Lawrence Andrew Rainey Sr. (March 2, 1923 – November 8, 2002) was an American police officer and white supremacist who served as Sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi, from 1963 to 1968.

He gained notoriety for his alleged involvement in the June 1964 murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

He was accused of aiding and abetting members of the Ku Klux Klan in the murders by having his officers keep watch over the men's position in town.

Rainey was a member of Mississippi's White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan[1] and had previously gone to court for the shooting of an unarmed black motorist in 1959.

He successfully ran for the office of Sheriff in 1963 and has been quoted as positioning himself as "the man who can cope with situations that might arise",[4] a veiled reference to the racial tension in the area at the time.

Jackson of Flint, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois, was a former resident of Philadelphia and had come to town to claim a murdered relative's body.

[2][5] On June 21, 1964 afternoon, Chaney, Goodman, & Schwerner arrived at Longdale to inspect the burned-out church in Neshoba County.

On July 18, 1964, Rainey unsuccessfully sued NBC, the Lamar Life Broadcasting Company, Southern Television Corporation, and Buford W. Posey (a Philadelphia, Mississippi resident who became a civil rights activist) for US$1 million (equivalent to $9.8 million in 2023) for slander due to an interview which Posey gave to NBC during the investigation of the disappearance of the civil rights workers.

A stint at the IGA grocery store ended abruptly after the airing of the CBS drama Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan in 1975; bomb threats were made against the supermarket for hiring him, and they subsequently fired him.

[8] His boss at McDonald's Security Guard Service was an African American, and Rainey described the firm as "better to work for than any white company".

[8] He later blamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media for preventing him from finding and keeping jobs and reiterated that he was not a racist: They tried to make it that I hated the black people, and it was just because I had to shoot two, ...

In the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, the character of Sheriff Ray Stuckey was a fictionalized depiction of Lawrence Rainey.