Murder in Mississippi: United States v. Price and the Struggle for Civil Rights

A former Mississippi State University professor delivers an impassioned chronicle of an infamous crime in this unevenly crafted, but serviceable, history. In 1964, after a Ku Klux Klan leader ordered the killing of Michael Schwerner, a white activist working on the Freedom Summer voter registration and education campaign, Schwerner and two of his co-workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were arrested, released and lynched near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The crime led to the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case United States v. Price--in which justices ruled that 18 Klansmen could be charged with conspiracy to violate the three victims' civil rights. Eventually, seven of these defendants were found guilty in a federal district courtroom, producing Mississippi's first 20th-century civil rights convictions. Ball skillfully dissects the uphill fight faced by the FBI and the Justice Department during these trials, and he offers keen observations on the""feral prejudices"" of the state organizations that encouraged terrorizing attacks on African Americans and their allies. Inexplicably, however, the Supreme Court case highlighted in the book's subtitle is neglected in favor an indignant recounting of the subsequent trial in Mississippi. At times, the book feels like an avenging crusade designed to aid those who would like the state to try the remaining living Klansmen. Ball rebukes those who would prefer not to rekindle the ashes of the""Mississippi Burning"" by levying new murder charges, declaring that""it is past time for a final accounting.... There cannot be any peace or rest until justice is done."" Though the book's descriptions can be somewhat repetitive, it nonetheless makes a good resource for anyone who wants a quick re-cap of all the facts of this complicated historic case.