http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site....nes/slaying106
Miss. grand jury takes up 1964 slayings
Date: Friday, January 07, 2005
By: Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - Mississippi prosecutors convened a grand jury Thursday to take up one of the last pieces of unfinished business from the civil rights era: the 1964 slayings of three voter-registration volunteers.
The grand jury will decide whether enough evidence exists after 40 years to bring charges in the crime that was dramatized in the movie "Mississippi Burning."
District Attorney Mark Duncan said the panel could complete its work as early as Friday.
Mississippi has had some success reopening old civil rights murder cases, including a 1994 conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers.
But until recently there has been little progress in building murder cases against those involved in the Ku Klux Klan slayings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
Seven Klansmen were convicted of federal conspiracy charges in the killings and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three years to 10 years. None served more than six years. But the state never brought murder charges.
"After 40 years to come back and do something like this is ridiculous ... like a nightmare," said Billy Wayne Posey, one of the men convicted. The graying Posey, supported by a cane, refused to say what he expected to be asked by the grand jury.
Goodman's mother, Carolyn Goodman, said she "knew that in the end the right thing was going to happen."
"As I have said many times before, I'm not looking for revenge. I'm looking for justice," Goodman, 89, said from her home in New York.
Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were among hundreds of Freedom Summer volunteers, mostly white college students, who came to Mississippi in 1964 to educate blacks and help them to vote. The three were beaten and shot to death. Their bodies were found later in an earthen dam.
Chaney, a 21-year-old black man, was from Meridian, Miss. Goodman, 20, and Schwerner, 24, were from New York.
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