An aging ex-Klansman once said something to me that I found very disturbing, that colored my view of history forever after.
I was working on a story in Philadelphia, Miss., that dealt in part with the deaths many years earlier of three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner. I knocked on the door of Cecil Price, the deputy sheriff and Klan member who had arrested the three young men in June 1964 and then delivered them into the hands of his fellow Klansmen to be murdered in the dark.
Price had served a ludicrously short 4 1/2 years in prison, and he was living comfortably back in his hometown with his wife and son. He was a member in good standing of the local country club.
