Hold Your Heads Up

He’s out of surgery. He’s doing fairly well, I guess. They got his legs straightened out ... He was hurt pretty bad, I think he was hit on the head when the tree fell.
—Jerry Killen, The Neshoba Democrat, 11 March 2005

On 10 March 2005, a tree fell on Preacher Killen. At the time, he was preparing to go on trial for the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. The tree hit Edgar Ray Killen on his head and drove him three inches into the ground, shattering the femurs in both thighs.

“It was pure a case of me getting careless,” says Killen in Neshoba: The Price of Freedom. The accident left him in a wheelchair, which made for dramatic entrances and exits from the courthouse: he would be convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison. The wheelchair also occasions a striking effect in the film, initiated when the ex-Klu Klux Klan member’s brother J.D. Killen asserts, “Edgar not the villain they make him out to be. He’s just an old country preacher that’s outspoken about what he thinks and he gets it all out of the Bible. And that’s what we all need to go on, God’s word.” Here the image dissolves from a Bible on Edgar’s lap to another in J.D.‘s lap, as he reads out loud. A cut from this Bible to a shot from across the room shows J.D.‘s home, including a pair of handguns in leather holsters on a table, looking especially large in the foreground.

Dramatic in its own way, this bit of editing suggests why Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano’s documentary is so fascinating and so effective. Opening at New York’s Cinema Village on 13 August, the film seems at first a straightforward historical dig. A series of archival clips set the time and place for the notorious murders, opposing the calculated idealism of John Kennedy and the ugly pride of self-proclaimed “Mississippi segregationist” and governor (from 1960-‘64) Ross Barnett, as well as the blustery ignorance of a white woman (“God forgives murder and he forgives adultery, but God is very angry and he actually curses all who do integrate”) with the quiet endurance of black field workers and families living in shacks.

From here, the film lays out the facts of the 1964 murders, with a reenacted drive down the road where the three Civil Rights workers were first arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, then released after paying a $20 fine for “speeding.” (When they were arrested, former FBI agent Jim Ingram reports, Chaney was changing a flat tire.) As the film cuts ahead to 2004, when Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood finally charges Killen (who would be convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison), it reinforces the idea that Neshoba County remains frozen in time, with some alarming interview bits, ranging from “It think it’s disgraceful, it’s something that should have been left alone” to “Why would we want to protect murderers? They are domestic terrorists and they murdered American patriots.”

The sequence closes with a comment that describes both the trial and the film’s own focus: “It’s not about revenge. This is about the image of Neshoba County.” This image drives the Philadelphia Coalition, co-chaired by Leroy Clemons and Jim Prince, which decries the 40 years of official inaction on the case (“This community did not make a good faith effort to seek justice”). This image also haunts the relatives of Haney, Schwerner, and Goodman: the film includes interviews from then and now. In 1964, James’ mother Fannie Lee declares, “Whatever he went for, he went with all his mind and heart, he wasn’t afraid.” In 2004, she observes the ongoing racism shaping the case: “If it hadn’t been for Goodman and Schwerner, my son wouldn’t have been known or found today.” Rita Schwerner underlines how her husband’s death helped to frame Chaney’s, “I think that says a lot about attitudes about race and who’s important and whose mother’s son matters more.” 

Neshoba: The Price of Freedom argues that such inequity and corruption remain unresolved, historically and today. The film lays out the systemic racism of Mississippi (and the South more broadly), including the Sovereignty Commission, which served as a state secret police agency. One interview subject, who appears unnamed and obscured by shadow, explains how no witnesses came forward even in 2004, leaving Hood’s case against Killen dependent on federal trial transcripts from 1967 (when 18 men were charged with conspiracy, convicting only seven).  “The people here,” she says, “Everybody’s kin to everybody or they’ve lived here all their life and they can’t speak and tell you how it is here or things that went on because they’d never be able to live here again. They would have to leave if they wasn’t found dead somewhere.” The film notes the example of Cecil Price, who agreed to testify in 2005 and then died of head injuries “allegedly” suffered in a fall.

In this context, the efforts to bring Killen to trial do seem heroic, and the relief expressed by dedicated activists Fannie Lee Chaney, Carolyn Goodman (Andy’s mother), and Rita Schwerner Bender, among, is affecting: this despite some flat-footed music accompanying some of their appearances, as well as an apparent edit (by someone keeping film archives) of Schwerner Bender’s statement following Killen’s conviction for manslaughter instead of murder. The film features a clip where she says,

The fact that some members of this jury could have sat through that testimony, indeed could have lived here all these years and could not bring themselves to acknowledge that these were murders, that they were committed with malice… that means there’s a lot more yet to be done.

In newspaper reports from the time, her last phrase is a harsher denunciation of the Neshoba jury: after the words “committed with malice,” she continues, that the verdict “indicates that there are still people unfortunately among you who choose to look aside, who choose to not see the truth.”

This disjunction shows again that history is yet being written, that reconciliation is an arduous process, and that justice remains elusive. The movie emphasizes exactly this point, noting the work undone concerning eight of Killen’s fellow 1967 indictees, still alive and free, and the many cases of Civil Rights activists who went missing or were murdered from 1952-1970. Their names are listed at film’s end as “The Forgotten,” a formidable testament to continuing injustice.

The most galling embodiment of this injustice is Killen, who is remarkably voluble, unrepentant, and cocky—tree to the head notwithstanding. “I’m not meaning this as a brag or anything,” he says, “But I’m literally mobbed most everywhere I go by people that know me. I appreciate it, ‘cause I never strut and act the hero.” He proclaims his innocence repeatedly and denigrates his persecutors (including Hood, whom he calls “a little intellectual moron,” and Clarion-Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell, whom he describes as “that red-bearded, ultra-liberal Christ-hating Jew”). He also maintains pride in his racism (based on “actual fact”) and his ongoing affiliation with KKK (who show up to support him at the 2005 trial). Flamboyant and monstrous as he is, Killen’s self-image also reflects his time and place. And that is the price Neshoba—and the U.S. more broadly—continues to pay.