The Preacher Dies--Edgar Ray Killen, 1925-1018

Edgar Ray Killen was a "kleagle," which is to say, a recruiter, for his hometown KKK. Think pyramid sales, if that helps. Killen recruits a man, who then pays membership fees that include a couple bucks for the kleagle. That man recruits a couple more, and Killen earns more. A kleagle. Never heard the word? That's reason for thanksgiving.

In 2005, this man, Edgar Ray Killen, the KKK kleagle, was convicted by a Mississippi court of three counts of manslaughter and sent off to prison for sixty years, where he died a month ago.



The State of Mississippi determined that Killen had been the inspiration behind the murders of three civil rights workers--two white, one black--in Philadelphia, MS, during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964. Those three men--James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner--had been locked up in a Philadelphia jail after being arrested for speeding. All three weren't local boys. They were in Mississippi investigating the fire-bombing of a black church. When released, they disappeared, their bodies found later in an earthen dam. That's their burned station wagon at the top of the page.

In 1966, a grand jury indicted a eighteen men for the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. In a jury trial, seven men were convicted, eight were freed, and three--one of them Edgar Ray Killen--were released because of a hung jury. The convictions were the first ever made by a white jury for the murder of a black man in Mississippi.

In 2005, forty years later, Killen, eighty years old and in a wheelchair after breaking both legs in his sawmill, was retried and convicted of manslaughter, for recruiting the bunch who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. He was sentenced to sixty years, twenty each for each of the murders.

Edgar Ray Killen died in prison last month. He was 92.

Not long ago, he asked to do an interview, but set ground rules himself. He told the AP he would say nothing about the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, nor of his own role in them. He rambled a great deal but blamed that rambling on a brain injury he'd also suffered when he broke both legs. He vehemently maintained his segregationist views hadn't changes a bit while he was in prison, and made clear that he held no animosity toward African-Americans. 

If Killen had any change of mind or heart before he died, we don't know. What that single interview makes clear is that he had no interest in altering his views.

Killen's nickname is "Preacher." In the interview, he speaks warmly about the churches he served and the preaching he'd done.

That hung jury that allowed him to walk back in 1965? The tally went 11-1 for conviction. That one jurist who held out firmly against the others, said she simply couldn't convict a preacher.

Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen is a white man, a white man's white man. But his story as a kleagle and a preacher is a telling tale for Black History Month.