The Memo: Trump remark ignites racism accusations

President TrumpDonald John TrumpHouse Democrat slams Donald Trump Jr. for ‘serious case of amnesia’ after testimony Skier Lindsey Vonn: I don’t want to represent Trump at Olympics Poll: 4 in 10 Republicans think senior Trump advisers had improper dealings with Russia MORE’s use of the word “shithole” to describe Haiti and nations in Africa has once again moved race to the top of the political agenda.

In the wake of the remarks, the president’s critics are ever more willing to explicitly call him racist.

Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonGrassley blasts Democrats over unwillingness to probe Clinton GOP lawmakers cite new allegations of political bias in FBI Top intel Dem: Trump Jr. refused to answer questions about Trump Tower discussions with father MORE, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, castigated his “ignorant, racist views” in a Friday tweet. Sen. Bernie SandersBernard (Bernie) SandersSchumer: Franken should resign Franken resignation could upend Minnesota races Avalanche of Democratic senators say Franken should resign MORE (I-Vt.) accused Trump of “racist ramblings.” 

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Thursday evening that Trump “could lead the Ku Klux Klan in America.” Rep. John LewisJohn LewisJohn Lewis says he may not attend Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opening if Trump is there The nearly 60 Dems who voted for impeachment Live coverage: Day three of the Ways and Means GOP tax bill markup MORE (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, on Friday told Katy Tur, also of MSNBC, that racism “must be in his DNA.”

The criticism also came from the media, albeit mostly in outlets that have fractious relationships with the president. 

“The president of the United States is racist. A lot of us already knew that,” CNN anchor Don Lemon declared at the beginning of his show on Thursday.

When Trump appeared in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Friday morning to sign a proclamation to honor Martin Luther King Day, he left to the sound of reporter April Ryan asking, “Mr. President, are you a racist?”

Trump’s contentious remarks were made during a White House meeting intended to discuss a way forward on an immigration deal. Senators from both parties were present.

Trump has long denied charges of racism, and his allies also do so vehemently. 

“There is not a racist bone in his body,” Pastor Robert Jeffress, an evangelical advisor to the president, told the Christian Broadcasting Network last summer.

During a February 2017 news conference at the White House, Trump — who at the time was facing questions about an upsurge in threats against Jewish organizations — said “Number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Number two, racism — the least racist person.”  

Trump on Friday denied making the “shithole” remark, writing on Twitter, “The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used.”

But Sen. Tim ScottTimothy (Tim) Eugene ScottMcConnell names Senate GOP tax conferees GOP senator: Trump shouldn’t pardon Flynn Trump should fill CFPB vacancy with Export-Import chief MORE (R-S.C.), who was not at the meeting, said the basic accuracy of the reporting on what Trump said had been confirmed to him by Sen. Lindsey GrahamLindsey Olin GrahamGOP and Dems bitterly divided by immigration We are running out of time to protect Dreamers US trade deficit rises on record imports from China MORE (R-S.C.), who was present. Sen. Jeff FlakeJeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeGOP strategist donates to Alabama Democrat Sasse: RNC help for Roy Moore ‘doesn’t make any sense’ Sasse calls RNC decision to resume support for Moore ‘bad’ and ‘sad’ MORE (R-Ariz.) said he heard about the remarks before they were publicly reported.  

Sens. Tom CottonTom CottonGOP and Dems bitterly divided by immigration Grassley offers DACA fix tied to tough enforcement measures Five things senators should ask Tom Cotton if he’s nominated to lead the CIA MORE (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) said in a joint statement that they “do not recall the President making these comments specifically.” But Sen. Dick DurbinRichard (Dick) Joseph DurbinDemocrats turn on Al Franken Minnesota’s largest newspaper calls on Franken to resign Democratic senator predicts Franken will resign Thursday MORE (D-Ill.), another attendee, was adamant that Trump had done so.

For Republicans, the political difficulties caused by the controversy are considerable. 

In the short term, they complicate the search for a deal on immigration in general, and the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in particular. Democrats will be under pressure from their base to make no concessions to the president. 

Beyond that, Republicans are grappling with a political landscape in which their president faces serious charges of racism and is mired in historically low approval ratings.

Some GOP House members who face challenging reelection races, such as Rep. Carlos CurbeloCarlos Luis CurbeloHouse Republican: ‘I worry about both sides’ of the aisle on DACA House passes concealed carry gun bill 34 House Republicans demand DACA action this year MORE of Florida, were to the fore in criticizing the president for his remarks.  

GOP strategists fear Trump is playing havoc with the party’s brand. That brand is now “not just contaminated, it is infected,” said Doug Heye, a former communications director of the Republican National Committee and a frequent Trump critic. 

Heye said the Trump administration’s propensity to produce a constant stream of controversies leaves GOP lawmakers exposed.

“This administration presents a constant ‘What now?’ problem,” he said. “At multiple times in any given week, a member is going to be asking ‘What now?’” 

Observers on all sides agree that the controversy will not necessarily lower Trump’s approval ratings any further. 

Indeed, the president has spent years firing up a certain cohort of the population with controversial rhetoric.

Before he ever sought office, he traded in the false theory that his predecessor, President Obama, was not born in the United States. In his speech announcing his presidential candidacy in June 2015, he said that Mexico was “not sending their best” as immigrants, and that those who were arriving in the United States included “rapists.”

Last August, after one protester was killed amid clashes over a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., Trump claimed there were “very fine people on both sides” — a remark that caused outrage, as it suggested moral equivalence between Nazis and those campaigning against them. 

For all the supposed resilience of Trump’s base, there has been some erosion in recent polls. A report in The Atlantic cited cumulative data from SurveyMonkey polls during 2017 to note that his approval rating among whites without a four-year college degree had fallen 10 points below his showing with the same group in 2016 election exit polls.  

On Friday, a new poll in Georgia gave the president an approval rating of about 37 percent and a disapproval number of about 59 percent. Trump won the state by approximately five points in the 2016 election. 

Trump loyalists note that polls have often underestimated his support. But other, more moderate figures insist that the president’s ability to maintain his base is hardly cause for great optimism. The base is a clear minority of voters, they note. 

“It is becoming increasingly difficult for Republicans to reach out to people who are not already in the party base. That is especially true for millennials and non-whites,” lamented Whit Ayres, a GOP strategist who has often advocated for a more inclusive approach.

The fear, among Ayres and others, is that Trump is deepening the party’s problem with every new controversy — and that a steep price will be paid at the polls come November. 

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage, primarily focused on Donald Trump’s presidency. 

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Edgar Ray Killen, Convicted in ’64 Killings of Rights Workers, Dies at 92

Mr. Killen was a founding member of the Klan in the Philadelphia area and its chief recruiter, according to the F.B.I. He had been among 18 men tried in 1967 on federal charges of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Mr. Chaney, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner.

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They were shot to death on the night of June 21, 1964. After an extensive search led by the F.B.I., their bodies were found on a farm nearby six weeks later, buried nearby under an earthen dam.

The federal charges against Mr. Killen, a sawmill operator and part-time preacher at small churches near his lifelong home in Union, Miss., were dismissed after a lone member of the all-white jury at the 1967 trial, in Meridian, held out for acquittal. She said she did not believe a man of God could have participated in such a crime.

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Afterward, Mr. Killen, known to friends as Preacher Killen, continued to live with his wife, Betty Jo, at their modest ranch home near his 20-acre farm and sawmill. He resumed his preaching and displayed a tablet with the Ten Commandments on his lawn.

But in 1975 he was charged with making a telephone call threatening to kill a private investigator who had been hired by a man to follow the man’s wife. The man believed she was having an affair with Mr. Killen.

Mr. Killen was sentenced to five months in prison in the case, which was prosecuted by Marcus D. Gordon, the Neshoba County district attorney at the time and later the judge who presided over the murder trial.

Mr. Killen was indicted by a Neshoba County grand jury on murder charges in January 2005. Two months later, free on bail, he broke both his legs when a tree at his farm fell on him. He sat in a wheelchair during his state trial in Philadelphia while recovering from his injuries, a gaunt figure sometimes breathing through tubes attached to an oxygen tank.

The murder prosecution, brought by the Mississippi state attorney general, Jim Hood, and the county district attorney, Mark Duncan, was based largely on the transcripts of testimony at the federal trial.

Mr. Killen was said to have recruited the mob that killed the civil rights workers, although he was not at the scene of their murders, having gone to a funeral home to attend two wakes. In testimony, fellow Klansman said he had gone to the funeral home to create an alibi for his whereabouts when the murders occurred.

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In bringing a manslaughter verdict in 2005, the jury — made up of nine whites and three blacks — concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove Mr. Killen had known that the three civil rights workers would be killed when he sent Klansmen to abduct them.

Mr. Killen did not testify at the trial, but he had long professed his innocence. While ardently defending segregation, he had denied being a member of the Klan, although one of his defense lawyers said he was.

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‘We Got a Little Justice’

Mr. Schwerner’s widow, Rita Bender, was dismayed that the jury did not convict Mr. Killen of murder. But after hearing Judge Gordon sentence him to three consecutive maximum terms of 20 years on the manslaughter convictions, she remarked, “I think we got a little justice this morning.”

The judge was a neighbor of Mr. Killen’s and had presided over the funerals of Mr. Killen’s parents. Some of the judge’s friends later criticized him for not imposing concurrent sentences on Mr. Killen, who was 80 at the time.

“Each life has value,” Judge Gordon said before imposing the sentence. “Law does not recognize the distinction of age.”

In 2014, in a posthumous ceremony, President Barack Obama presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, to the three murdered civil rights workers. Handing the decorations to members of their families, he said that the young men had “refused to sit on the sidelines” at a time of racial injustice and that “their brutal murder by a gang of Ku Klux Klan members shook the conscience of our nation.”

The murder plot unfolded on the afternoon of June 21, 1964, when the Neshoba County deputy sheriff, Cecil Price (who died in 2001), pulled the three men’s station wagon over and arrested them. Mr. Schwerner, the driver, was charged with speeding, and Mr. Goodman and Mr. Chaney were held for investigation concerning the burning of a black church in the area that was to have been used as a center for recruiting civil rights workers.

The three men had gone to the church to investigate the fire, which had, in fact, been set by Klansmen.

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According to testimony, Sheriff Price had notified Mr. Killen that he was holding the three men, allowing time for him to gather fellow Klansmen to trap them.

The Klansmen waited in two cars near the police station, and when the three men were released that night, they chased after them, together with Sheriff Price in his cruiser. When they caught up with the station wagon on a small road, the men were pulled from it and shot to death.

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Among the 19 federal defendants were Sheriff Price and Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which the federal authorities regarded as the Klan’s most violent group.

Mr. Bowers was said to have specifically marked Mr. Schwerner for death because of his extensive civil rights activities in the Philadelphia area. Mr. Schwerner was described by the Justice Department in its 2016 summary of the events as “particularly reviled by the Klan.”

Mr. Chaney had also been involved in civil rights work in the area, but Mr. Goodman was there for the first time.

Seven of the defendants were convicted at trial; another confessed, pleaded guilty and did not stand trial but testified against the others. None served more than six years in prison. Eight defendants were acquitted. Mr. Killen was among three whose cases ended with hung juries.

The prosecutors in Mr. Killen’s state murder trial sought to bring charges against all eight surviving defendants from the federal trial, but the grand jury indicted only Mr. Killen.

The historian David Oshinsky, writing in The New York Times in 1998, told of an interview that Mr. Killen had given him in which he said of the victims: “Those boys were Communists who went to a Communist training school. I’m sorry they got themselves killed. But I can’t show remorse for something I didn’t do.”

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Jerry Mitchell, a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., who investigated many of the South’s racial crimes, quoted Mr. Killen as telling him in 1999 that sometime after he had been questioned by the F.B.I. in the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, he asked if the bureau knew who had committed the murder because, he said, “Man, I just want to shake his hand.”

He Said He Was Innocent

By Mr. Mitchell’s account, when he asked Mr. Killen what should happen to the killers of the three civil rights workers, Mr. Killen replied, “I’m not going to say that they were wrong.”

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When he went on trial for murder in 2005, Mr. Killen, interviewed for the documentary “Neshoba: The Price of Freedom” (2010), said he was being made a “sacrificial lamb.”

“I’m probably the only sawmiller in the South who never whipped one of his black hands,” he said, while denouncing “mingling” of the races.

Edgar Ray Killen was born on Jan. 17, 1925, the oldest of eight children in a family that had long worked as loggers, millers and farmers in the Union, Miss., area, not far from where the three civil rights workers would be killed.

Patsy Sims, who was researching a book on the Klan when she interviewed Mr. Killen in 1976, wrote in the Southern literary magazine Oxford American in 2014 that he told her that he had graduated from high school, studied agriculture at a junior college, bought a sawmill at age 19 and had been preaching since his early 20s, mostly at a Baptist church.

In her notes following the interview, she described him as “a slight man who looked almost comical in his cowboy hat and baggy suit,” lending the appearance of “someone who had just stepped off a Greyhound bus.”

Mr. Killen and wife, Betty Jo — it was reportedly the second marriage for both — had no children together. Information on Mr. Killen’s survivors was not available.

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James Earl Chaney’s mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, of Willingboro, N.J., and Andrew Goodman’s mother, Carolyn Goodman, a clinical psychologist in Manhattan who became a prominent civil rights activist after her son’s death, testified briefly at Mr. Killen’s state trial, as did the widow of Mr. Schwerner, who had worked with him in the Mississippi voter drive.

Mrs. Chaney and Mrs. Goodman both died in 2007. Ben Chaney, a younger brother of James Earl Chaney, was among the mourners at Mrs. Goodman’s funeral, and he pondered the decades of anguish for both women.

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“They carried a hell of a burden for a long time,” he said. “A hell of a burden — knowing that your sons were murdered and the murderers were out on the streets going free.”

In June 2016, Mr. Hood, the Mississippi attorney general, announced an end to the active federal and state investigations into the killings of the civil rights workers, saying it was unlikely that there would be any more convictions. Mr. Gordon, the judge in the murder trial, had died a month earlier.

In its report on the case, presented to Mr. Hood that June, the Justice Department said that in the course of its continuing investigation it sought to interview Mr. Killen in 2012, but that through his lawyer he had refused to speak to federal investigators and continued to maintain that he knew nothing about the murders.

“Any time a person passes, their family grieves,” Andrew Goodman’s brother, David, told The Clarion-Ledger. “However, in the case of Edgar Ray Killen, he belongs to a bigger part of American history, where white supremacists took black lives with impunity.”

When Mr. Killen was convicted of manslaughter, Jim Prince, the editor of the weekly newspaper The Neshoba Democrat, said that a collective burden had been lifted on a once-infamous corner of Mississippi.

“Finally, finally, finally,” Mr. Prince said. “This certainly sends a message, I think, to the criminals and to the thugs that justice reigns in Neshoba County, unlike 41 years ago.”

Correction: January 12, 2018

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the location of the prison in Mississippi where Mr. Killen died. It is in Parchman, not Jackson.

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