The conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for the manslaughter of three civil rights workers has a symbolic significance that goes beyond the families of those who died 41 years ago.
At stake was not just how Killen would spend his fading years, but whether Mississippi — a state Martin Luther King described as ”sweltering in injustice” in his ”I have a dream” speech — could, and should, address its segregationist past.
Over the past 30 years the South, characterised by grainy footage of policemen beating schoolchildren and churchmen as they tried to vote, has sought to rebrand itself as a region that conquered its own history. Southerners have been keen to show the world that they have dealt with their past.
This was apparent in the closing arguments of the trial when both the prosecution and the defence let slip how far the verdict went beyond the guilt or innocence of one man.
”When justice is done here, [the victims’ families] will go back to New York or Oregon, or wherever they came from, give them the bad news, and we’ll have to live with this trial,” said defence lawyer James McIntyre.
Mark Duncan, the prosecuting District Attorney, countered: ”There is only one question. Is a Neshoba county jury going to tell the rest of the world that we are not going to let Edgar Ray Killen get away with murder anymore? Not one day more.”
Most of the evidence presented at the trial has been known for 40 years. ”It wasn’t like there was any one thing that happened that said, ‘Here’s the magic bullet’,” Duncan told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. ”It really was that we had gotten to the end. There was nothing to do.”
But as both the defendants and the witnesses got older, there was a fear that Killen might die and take Mississippi’s reputation down with him. Killen’s manslaughter conviction, like the convictions of 22 others for civil rights-era killings in the past 16 years, was part of a push to show that the goods, as well as the packaging, had changed.
At the Chamber of Commerce in the Mississippi town of Philadelphia, you can find a glossy pamphlet titled ”Neshoba county, African-American heritage driving tour: roots of struggle, rewards of sacrifice”. Inside you are invited to join ”a journey toward freedom”, complete with a map detailing where the three men were murdered.
”It’s a captivating story,” said Jim Prince, editor of The Neshoba Democrat. ”The dark of night, the Ku Klux Klan, it’s got all the elements for great drama, but it’s a true story and it’s a sad story. I tell people if they can’t be behind the call for justice because it’s the right thing to do … then they need to do it because it’s good for business.”
The desire of many Southerners for a makeover is understandable, as is their irritation at the north’s continued attempts to caricature them.
According to a census report from 2002, the top five residentially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States are Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, St Louis and Newark — none of which is in the South. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, you will find higher rates of black poverty in the northern states of Wisconsin, Illinois and West Virginia than in Mississippi.
The only difference between the North and South, wrote the late James Baldwin, was that ”the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.”
Nonetheless, if much has changed, much has remained the same. The klan still march in town every year, and at the trial Harlan Majure, the mayor of Philadelphia during the 1990s, told the jury the klan ”did a lot of good up here”, and claimed he was not aware of the organisation’s bloody past.
African-Americans in the state remain at a huge disadvantage. Infant mortality rates are twice as high, earnings are half as much as whites, and black people are three times as likely to live in poverty. Before the trial Leroy Clemons, the head of the local civil rights organisation, said it was time for Philadelphia to move on and tackle the problems blighting the area today.
”It doesn’t matter where you go in the world: people talk about Mississippi, they think racists, backwards people. We want to show them the state has changed. I don’t want to paint a picture free of racism, we still have issues. One thing about [the trial], it’s forced us to deal with our past.” — Â