By: Joe Strupp After running hundreds of editorials over the years on the unsolved 1964 murder of three civil-rights workers near Philadelphia, Miss., David Hampton, editorial director of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., believes his paper helped lead to the arrest of a former Klansman who was charged with the murders Friday.
"I think the paper kept it before the public," said Hampton, who has run the editorial page since 1988. "Our position has always been that you never heal until you deal with the problem and face it."
The Mississippi Attorney General's office reopened the case in 1999 after The Clarion-Ledger published excerpts from a secret interview given by Sam Bowers, a one-time Imperial Wizard who headed the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, according to the paper.
The latest break came Thursday, when police arrested Edgar Ray Killen for allegedly arranging the killings near Philadelphia, about 100 miles from Jackson. Killen pleaded innocent Friday to three counts of murder in the first-ever state charges in the case.
"It has been one of our major focuses for the last 10 years," Hampton said about the case. "When we first started reporting and editorializing about it, there was a great feeling among some [readers] that we were dragging out the past. But our position was always that you don't pursue cases because it is politically right or wrong, you do it to seek justice."
Most recently, Hampton ran an editorial on Dec. 22 that sought to give attention to a reward being offered by a local religious group seeking information to help solve the case.
"The reward could jog a few memories, but it's the impetus behind offering the reward ... that's important," the editorial stated. "It's offered because prosecuting the case is the right thing to do and a moral obligation."
In the 1999 interview, Bowers, the former KKK boss, admitted that he "thwarted justice in the trio's killings." He is now serving a life sentence in a Mississippi prison for ordering a 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss.
Bowers said he didn't mind going to prison on federal conspiracy charges because a fellow Klansman had gotten away with murder. "I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man," he said about Killen, according to the paper.
Hampton said the arrest sparked a handful of e-mails on Friday, all of them positive, about the paper's long-running campaign to keep attention on the case. "That is unlike the past, when I used to get mean letters and calls asking why we stayed on it," he told E&P. "This is all positive."
Along with a front-page story, an editorial, and an editorial cartoon on the arrest in Saturday's edition, Hampton said the paper will have at least one full page of inside coverage.
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