Miss. town forges a hopeful future from racist past

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. -- Forty-one years ago this month, former FBI agent Dean Lytle recalled, the nighttime scene outside the Neshoba County Courthouse was enough to frighten hardened federal investigators. ''The square was filled with people," Lytle, 71, testified in a slightly wavering voice Friday inside the same brick building. ''They were standing shoulder to shoulder, and the crowd was very hostile."

Lytle had been dispatched here to investigate the disappearance of three young men -- James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael H. Schwerner -- who had been killed by the Ku Klux Klan because of their efforts to register black voters in one of the most infamous acts of violence of the civil rights era.

Today, the courthouse square is nearly devoid of people, barricaded on all sides by a cordon of barrels and police tape as 50 law enforcement officers keep watch over the state murder trial of the alleged mastermind of those killings.

That defendant, Edgar Ray Killen, is an 80-year-old, part-time preacher whose body has been broken by a sawmill accident but whose allegiance to the racist principles of a Klan he once served has never been disavowed.

Unlike Killen, this small community made notorious by the murders, depicted in the 1988 movie ''Mississippi Burning," finally appears to be facing a sordid, tragic history that many of its 7,500 residents tried hard to forget. Much remains to be done, whites and blacks here say, but nearly all agree that Philadelphia is a changed, better place than 41 years ago tomorrow, when Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were ambushed and executed.

''We're trying to get this big elephant out of our living room," said Jewel McDonald, 59, a black woman who saw Klansmen beat her mother during a raid on her church. ''It's changed tremendously. People here today seem different than '64. They want this cloud to be lifted from Neshoba County."

The county demographics are roughly the same as they were four decades ago. Whites outnumber blacks by about 3 to 1. The public schools have been integrated for more than 30 years, and a black fire chief presides over a department that has disproportionately more minority firefighters than white ones, said City Clerk Brenda Mills. Even the presence of three black jurors in Killen's trial would have been unthinkable when the defendant was tried for conspiracy in the killings in 1967.

Eleven jurors voted to convict Killen in that federal trial, but one juror refused because, she said, she could never convict a preacher. Of 18 defendants in that case, seven were convicted but none served more than six years in prison. Killen walked away a free man.

Until recently, the memories of the slayings had rarely been voiced here, residents said. No memorial has been erected at the fork in the road, marked only by a tilted stop sign, where the men were cornered and shot by a mob of local Klansmen. And when Dick Molpus, then the Mississippi secretary of state, apologized to the victims' families on the 25th anniversary of the murders, the 1989 remark is believed to have harmed his career.

In 1999, the state reopened the case after one of the men convicted in the federal trial boasted that the ringleader had gone free. But key witnesses had died, and momentum to lay bare the old wounds began to lag. The turning point occurred last year, when a multiracial Philadelphia group seeking to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the killings persuaded first-term Attorney General Jim Hood to convene a grand jury.

An indictment for murder, the first charge ever leveled by the state in the case, was handed up in January against Killen, who has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence. Although prosecutors, who rested their case Saturday, believe that Killen was not at the killing site, Mississippi law allows a person involved in its planning to be charged with murder.

''I can't tell if a man is guilty or not guilty," said Mayor Rayburn Waddell, who seemed to choose his words carefully, as trial coverage played live on a computer screen behind him. ''But I believe that if a crime has been committed, you should be punished for it."

But, unless the locally based Philadelphia Coalition had pressed the state to pursue Killen, activists said, the trial would not have occurred. ''When I came here last year, there was still a lingering suspicion, a secret that everyone knew but no one talked about -- that these boys had been murdered by people from this community and nothing had been done about it," said Susan Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.

''What happened here did not happen in the vacuum of Philadelphia," said Glisson, who supported the coalition's efforts. ''The Klansmen were simply the gun, but the gun was loaded by the state."

The murders of Chaney, 21, a black man from Meridian, Miss., and Goodman, 20, and Schwerner, 24, white men from New York City were carefully choreographed, according to witnesses. The trio were part of a young civil rights contingent that worked to register black voters in Mississippi during the ''Freedom Summer" of 1964. When their efforts spread to Philadelphia, witnesses said, local Klansmen headed by Killen burned a black church to lure the trio to investigate.

The men were arrested in Philadelphia on a speeding charge, jailed by complicit police for several hours while Klansmen assembled, and then ambushed at night as they drove out of the town. Their bodies were buried in an earthen dam, where they were discovered 44 days after the killings. Killen is alleged to have planned the shootings and chosen the burial site.

''The state should have acted sooner," said Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. ''There was not only denial going on, but coverup by the state."

Johnson, however, praised the trial as the latest in a string of high-profile prosecutions of crimes from the civil rights era.

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. In 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was found guilty in the 1963 bombing of an Alabama church that killed four black girls. And in Chicago this month, the body of 14-year-old Emmett Till, kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi in 1955, was exhumed for possible criminal evidence.

Still, black leaders said, more needs to be done. George Roberts, president of the NAACP in neighboring Kemper County, said the visible signs of racial progress mask an undercurrent of distrust and worse. ''A lot of people still have fear," Roberts said. ''Some refuse to participate in various activities because of a fear of reprisal, and some refuse to come to this trial."

But, unlike 1964, racially mixed groups of students can be seen at diners. The town's tourist board has printed a map of civil rights sites -- including the murder site. And on July 1, a stretch of state Highway 19, where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were chased before their deaths, will be named in honor of the men. Plans also are being discussed to purchase the former jail, where the victims were held, and convert the facility into a civil rights museum.

''We were just children when this happened," said a white Philadelphia woman, who asked that her name not be used. ''We don't want to see us portrayed as barefoot, backward people. That's not who we are. We're not the people who were here 40 years ago."

More than 100 people attended two memorial services in Philadelphia yesterday to honor the three slain civil rights workers. The trial is scheduled to resume today.

Outside the courthouse Friday, after the trial had been adjourned for the day, Killen was pushed in a wheelchair to a car. At the beginning of the trial, Killen had been greeted by a man who identified himself as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. On Friday, none of the bystanders offered support to Killen as he passed Carolyn Goodman, the 89-year-old mother of one of the murder victims.

Goodman testified Friday about her son's idealism, and that she had approved of his journey to Mississippi. ''This is a person who saw that all people are important," Goodman said, her arm held by another son. ''Andy didn't come down here to be a martyr. He came here to help people."

On the stand, she read a postcard her son had sent home from nearby Meridian, shortly before he died. ''This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine," he wrote. ''I wish you were here. People here are wonderful."