After the 1964 murders, Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld was dispatched to Philadelphia. He recounted his confrontation with its citizens three months ago in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:
"I would write about the social stratum that thought of itself as making up Philadelphia's 'responsible majority.' These citizens may have been neither responsible nor a majority, but that's how they saw themselves. Loosely defined, it was the stratum that embraced the country club members who ... despised the idea of racial integration but couldn't afford resistance, who never joined the Klan and wouldn't have been asked - all of whom now seethed with resentment because the whole country associated their town with the lynchings of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. ... Some were silent out of fear; most viewed the three murdered men as intruders and didn't see anything wrong with confronting intruders."
In other words, murder was a public relations problem for the town's leading citizens.
Molpus' father was one of them, a sawmill owner, but more progressive than most. "He taught me to call black people 'mister' and 'missus'," recalls Molpus, who as a boy worked at the mill and saw, among black laborers "a lot more kindness, compassion and decency than what was sitting at the First Baptist Church."
The Philadelphia elders "had called Turner Catledge and demanded that Lelyveld be fired," Molpus says.
Catledge trekked to Mississippi and held the meeting with the town gentry at the Molpus home. Lelyveld wasn't fired, and Molpus says the reporter was on target.
"The Klan had joined forces with what we called the 'uptown Klan,' the White Citizens Council," Molpus says. "They were offended they'd been portrayed as rednecks, when the real problem was a cancer in the community."
"This is a terrible town, the worst I've seen. There is a complete reign of terror here."
- The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 1966, after being confronted by a Philadelphia mob led by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, who later served six years in prison for complicity in the 1964 murders
Dick Molpus is sitting in a restaurant in Jackson, the state capital, about 90 miles southwest of Philadelphia. His round face is a road map of upward curving smile lines.Molpus is now in the business of managing timberlands. His clearly favorite years were 1980-'84, when he was an aide to Gov. William Winter, the first progressive to break the segregationists' stranglehold on state politics.
The fact that there is a William Winter Institute of Racial Reconciliation at Ole Miss is a good measure of how far the former governor pulled the state out of the darkness. Now in the hands of lesser men, Mississippi is backsliding.
"The people Winter brought into state government, we were all young," Molpus says. "They called us the 'Boys of Spring.' Another name might be the 'Redneck Camelot.'"
Until he was 14 - the time of the murders - Molpus says he was much like other youths in the community. "Jim Crow was the way things were," he says. "No one questioned it." But the triple killing moved something in Molpus. "There was right and there was wrong," he says. "It wasn't always possible to reconcile what I knew to be right with what I'd been taught growing up."
Later, when he was president of the Sigma Chi at Ole Miss, he cast a vote to integrate the fraternity. "That got me in a huge amount of trouble," he says. "To be truthful, though, I had a foot in both camps."
The turning point in his life was connecting with Winter. "I couldn't identify with kids from Queens," Molpus shrugs. "I had never known anyone who went to college out of state. But William Winter was a man I could relate to."
Molpus won the secretary of state's race in 1987 and served until 1995, when he lost the race for governor. Even Neshoba County sided with Molpus' opponent, Fordice. Molpus had opened Mississippi's darkest closet and showed the world the moldering skeletons when, while secretary of state, he made his 1989 "apology" speech. Fordice used that, in the well-established tradition of Southern race-baiters, to help claim victory.
Winter, meanwhile, ran for U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Thad Cochran. "I got 'landslid'," Winter quipped during a March interview with me.
Personally observed Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen this date while Killen was dressed in suit and tie at FGJ [Federal Grand Jury], Biloxi, Miss. Positively identified Killen as being the member of the abduction group referred to as "Preacher."