In 1964 three civil rights workers from the North were brutally murdered by the KKK in Mississippi. The 1967 Federal trial in the case in which 18 men were accused of conspiring to deny the three victims of their civil rights. Seven were convicted in what would never have seen the lights of the courtroom if not for the courage of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, both killed prior to this trail. Excerpts from eyewitnesses of the day follow.

“As soon as word got out about where they were staying, it was time to leave.”

“A man who rented a house for them was threatened.”

“A minister’s wife gave them an apartment, but there was no running water, and they had to go to a black-owned hotel every morning to wash, sneaking through the back door because they were white.”

When they had a phone, it rang constantly. People on the other end would tell [her] that her husband was a dead man. Their license plate number was circulated to law enforcement officers.”

“That was the welcome Mississippi gave a young couple who came from New York in 1964 to join the civil rights movement…”

“The only place [they] could stay was the black-owned hotel. A guard organized by black ministers kept watch outside.”

“Church leaders had been beaten by Klansmen and the church had burned to the ground…”

“The station wagon had been found burned in the Boque Chitto swamp in Neshoba County. A fellow civil rights proponent…was with her, and the two of them heard the news together…the granddaughter of slaves, drew [her] into her arms and the two of them cried. ‘Our tears were mingling with each other’.”

End of excerpts.

This should sound very familiar to Irish natives who are under harassment by the Orange Order Death gangs in the Occupied Counties of Ireland. They are after all the kinsmen of the KKK; kinsmen of the descendants of the plantation owners of America. Even Ulster is referred to by them as a “Plantation”. Plantation has its name from the phrase “Transplantation of English society”.