Racial Cases

Forty one years ago, in 1964, I had a client named Langdon Anderson.  He was then engaged in the oil and gas business.   One morning he came into my law office and was greatly upset about three young people, who had been murdered and buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi for their efforts in getting Blacks registered to vote.  Anderson said that could have been a member of his family. He just didn’t believe people should take the law into their own hands.  Later he was selected on the jury in the Federal Court case dealing with said facts in which the Federal Government had indicted 18 suspects involved in regards to a civil rights violation.       

18 white men had been arrested.  They were tried in Federal Court on Federal Civil Rights charges.  Seven were convicted.   Langdon Anderson was selected foreman of the jury.  Prior to his being selected as foreman of the jury, I got a phone call from Wilson F. Minor, a newspaper reporter, and he asked me if I knew Langdon and I told him I did and that I represented him.  He told me that Judge Harold Cox had made inquiry about Langdon being made foreman of the jury and an FBI Agent wanted to talk to someone in Lumberton who knew Langdon.  Minor then introduced me to the FBI agent and wanted to know if Langdon was a good man.  I told him “yes” he will be honest, fair and impartial.  That if the evidence was presented, he would vote for a conviction. The FBI Agent then inquired about Nell Dedeaux, who lived South of Lumberton, and while I didn’t know her as well as Langdon, I told him I thought she would be alright and that her Father was the late Jessie Byrd who had run for Lieutenant Governor   Both of these jurors voted for conviction.

When the trial was over Langdon came by my Office and told me that the U.S. Marshals were watching his house at night. He also told me that if anything happened to him that he had seen a list of Klu Klux Klan members in our area furnished to him by the FBI and told me the one he was concerned about.  No one ever bothered him.   Those were tense times in Mississippi during integration.  I always admired Langdon Anderson for the courage of his convictions.  For sometime there has been an active effort being made to indict the remaining living participants in a murder trial in Neshoba County, Mississippi.  There is no statute of limitations on murder. Langdon was upset that a Preacher named Edgar Ray Killen who organized the murders escaped conviction because one woman said she couldn’t vote against a preacher.

On June 21. 2005, 41 years to the day from the 1964 murder of the three civil rights workers, the man who planned the KKK’s murder of James Chaney,  Andrew Goodman, and  Michael Schwerner, a preacher named Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter. The Judge sentenced him to 60 years.   Since he is 80 he in effect got a life sentence.

Another case that drew National attention involved a black man from Lumberton, Mississippi named Mack Charles Parker.   Parker and three other Black men had been to Poplarville and at night enroute back 14 miles to Lumberton on U S Highway 11, had observed a white woman with a child in a car parked beside the road.  While proceeding further, they saw her husband walking towards Lumberton. After Parker let his passengers out of his car in Lumberton, he told his friends that he was going to drive back to the car occupied by the lady and her child and rape her.  He did drive back and with a pistol and got the lady and her child in his car and drove onto a woods road and raped her.  The Blacks who had got out of Parker’s car told some older Black men that he said he was going to go back and get the lady.  They told the Lumberton Police and Parker was thereafter shortly arrested and incarcerated in the Lumberton jail. 

While Parker was in the Lumberton jail one of my clients, R. E. Easley, came to my office and told me that there was talk of lynching Parker.  I then contacted my Banker friend, J. V. McElveen and Ward Hurt, the Mayor.  We then contacted then Governor J. P. Coleman and suggested Parker be incarcerated in Jackson, Hinds County, Mississippi, because of strong feelings, which if carried out, would embarrass not only Lumberton but the State of Mississippi.  Parker was then transferred to jail in Jackson.    Later the Grand jury convened in Pearl River County and Parker was then incarcerated in the Pearl River County jail at Poplarville. 

While in jail there, a mob of white men went into the Pearl River County jail and took Parker out of jail, shot and killed him and threw his body in the Pearl River near Bogalusa, Louisiana.  This caused the case to be on national news.  I was glad that I was a good listener to my client who told me they were going to lynch Parker in Lumberton. At least it didn’t happen where I then practiced law.   His Mother, Liza Parker, came to see if I would represent her son and I declined.   The book, named “Blood Justice”, which is well written, tells about the lynching and gave the names of the participants. One was from Lumberton.