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Brother of slain civil rights activist Ben Chaney tells WW:Reopening of case is 'whitewash'Workers World Managing Editor Monica Moorehead interviewed Ben Chaney, the brother of slain civil-rights activist James Chaney, at his Manhattan office on Jan. 27. African American James Chaney, along with two other white civil-rights activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were killed by the KKK and other racists on June 21, 1964 in Philadelphia, Miss. No one was ever convicted of murder in this case. Last month, 40 years later, a murder charge was brought against one of the masterminds of these killings, Edgar Ray Killen. (See WW, Jan. 20, 2005.) Following are excerpts from the interview. Workers World: You were 11 or 12 years old when your brother James was murdered. What are some of your memories of him?
Ben Chaney: My brother was an asthmatic. He was captain of the football and track team. He had to take me to get a haircut one day and we had to go to the other side of town. Some of his high school friends were hitting me on the head. He beat them down. Another memory is that he bought me my first football outfit when I was 9 or 10 years old. He tried to teach me to play and I played a little bit in the little league. WW: Did he ever talk to you about why he was so invested in the civil-rights movement? BC:It really wasn't necessary because of the conditions. Everybody knew what was going on. When you got to be 6 or 7 you'd have to get off the sidewalk when white folks were walking by. So everybody knew what was happening. And when somebody was out demonstrating, you knew why. The biggest conversations that ever occurred in my house were about the Freedom Rides. And that's because my brother was involved and you could see on the TV the Freedom Riders getting beat up when they got off the bus. And that was one of my mother's main concerns. But as far as doing voter registration work in the community, he would return, usually late at night. I would be asleep, but he would be talking to mother. My mother has these stories that she's been telling ever since I was 4 or 5 years old. She was telling more of them back then about lynchings that she had seen growing up, her first lynching that she witnessed, about her great-uncle being lynched. I think she was telling these stories to keep my brother safe, to let him know about the danger that was out there. Once you get to be a certain age, you know what's happening. You can just open up your eyes and see that society has made a difference in the two different peoples--Blacks and whites. So you don't need to talk about it, just need to act on it. WW: Where did you all grow up?
BC:Meridian, Miss., about 45 minutes from Philadelphia, Miss. WW: Did you know Andrew Goodman or Michael Schwerner before they were murdered? BC:The first time I saw Mickey, he and his wife had just gotten to Mississippi and my brother had brought them home. When I woke up that morning, they were sleeping on our living room floor. Andy came to the house, but he was only in Mississippi for the one day before he was murdered. He had breakfast that Sunday morning at our house. Mickey and Rita used to come by and eat my mother's homemade chocolate cake all the time. And her homemade biscuits. 'Just some whitewash' WW: Just a few months ago, the Department of Justice decided to re-open the case of your brother's murder--along with the case of Goodman and Schwerner's murders--more than 40 years after the KKK got a slap on the wrist from the Mississippi courts. Do you think real justice will be served by the reopening of the case? BC:It wasn't the Justice Department that decided to reopen the case. It was the state attorney general. In 1967, the Justice Department tried them for violation of civil rights. In March of last year we requested that the state attorney general follow the same model in this case that was used in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing case--that an independent investigation and a special prosecutor be appointed. The Mississippi attorney general, instead of going by our suggestions, issued a press release saying that he was turning the case over to the Justice Department. As a matter of fact, he did not. What he did was that he conducted his own investigation. He did so because he targeted one individual-Preacher Killen-who is probably one of the most unrepentant racists in the state. He did so because he wanted to protect the rich and powerful people that were involved in the case that have gotten away. And as a result, this is where we are today--one person is being prosecuted, where there are seven others who the state attorney general is not going to even attempt to prosecute.
It appears that in order for justice to exist, everybody who was involved in the case should be prosecuted. But there's a former state legislator that the state attorney general refuses to go after because his son has taken his place. There's a very rich landowner in Neshoba County, Philadel phia, Miss.; Olin Burge is his name. The bodies were found on his land. Burge put up some of the bail money for Killen. So the state attorney general is staying away from the rich and powerful. He's going after the one Klansman that hasn't changed his appearance. These other people have changed their appearance. They have gone from being members of the White Citizens Council (WCC) to members of a new group started by the WCC, called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). If you go to the Southern Poverty Law Center web site, it's listed as one of the most racist groups in the country. CCC wear the suit and tie; they got these big positions as judges and law y ers, and even the governor of Missis sippi, Haley Barber, is a supporter of the CCC. He's on their web site at a fund raiser he attended to raise money for the group so they can keep segregation and perpetuate their busing into parochial schools so they won't have to integrate the schools in Mississippi. To get one person and not to get everybody else is a miscarriage of justice. This is just some whitewash. WW: Why do you think they are doing this knowing it is a whitewash? BC:They're trying to change the image of Neshoba County and Mississippi. They want to put this case to rest. So one way to say that justice is being served is to get Preacher Killen now. Killen is a key figure in these murders. He organized the lynch mob. He was the recruiter for the Klan in the 1960s and it was his job to get approval from state officials for the murder. The Klan would not have committed the murders unless a state official approved it. Whether or not that state official is a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he was probably a member of the Sovereignty Commission and a member of the WCC. In the mid-1950s, the state of Missis sippi formed this state agency called the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Their job was to spy on civil-rights workers and to try in any way they could to derail the movement. They got some of their favorite Negroes and some of the moderate whites and they tried to form a civil-rights organization that could be the spokesmen for Black folks in Missis sippi other than the organizations that were already working there at the time. That didn't work because the civil-rights workers used simply too much activism, too much demonstrating, too much heat that prevented that. They got Negroes in the community and they paid them money to spy on civil-rights workers. The Negroes would tell the commission what the civil-rights workers were doing and where they were going and give them identifications of cars they were driving and who were with them. The commission would tell the WCC, which would in turn would tell the KKK and law enforcement. 'How my brother was murdered' In a book by Prof. Neil McMillan that talks about racism in Mississippi, he explains that the commission was made up of state leaders, including the governor, the lieutenant governor, the leaders from the state senate and the house--and they were all members of the WCC. So when the commission got the information, the Klan had the information--because the WCC gave it to the Klan. This is how my brother was murdered. There was a Negro agent at the training session in Ohio along with my brother and Goodman and Schwerner. When the church was burned in Philadelphia, Miss., they made plans to come back to Mississippi. In the Ohio planning session was a state representative for the NAACP (they called him Agent X). He called the Sovereignty Commission and told them that they were coming down. He gave the commission the license plates numbers on the car, described the car they were driving and their names. On Sunday morning, June 21, the day that they left to go to Philadelphia, Miss., another informer spoke to Cecil Price, who was a deputy sheriff there. On that same Sunday, they were returning from the church and talking to the people who would be coming back to Meridian where we lived and that's when the sheriff's deputy stopped them, about 4 p.m. He took them to jail and held them until about 10 o'clock, until Preacher Killen could organize the lynch mob. Once he organized the mob, the deputy sheriff turned the three loose. He re-caught them and he turned them over to the Klan. Preacher Killen was not there. But he had arranged for where they would be stopped at. He had arranged for the posse to be there. He had arranged for the site to bury the bodies. He had arranged for the bulldozer to be there to cover the bodies up. So he's a key figure in these murders. But he's not the only key figure. There's this former state legislator who has, for the past 40 years, stopped any prosecution and any investigation. And there are other rich people involved in these murders. So as far as justice is concerned, right now we are glad that Preacher Killen is being prosecuted, but again, we're back to the whitewash. This has been a long time coming. In 1989 I met with Mike Moore, who was the Mississippi attorney general at the time, and he promised to prosecute the case. He assigned two attorneys in his office to do the research. And they gave him a memo saying he should prosecute. He came back a couple of weeks later saying that there was not enough evidence. Again, Mike Moore did the same thing in 1994. And he did it again in 1999. But come to find out, he never requested the evidence from the Justice Department. And what's most important, he never requested the informants' files that the Justice Department had. So he had no real intentions of prosecuting. He was just leading people on. And it's clear that this new attorney general, Jim Hood, has no real intentions of seeking justice. He wants to simply give the appearance that things have been done, that this case is closed. There's some very rich people that need to be prosecuted and he's simply protecting them. WW: This is a classic example of government and the extralegal terrorist organizations working hand-in-hand. What do you feel is the legacy that your brother left for the movement today? If he were alive today, what would he have thought about the state of the movement and the situation that Black people, not only in the South, but around the country and around the world, are facing today? BC:I'm not sure about the Northeast or other places, but I know particularly in the area where he's buried, the legacy is strong among young African Americans. And his grave even symbolizes the desire of young people to buck the status quo. His grave has been vandalized for the past 40 years. In fact, someone used a high-powered rifle to shoot his photograph out of the monument we had put there in 1989. They've kicked over his tombstone. They've tried to get to his coffin. That's because it has such a strong symbolic gesture for young people in that area. They're trying to destroy just the symbol itself. So I think it means a great deal to young Black folks in Mississippi. 'Leadership is something that's claimed' As far as the state of Black folks today and the state of the movement, I don't know what he would be thinking now, but I've talked to a lot of people who worked with him-in fact, in the last few months I've been talking with those old guys that were in the movement, including Jim Forman before he passed away. I think he would be sort of discouraged by the fact that there's no real solid leadership in our commu nity. The mainstream media identifies who's going to represent us and they push them to the forefront. So I think he would have been sort of disappointed because of the fact that in the 1960s a grassroots movement meant that poor people came together and got their resources together and got things done. Now, poor people don't really come together. We rely upon these rich, liberal organizations to supply us with the funds. And as a result, the issues that are most affecting our community are not being addressed. The leadership is not going to address them. And the poor people are not equipped to address them. Right now, young poor people are being taught that you can't do anything unless you've got some backing or support from some major leader or major organization. When in fact we know that the civil-rights movement started without any white folks. It started with poor Black folks in the south. The sit-ins started with Black students from Black college campuses taking the lead. And it was years later before these liberal volunteers really got involved. In fact, when they were looking for my brother's body, they found the bodies of nine other Black college students that had disappeared over a three or four year period doing voter registration. WW: Can you tell us about the James Earl Chaney Foundation? How and when did it get started? What are its goals? BC:I started the foundation to raise money to repair the vandalism to my brother's grave. But we got involved in a lot of other things that we were not equipped to do. One thing that we got involved in, in 1992 and 1993, was the jailhouse hangings in Mississippi. People were calling us up in '92 saying that Black males were dying in jail and they didn't know what to do in Mississippi. So we went down, we traveled over the state and we determined that there were 25 to 30 deaths. We formed a group called the Mississippi Coalition for Human Rights. We went to Jackson, Miss., the state capital, and we put on hearings in the Senate chamber room and then the media started doing their own investigation and they uncovered 50-something deaths that were ruled as suicides. We were able to get our information into the hands of Attorney General Janet Reno, and she, under the Institutionalized Persons Act, conducted an investigation into 18 Mississippi jails. She closed down four in order to upgrade eight others. That put us in debt. Then we got involved in putting on hear ings about capital punishment in Pen nsylvania and a few other places. From that point on we got involved in youth empowerment, youth education, teaching the history of the civil-rights movement. We did so through Freedom Rides. We'd get a group of young people to board buses in New York and we would visit all the sites in the south. Just last year we added to that by any stop we go to, we do voter registration. And we feel this is necessary first of all because that's what my brother was doing-voter registration. He and Mickey and Andy were doing that when they were murdered. It was interesting because they were not eligible to vote, simply because of the age limit. You had to be 21 to vote in 1964. Andrew was 20. My brother had just turned 21. And yet they were still out there registering people to vote. So on our Freedom Rides we have people from 14, 16 on up. Last year we registered 550 people, first-time voters from 18 to 22. That was 90 percent of the people that registered to vote. We're going to be doing this for the next three years, getting ready for the Voting Rights Act, because it is set to expire in three years. And because our leadership has a tendency to wait until the last minute--don't prepare, don't plan, don't organize and don't create stra tegies until the last minute-they don't want to make a lot of noise, you know, because things don't get done. We decided to begin planning now, so we're going to do a Freedom Ride, leaving the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, in June. We're going to go through out the south. We're going to Miami University because the training sessions in the 1960s took place on Western College, which is part of the school. And they have extended an invitation for us to use that. From there we're going to go into the poorest community in Cincinnati and do voter registration for one day and then we'll go south. We're going to these various stops, and working with community coalitions, forming community groups in different cities to get young people to help us to identify areas to do voter registration. Also to help us identify areas for resources that we may need like housing and food. We've got a pretty good group of people across the South that are young, they're college students and they're smart. And they want this because there's no leadership. The problem that I see is where there is leadership, it's weak. So there is a serious need for young people to become leaders. But a lot of them feel that leadership has to be given to them-that leadership is given, it has to be bestowed upon you. But in fact, when you look back at a history of the movement, nobody bestowed leadership on Jim Forman. So leadership is not something that's given, it's actually something that's claimed-you take it and you act upon it. But we are going through the process of trying to get young people to use their voice. They'll just speak up, simply speak up. And we are giving them the resour ces to do it by creating community-based coalitions. WW: It is amazing that in the years 2000 and 2004 something as basic as the right to vote is still a big issue. BC:It is a very big issue-in the past election we saw that. One thing we are going to try to do-I'm not exactly sure how to do it yet--is to get an amendment to the Voting Rights Act. The amendment would be that for these electronic voting machines there must be a print-out so you can verify who the person voted for. I think that may eliminate some of the problems. We're going to try to have it on the agenda by end of this year. For more information on the James Earl Chaney Foundation, go to www.jecf.org. Interview transcribed by Jean Bowdish.
Reprinted from the Feb. 10, 2005, issue of Workers World
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