[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 2]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 1789-1790]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               REMEMBERING CHANEY, GOODMAN, AND SCHWERNER

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BENNIE G. THOMPSON

                             of mississippi

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, February 8, 2005

  Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, I would like to recognize 
the State of Mississippi's pursuit for justice as it has brought forth 
an indictment of noted Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for the murders of 
James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. As the State of 
Mississippi has been collecting evidence and investigating this case, I 
would like to submit the following excerpt from Olen Burrage's The 
Mississippi Murder of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney by Seth Cagin and 
Phillip Dray.

       The owner of a local trucking company, Olen Burrage, was 
     having a cattle pond dug on his property, five miles 
     southwest of town on Highway 21. Burrage had hired Herman 
     Tucker, one of his part-time drivers and the owner/operator 
     of two Caterpillar dozers, to build the pond and the large 
     dam that would restrain it. The Neshoba Klansman arranged for 
     Billy Wayne Posey to arrive at midnight on the lane of the 
     Burrage property with the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and 
     Chaney. Once the bodies were placed in the center of the dam, 
     fifteen or twenty feet down, Tucker would reseal it with one 
     of the bulldozers. When the pond filled with rainwater, the 
     place where the bodies were stashed would simply become an 
     innocuous part of the Neshoba landscape--a Klansman version 
     of a Choctaw burial mound.
       ``So you wanted to come to Mississippi?'' one of the 
     murderers is reputed to have told the victims later that 
     night. ``Well, now we're gonna let you stay here. We're not 
     even gonna run you out. We're gonna let you stay here with 
     us.'' (p. 55)
       Killen, as organizer of the Neshoba and Lauderdale County 
     klaverns of the White Knights of Mississippi and point man 
     for the conspiracy, was eager to return to Philadelphia as 
     soon as he had collected enough men for the operation. There 
     were ``arrangements'' to be made, he explained to the men at 
     Akin's. Quickly he sketched for them the plan he had devised 
     in collusion with Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price 
     and Billy Wayne Posey, and possibly--to infer from the events 
     that would transpire--Hop Barnett and Olen Burrage. Deputy 
     Price would release Goatee and the other two civil rights 
     workers as soon as it got dark. Once the civil rights workers 
     were turned loose and were alone out on the highway, they 
     would be stopped by a Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol car 
     and turned over to the Klan. (p. 336)
       Billy Wayne Posey was among those who attempted the Bonanza 
     alibi, but in fact Posey had been far too busy that day to 
     watch television. His role in the conspiracy was to arrange 
     for the disposal of the victims' bodies, a grisly task easily 
     as complex as setting them up to be done away with in the 
     first place. After Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were 
     arrested late on the afternoon of June 21, Posey met with 
     Olen Burrage, who owned a trucking firm and several pieces of 
     farm property west of Philadelphia, and Herman Tucker, a 
     bulldozer operator who occasionally worked for Burrage. This 
     meeting took place either at Burrage's garage, southwest of 
     Philadelphia, or at the Phillips 66 station.

[[Page 1790]]

       Posey's arrangement with Burrage to use a dam being built 
     on Burrage's property as a burial site for the three civil 
     rights workers' was probably not the result of brainstorm 
     thinking by the conspirators. In all likelihood, Burrage's 
     dam site had been previously scouted out by the Neshoba 
     klavern for its potential as a secret grave, perhaps as early 
     as mid-May, when Mickey Schwerner's incursions into Longdale 
     were becoming known to the Klansmen. Mississippi FBI agent 
     John Proctor claims to have learned from an informant that 
     Burrage once told a roomful of Neshoba Klansmen discussing 
     the impending invasion of civil rights workers, ``Hell, I've 
     got a dam that'll hold a hundred of them.'' Although the 
     Meridian Klansmen had been instructed to leave Mickey 
     Schwerner alone, the leaders of the Neshoba klavern had 
     apparently been given Sam Bowers's approval to ``eliminate'' 
     him if they caught him in Neshoba County. They may well have 
     expected to have further opportunities to nab Schwerner on 
     one of his visits to Longdale, and it is possible many 
     elements of the conspiracy--the release from jail, the 
     highway chase, and the secret burial--were loosely in place 
     before June 21.
       The previous summer, Burrage had consulted an agent of the 
     U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service 
     about joining a program under which landowners could obtain 
     government funding for pond dams that met certain 
     conservation requirements. Burrage's proposed dam met the 
     program's specifications, but the approval of the funding was 
     contingent upon periodic inspections of the construction site 
     by agents from the Department of Agriculture. In May 1964, 
     when Burrage finalized arrangements with Herman Tucker and 
     authorized him to begin work on the dam, Burrage chose--for 
     reason he never explained--to do so without participating in 
     the government program. (pp. 340-342)
       With the civil rights workers' bodies in the hole, Posey 
     signaled Tucker to start moving. The tractor ran fifteen 
     minutes as Tucker bladed off the top of the dam so it would 
     look as though it had not been disturbed.
       The eight Klansmen got into Barnette's car and the civil 
     rights workers' station wagon for the short ride down highway 
     21 to Burrage's trucking garage. There the men replaced the 
     license plates on Barnette's car, which had been removed 
     earlier in Meridian, and Jordan was given all the gloves the 
     men had worn and told to dispose of them. Tucker took a glass 
     gallon jug and filled it with gasoline from one of Burrage's 
     pumps, to use in setting fire to the station wagon. (p. 361)

  Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner will be remembered in the State of 
Mississippi's history as extraordinary individuals doing whatever it 
took to end racial segregation and win social justice not only in the 
State of Mississippi but across this country. The story of Olen Burrage 
is one of many in Mississippi's plagued past. The State's insistence on 
justice signals a new day not only for the State of Mississippi, but 
also for the families of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

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