Roberts, a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted for his role in the 1964 Freedom Summer murders.

He was the one who fatally shot two of the victims, Congress of Racial Equality civil rights activists Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.

He was the second youngest child of Clyde Cuthell Roberts and Eula Juanita Quinnelly and grew up with three brothers, Lee, Lloyd, and Raymond.

In the afternoon of June 21, 1964, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner arrived at Longdale to inspect a burned-out black church in Neshoba County, which had been attacked and vandalized by the local chapter of the KKK.

The lynch mob, in Horace D. Barnette's and Billy W. Posey's cars, was drinking while arguing about who would kill the three men.

After a quick rendezvous with Philadelphia Police Officer Richard Willis, Price was in pursuit of the three civil rights workers.

Price eventually caught the CORE station wagon heading west toward Union, Mississippi, on state highway 492.

Soon, the three civil rights workers would be escorted north on Highway 19 to secluded Rock Cut Road, where they would be executed at the hands of Roberts and Jordan.

On December 4, 1964, The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested several men for engineering a conspiracy to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

[7][12] Roberts gained national recognition on January 27, 1965, for getting into a fight with CBS cameraman Laurens Pierce outside the federal courthouse in Meridian where he was on trial at the time.

Jack Thornell took photos of Roberts beating up the reporter,[14] with the incident becoming widely circulated in the U.S. press the next day.