Cecil Price; Convicted for Role in 1964 Deaths of Civil Rights Workers
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Cecil Price, 63, a former deputy sheriff in Neshoba County, Miss., who was convicted of conspiracy in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, died Sunday in a hospital in Jackson, Miss.
Price suffered a fractured skull Thursday when he fell from a lift at an equipment rental store in Philadelphia, Miss.
Price was one of 18 men tried on federal conspiracy charges in 1967 for the June 1964 killings of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. The deaths were the focus of the 1988 film “Mississippi Burning.”
Seven men, including Price, were convicted. Price served four years in federal prison before returning to Philadelphia and working for Olen Burrage, a wealthy landowner acquitted in the killings.
The civil rights workers had been jailed in Neshoba County; released, they were abducted by members of the Ku Klux Klan. They were shot to death and their bodies buried in an earthen dam.
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