Over the last 15 years legal authorities in a number of American states, primarily in Alabama and Mississippi, have re-examined murder cases from the civil rights era. They have made 27 arrests and juries have convicted in 22 cases.
But no case has been followed in the 1960s by the national press as closely as the disappearance of civil rights workers James Chaney (21), Andrew Goodman (20) and Michael Schwerner (24) in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
That "Freedom Summer" nearly 1,000 northerners went to the south to help with voter registration, also setting up Freedom Schools.
On June 21, 1964 Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner drove out to a nearby hamlet to investigate the torching of a black church whose congregation had agreed to host a Freedom School. The three were arrested for speeding, jailed for several hours, then released after the sheriff tipped off the Ku Klux Klan. Their burnt-out station wagon was found the following day, but it took almost 6 weeks before their bodies were uncovered, buried in a nearby earthen dam.
Edgar Ray Killen, an ordained Baptist minister and Ku Klux Klan leader, was not among those who murdered the civil rights workers but he was the mastermind.
In 1967, when no state charges had been filed, 18 Klansmen were tried on federal civil rights charges. A hung jury failed to convict Killen; seven others were found guilty and served light sentences.
Earlier this year the 80-year old Killen was charged with murder of the three civil rights workers; this June he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He is currently out on bond.
Ben Chaney, brother of James Chaney, was asked whether his brother had been treated differently in the media than the two white victims. He responded that if his brother hadn't been with white civil rights workers his body would have gone unreported.
He pointed out that nearly a dozen murdered black men were found during the search for the three. But James Chaney, unlike the two white victims, was treated differently by the Klan that night: only his body bore evidence of
From post-Reconstruction (1876) through the 1960s almost 5,000 black people were brutally murdered in order preserve white supremacy. But if African Americans and their white allies forced the federal government to institute laws and prosecute those who murdered black people, nonetheless racism and segregation remam.
Today the most residentially segregated urban areas aren't mainly in the south: Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis and Newark. The existence of racism is revealed in higher infant mortality rates, unemployment and poverty rates, higher rates of incarceration and lower rates of educational achievement. At the same time a black middle class has emerged.
Today's institutional racism reinforces class, race and gender dynamics. It esteems some people of colour while degrading others: those who "grab" opportunities versus others who "allow" themselves to sink into poverty and unemployment.
It colours those who use welfare benefits or who are on drugs as black or brown, thus