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Mississippi healing

A state notorious in American history for inflaming racial hatred succeeded Tuesday in bringing to justice a former Ku Klux Klan leader - and to some degree, itself - for the slayings of three civil rights workers. The verdict came on the 41st anniversary of the crime. A Mississippi jury of nine whites and three blacks convicted 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time preacher and sawmill worker, of manslaughter in the deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were beaten, shot and buried under an earthen dam on June 21, 1964.

With the verdict, Mississippi moves closer to being the type of state the three men died for but never lived to see. Chaney, a black Mississippian, was in Neshoba County with the white New Yorkers registering black voters as part of the Freedom Summer civil rights campaign. Prosecutors said Killen helped plan the attack, rounding up carloads of Klansman to intercept the civil rights workers' car. He was also accused of arranging the burial of the bodies. The killings, which inspired the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning, symbolized how engrained racial violence had become not only in the Southern social psyche but in the very administration of law and order.

Killen, who will be sentenced Thursday, has maintained he was attending a wake at a funeral home when the killings took place. His lawyers said prosecutors did not place their client at the scene, and they vow to appeal. In reaching a verdict for manslaughter, jurors put aside the more serious charge of murder, a downgrading state Attorney General Jim Hood saw as a tactical maneuver that still sends a strong message that Mississippi has changed.

Mississippi had its chance, when the evidence was fresh and the witnesses alive, to prosecute those responsible for murder. As Schwerner's widow said after the verdict: "Preacher Killen didn't act in a vacuum . . . The state of Mississippi was complicit in these crimes and all the crimes that occurred, and that has to be opened up." Killen was tried in 1967 on federal civil rights charges in the case, only for the jury to deadlock.

Mississippi's long night of racial violence is history, and good people continue to seek justice for the crimes of white racists who shamed their state. The conviction of Killen doesn't mean all is well in Mississippi, but it does show that things are better.

[Last modified June 22, 2005, 01:08:17]