More than 30 people picketed the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce September 27. Signs included “Mississippi is still burning” and “First Amendment is no excuse for abuse.”

Some protesters encouraged people to register disapproval of the racist group’s booth by not attending the state fair, which runs October 6-17 in Jackson, the state capital. “If the contents of the fair do offend you, don’t go,” Shawna Davie, president of the Student Government Association at JSU, told the Jackson Clarion Ledger.

Jackson State students then called for a March Against Racism for October 6, and began contacting area students, Black and white, to participate, said Bill Chandler in a telephone interview from Jackson. Chandler is an international organizer for UNITE HERE and chair of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA!). “It’s important to support this march,” said Chandler, “because racism is one of the main ways used to divide working people, especially when they’re trying to organize.”

Nationalist Movement leader Richard Barrett of Learned, Mississippi, had announced that he was going to have a petition supporting Killen at the group’s booth. Killen, 79, was tried in 1967 on federal conspiracy charges in the Klan’s June 21, 1964, murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. He was freed after a hung jury verdict and never faced state charges. Seven Klan members were convicted on federal civil rights violations in the case, but none served more than six years.

Barrett said he intended to hand out cards with the images of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner—the three murdered civil rights workers—with a circle around them and a line crossed through. The card describes the three as communists who “invaded” Mississippi.

The Mississippi state attorney general’s office is currently investigating the possibility of seeking a state murder indictment in the 1964 case, as a result of growing pressure to reopen one of the most important unsolved cases of the civil rights movement. In June, hundreds gathered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town in Neshoba County, to mark the 40th anniversary of the slayings and support efforts to reopen the case.

At the 1967 trial, Killen was identified as having organized the killings of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. The three young civil rights workers had been in Neshoba County in 1964 as part of Freedom Summer, during which hundreds of volunteer organizers came to Mississippi to help register Blacks to vote.

Mississippi State Fair Director Mike Brinkley, after initially denying Barrett’s request for a booth on technical grounds, agreed September 28 to grant a permit.

The sheriff of Hinds County, where Jackson is located, announced that his office will have a booth at the fair and will be asking fairgoers to sign a petition to reopen the murder investigation against Killen.

On October 1, Killen’s wife, Betty Jo Killen, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview that her husband had no intention of attending the fair. The next day, Barrett threw in the towel and announced that he had canceled plans to have the booth.  
 
 
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