Dec. 4, 1964 - The FBI arrested the Neshoba County Sheriff, his deputy, and 19 other white men today in connection with the murder of three civil rights workers on a lonely road the night of June 21.
The bureau said the murder had been plotted by the Ku Klux Klan.
It said that Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, 41 years old, had been involved in the conspiracy but had not taken part in the actual slaying. It added that his deputy, Cecil Price, 26, had set up the crime by unlawfully arresting and detaining the victims, then turning them over to a lynch mob of which the deputy was a part.
Others arrested included a Philadelphia city policeman, a fundamentalist Baptist minister, and several leaders in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, a terrorist organization believed to have originated much of the state’s racial violence in recent months.
Nineteen defendants, most of them members of the Ku Klux Klan, were charged under Federal law with conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of the three young men. The two others were charged with refusing to disclose information about the crime.
The defendants were arraigned at the Naval Air Station at Meridian, Miss., before the U.S. Commissioner, Miss Esther Carter, and were released on bond. Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price then returned to their law‐enforcement jobs in Philadelphia, a town in south-central Mississippi near which the three rights workers were killed.
Miss Carter set bond at $5,000 for each defendant charged with conspiracy and $3,000 for each charged with refusing to give information. She scheduled a preliminary hearing for Dec. 10.
The FBI said 10 of the 19 men charged with conspiracy had actually taken part in the slaying of Andrew Goodman, 21, and Michael Schwerner, 24, both white men from New York, and James Chaney, a Negro from Meridian.
For the first time, the bureau told how the three young men allegedly met their deaths on a dirt road a few miles southeast of Philadelphia. The complaint said that Deputy Price had sent them into the hands of a group of armed men after detaining them for six hours.
The armed men, most of them Klansmen from Meridian, followed the three civil rights workers outside the city limits, intercepted them, and forced them into other automobiles. The three were taken down a side road and shot to death, it said.
The FBI said leaders of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an independent Mississippi group formed earlier in the year, had decided as much as six weeks before that Schwerner, who had done civil rights work in the Meridian area, must die. The bureau’s complaint said:
“It was part of the plan and purpose of the conspiracy that Cecil Ray Price, deputy sheriff of Neshoba County, acting under the color of his office, did arrest Michael Henry Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman without lawful cause and detained them in the Neshoba County jail located in Philadelphia, Miss., and did release them from custody, and that Cecil Ray Price, Jimmy Arledge, Horace Doyle Barnette, Travis Maryn Barnette, Alton Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, James E. Jordan, Billy Wayne Posey, Jerry McGrew Sharp, and Jimmy Lee Townsend did thereupon intercept Michael Henry Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman shortly after they departed from Philadelphia, Miss., by automobile, and did threaten, assault, shoot and kill them.”
The shooting was said to have taken place near a small settlement on Route 19 between Philadelphia and Meridian.
The FBI said the 10 men forced the victims to leave their station wagon, put them in automobiles “and drove them down a side road, where they were shot and killed.”
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