Stevenson High Students Involvement in the Mississippi Burning Case

Barry Bradford, a teacher at Stevenson High in Lincolnshire, had three students working to publicize the case of three murdered civil rights workers during the Freedom Summer in 1964.

With the arrest of Edgar Ray Killen for the murders, they are receiving some well earned attention.

Barry thanks the readers who contacted their Representatives. I think we should thank Barry and the three students, Sarah Siegel, Allison Nichols and Brittany Saltiel For more information go here.

From Barry:

On December 15, you were kind enough to post a request from my students,
asking your readers to write their Congressman to request a reopening of
the “Mississippi Burning” Murder Case. ?On behalf of Brittany, Sarah, and
Allison, I’d like to thank all of the ArchPundit readers who helped make a
difference!

Here is an article from the Belleville News-Democrat:

Posted on Fri, Jan. 07, 2005

Student documentarians gratified by arrest in civil rights killings
NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON
Associated Press

CHICAGO – Hundreds of miles from a Mississippi courtroom where a suspect
pleaded innocent Friday to the 40-year-old slayings of three civil rights
workers, three suburban Chicago high school students were getting
accolades for their role in publicizing the case.

Stevenson High School students Sarah Siegel, Allison Nichols and Brittany
Saltiel spent more than a year working on a 2004 documentary about the
killings. Their project included a rare phone interview with the man
arrested Thursday, reputed Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, and
helped generate a congressional resolution last June asking federal
prosecutors to reopen the case.

“I was really happy for all the families who I knew had been waiting for
this for 40 years,” 17-year-old Siegel said Friday of Killen’s arrest. “It
was also a little saddening to know that it took 40 years for justice to
start working.”

The girls and their teacher, Barry Bradford, are humble about their part
in renewing interest in the case, which was the subject of the 1988 movie
“Mississippi Burning.”

But congressmen including Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and civil
rights activist who knew the slain workers, credit the students for
working to keep the case in the spotlight and unearthing new details.

“I was very inspired and very moved by the work that these three students
brought before us,” Lewis said Friday. “I think they were crucial in
bringing us to this point.”

The girls’ odyssey began in the summer of 2003, when they met with
Bradford to discuss possible projects for the annual National History Day
competition. They stopped him after his first idea: telling the story of
21-year-old James Chaney, 20-year-old Andrew Goodman and 24-year-old
Michael Schwerner.

The three young men were participating in Freedom Summer 1964, an effort
to register blacks in the South to vote and start educational programs,
when they were beaten and shot to death, allegedly by Klansmen. Their
ages, not much older than the girls, struck a chord.

“We just thought something about those three men and their dedication to
the movement really stood out,” 16-year-old Saltiel said.

Although 19 men were eventually charged with federal civil rights
violations in the case, Killen’s arrest marks the first time Mississippi
has sought murder charges.

The Lincolnshire students pored over thousands of pages of court
transcripts and interviewed former prosecutors and investigators,
witnesses, family members of the victims and government officials for
their 10-minute documentary. They also sought out Killen, now 79, for a
phone interview.

Bradford decided to conduct the interview after a Justice Department
official expressed concern about the girls having to testify in the future
in case Killen said something incriminating.

Killen didn’t implicate himself in the killings, Bradford said, but he did
say the reason civil rights workers were so hated at the time was because
people thought they were recruiting blacks to be communists.

Soon after that interview, Bradford said his and the girls’ names were
posted on a white supremacist Web site that accused them of trying to skew
the truth.

“I think it was truly a little startling to them to realize that there are
still remnants of that archaic mind-set,” Bradford said.

The students say the most rewarding part of their project was meeting with
family members of the slain men, including Goodman’s mother and Chaney’s
brother, who called them “superhero girls.”