of investigating civil rights workers.

Civil rights activists were aware of the threat of violent retaliation, especially in Mississippi and other areas of the Deep South. Therefore, each incident of racial violence, and more specifically each murder of a civil rights activist, bore an unmistakable message of hatred of the ideals of equality.

Medgar Evers

The first civil rights era murder case in the country to be reopened and re-prosecuted decades after the commission of the crime was the Medgar Evers case. Evers was perhaps Mississippi's most well-known and respected civil rights leader during the civil rights era, and for that reason his assassination was a particularly infamous attack on the movement. In 1954 Evers was appointed as the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, and his duties included enrolling new members in the NAACP and investigating and publicizing racist acts of violence against African-Americans.

Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, Evers was shot in the back as he stepped out of his car at his home in Jackson, Mississippi. The bullet came from a 1917 Enfield .30-06 deer rifle shot from the bushes across the street. The bullet ripped through Evers's chest and into his home with his wife and three children. Evers died within the hour on an operating room table.

The Jackson Police Department immediately responded with a thorough investigation: interviewing neighbors, receiving call-in tips, and locating the murder weapon not far from where it had been fired. The next day a witness identified the murder weapon, which had been described in newspapers, as one he had traded three years earlier to Byron De La Beckwith, a man who the witness recalled was "very radical on this racial problem." The FBI arrested Beckwith on June 23 and charged him under the 1957 Civil Rights Act for "conspiring to injure, oppress, and intimidate Medgar Evers in the free exercise of his Constitutional rights." The Justice Department then dropped the charges and left the state to prosecute Beckwith for murder. Hinds County District Attorney Bill Waller obtained a grand jury indictment for murder and sought the death penalty.

At the first Beckwith trial, jurors deliberated for 11 hours and voted 20 times before giving up and having the judge declare a mistrial. Just months later Beckwith was retried with nearly the same evidence as was presented in the first trial by both sides; however, a new witness surfaced for Beckwith which enabled the defense to argue that Beckwith was the victim of mistaken identity. After a two-day deliberation, the jury was deadlocked again, a second mistrial was ordered, and Waller decided not to retry Beckwith unless new evidence surfaced. On May 10, 1969, after reviewing the file, the newly elected Hinds County district attorney, Jack Travis, requested that an order of nolle prosequi be entered in the case.

The fight for justice in this case was all but forgotten until October 1989, when the Jackson newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger, reported that leaked Sovereignty Commission documents showed that potential jurors in Beckwith's second trial were investigated by the commission and the results given to Beckwith's defense team. By the end of the month, Hinds County District Attorney Ed Peters announced that a grand jury would be called to investigate possible jury tampering. While the grand jury did not find that there was illegal jury tampering, it did encourage the state to continue to investigate Beckwith. Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter devoted himself to reopening the case and amassed an impressive amount of evidence. Beckwith was arrested after a new Hinds County grand jury indicted him for murder in December 1990.

After a series of defense continuances and interlocutory appeals, Beckwith was tried for a third and final time in 1994. While much of the evidence introduced by both sides was the same as that presented in the 1964 trials, there were some differences. First, unlike the all-white juries in Beckwith's 1964 trials, the 1994 jury consisted of eight African-Americans and four whites. Second, some of the testimony was read from the previous trial transcripts because the witnesses had since passed away. Third, Beckwith did not take the stand in his own defense.

The jury in Beckwith's third and final trial reached a verdict on February 5, 1994. At the age of 73 and over 30 years after the murder of Medgar Evers, Byron De La Beckwith was found guilty. He was given a life sentence, and on January, 22 2001, he died in prison at the age of 80.

Vernon Dahmer

In the second civil rights era murder case re-prosecuted by the state of Mississippi, Sam Bowers was convicted for the murder of Vernon Dahmer. Dahmer was an African-American cotton farmer, successful grocery store owner, sawmill operator, and president of the Hattiesburg NAACE In the 1950s, he began paying poll taxes for other blacks who could not afford them but were brave enough to register to vote. Blacks were able to pay their poll taxes at his store, which was located adjacent to his home.

In September 1965, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi met near Laurel, Mississippi, to discuss what was to be done with Vernon Dahmer. In this meeting, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers authorized the burning of Dahmer's home and his "elimination," or murder. After Bowers continued to insist that Dahmer be "taken care of," two carloads of Klansmen laid siege to Dahmer's home with firebombs at approximately two o'clock in the morning on January 10, 1966. Dahmer held off the Klansmen with his shotgun long enough for his family to escape, but died later that day due to severe burns.

The FBI's investigation into the firebombing of Dahmer's home and his murder occurred almost immediately. According to David Chalmers: (1)

FBI agents hurried over from Jackson, set up headquarters in Hattiesburg's Holiday Inn, and began their investigation. There was much to go on at the crime scene. There were plastic gasoline containers, ejected shells, a dropped pistol, and, a short distance away, one of the Klan cars, a blue Ford, which had been mistakenly shot up by Klansmen from the other car. Local opinion was outraged by the killing, and the county sheriff and state police helped with the investigation. A wealthy farmer and oil-well owner who had been one of Bowers's first recruits and financial contributors agreed to help persuade other participants to confess. Fourteen suspects were arrested and charged with murder and arson. Three were sentenced to life, but none of them served more than...