Dec. 4, 1964 - Civil rights leaders applauded today the arrests in the slaying of three integration workers in Mississippi. They expressed doubt, however, that convictions could be obtained in that state. (Pictured below are Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey [right] and his deputy Cecil Price [left] today as they wait to post bond after their arraignment.)
“The FBI has done its job of gathering the evidence, detecting, and arresting the suspects,” Roy Wilkins said. “It is up to Mississippi to do the rest.” Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, went on to say:
“We may be sure that the evidence is of a kind which, in any normal jurisdiction, would justify indictment by a grand jury. Mississippi, however, is not a normal jurisdiction as far as the lives and rights of Negroes are concerned. The record to date shows that its white people can kill Negroes without fear of punishment in a judicial process.”
He said the state “now has another chance to make a new kind of history.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who has been critical of FBI effectiveness in Southern civil rights cases, hailed the arrests at a news conference in New York.
“I must commend the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said, “for the work they have done in uncovering the perpetrators of this dastardly act.” He said, “It renews again my faith in democracy.” Dr. King’s statement went on to say:
“I sincerely pray that justice reign in this situation and that the State of Mississippi will find its conscience and forthrightly declare that murder, even if it be the murder of a black man, is a crime in every state of this great Union of ours, even in the State of Mississippi.”
Dr. King stressed that even without a murder conviction, the arrested men “will have to stand before the world as those who have committed the world’s greatest crime.”
The civil rights leader, who was in New York today on his way to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, was nearly a half-hour late for his news conference at the Sheraton Atlantic Hotel because of “complete exhaustion.”
Before his appearance, Bayard Rustin, another civil rights worker, told newsmen:
“He’s just worn out — exhausted — and he has an upset stomach.”
Rustin said Dr. King was being attended by a physician.
Dr. King said later that “my health is pretty good, but I have lived a pretty hectic life and am told that I need a long period of rest.”
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