The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is the name of an American white supremacist, far-right hate group. Various historians have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group. There have been three distinct iterations with various targets relative to time and place, including African Americans, Jews, and Catholics.
Andrew Goodman was an American civil rights activist. He was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Goodman and two fellow activists, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were volunteers for the Freedom Summer campaign that sought to register African-Americans to vote in Mississippi and to set up Freedom Schools for black Southerners.
Mississippi Burning is a 1988 American crime thriller film directed by Alan Parker and written by Chris Gerolmo that is loosely based on the 1964 murder investigation of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. It stars Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as two FBI agents investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers in fictional Jessup County, Mississippi, who are met with hostility by the town's residents, local police, and the Ku Klux Klan.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an armed African-American self-defense group founded in November 1964, during the civil rights era in the United States, in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana. On February 21, 1965—the day of Malcolm X's assassination—the first affiliated chapter was founded in Bogalusa, Louisiana, followed by a total of 20 other chapters in this state, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama. It was intended to protect civil rights activists and their families, threatened both by white vigilantes and discriminatory treatment by police under Jim Crow laws. The Bogalusa chapter gained national attention during the summer of 1965 in its violent struggles with the Ku Klux Klan.
Michael Henry Schwerner was an American civil rights activist. He was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) field workers murdered in rural Neshoba County, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Schwerner and two co-workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were killed in response to their civil rights work, which included promoting voting registration among African Americans, most of whom had been disenfranchised in the state since 1890.
James Earl Chaney was an American civil rights activist. He was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. The others were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City.
A Kleagle is an officer of the Ku Klux Klan whose main role is to recruit new members and must maintain the three guiding principles: "recruit, maintain control, and safeguard."
Edgar Ray Killen was an American Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights activists participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He appealed the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on April 12, 2007, by the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, at age 92.
On June 21, 1964, three Civil Rights Movement activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Micheal Schwerner, were murdered by local members of the Ku Klux Klan. They had been arrested earlier in the day for speeding, and after being released were followed by local law enforcement & others, all affiliated with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. After following the three for some time, they were abducted by the group, brought to a secluded location, and shot. They were then buried in an earthen dam. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign by attempting to register African Americans in Mississippi to vote. Since 1890 and through the turn of the century, Southern states had systematically disenfranchised most black voters by discrimination in voter registration and voting.
United States v. Cecil Price, et al., also known as the Mississippi Burning trial or Mississippi Burning case, was a criminal trial where the United States charged a group of 18 men with conspiring in a Ku Klux Klan plot to murder three young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi on June 21, 1964 during Freedom Summer. The trial, conducted in Meridian, Mississippi with U.S. District Court Judge W. Harold Cox presiding, resulted in convictions of 7 of the 18 defendants. Another defendant, James Edward Jordan, pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution.
Lawrence Andrew Rainey Sr. was an American police officer and white supremacist who served as Sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi, from 1963 to 1968. He gained notoriety for his alleged involvement in the June 1964 murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. He was accused of aiding and abetting members of the Ku Klux Klan in the murders by having his officers keep watch over the men's position in town. Rainey was a member of Mississippi's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and had previously gone to court for the shooting of an unarmed black motorist in 1959.
Alton Wayne Roberts was an American murderer and white supremacist. Roberts, a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted for his role in the 1964 Freedom Summer murders. He was the one who fatally shot two of the victims, Congress of Racial Equality civil rights activists Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Roberts also shot the third activist, James Chaney, but some debate that it was another accomplice, James Jordan, who had killed him. Jordan had identified Roberts as Chaney's killer. In 1967, he was charged and convicted of depriving the slain activists of their civil rights.
Cecil Ray Price was an American police officer and white supremacist. He was a participant in the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964. At the time of the murders, Price was 26 years old and a deputy sheriff in Neshoba County, Mississippi. He was a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Murder in Mississippi is a 1990 American television film which dramatized the last weeks of civil rights activists Michael "Mickey" Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, and the events leading up to their disappearance and subsequent murder during Freedom Summer in 1964. It starred Tom Hulce as Schwerner, Jennifer Grey as his wife Rita, Blair Underwood as Chaney, and Josh Charles as Goodman. Hulce received a nomination for Best Actor in a TV Miniseries at the 1990 Golden Globes. The film premiered on February 5, 1990, on NBC.
Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr. was an American white supremacist who co-founded the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and became its first Imperial Wizard. Previously, he was a Grand Dragon of the Mississippi Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, appointed to his position by Imperial Wizard Roy Davis. Bowers was responsible for instigating and planning the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by members of his Klan chapter near Philadelphia, Mississippi, for which he served six years in federal prison; and the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, for which he was sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after the crime. He also was accused of being involved in the 1967–1968 bombings of Jewish targets in the cities of Jackson and Meridian. He died in prison at the age of 82.
Sheila Larken is an American television actress, best known for playing the role of Margaret Scully, the mother of Dana Scully, on The X-Files.
James Ford Seale was a Ku Klux Klan member charged by the U.S. Justice Department on January 24, 2007, and subsequently convicted on June 14, 2007, for the May 1964 kidnapping and murder of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two African-American young men in Meadville, Mississippi. At the time of his arrest, Seale worked at a lumber plant in Roxie, Mississippi. He also worked as a crop duster and was a police officer in Louisiana briefly in the 1970s. He was a member of the militant Klan organization known as the Silver Dollar Group, whose members were identified with a silver dollar; occasionally minted the year of the member's birth.
Mississippi Cold Case is a 2007 feature documentary produced by David Ridgen of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the Ku Klux Klan murders of two 19-year-old black men, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, in Southwest Mississippi in May 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement and Freedom Summer. It also explores the 21st-century quest for justice by the brother of Moore. The documentary won numerous awards as a documentary and for its investigative journalism.
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organization which is active in the United States. It originated in Mississippi and Louisiana in the early 1960s under the leadership of Samuel Bowers, its first Imperial Wizard. The White Knights of Mississippi were formed in December 1963, when they separated from the Original Knights of Mississippi after the resignation of Imperial Wizard Roy Davis. Roughly 200 members of the Original Knights of Louisiana also joined the White Knights. Within a year, their membership was up to around six thousand, and they had Klaverns in over half of the counties in Mississippi. By 1967, the number of active members had declined to around four hundred. Similar to the United Klans of America (UKA), the White Knights are very secretive about their group.
Kathryn Madlyn Ainsworth was an American Ku Klux Klan terrorist. She was killed by law enforcement in 1968 during her failed assassination attempt on a prominent Jewish Mississippian.
