Reopened Civil Rights Cases Evoke Painful Past

PHILADELPHIA, Miss., Jan. 9 -- Graying men in handcuffs and prison jumpsuits, unrepentant of their pasts even as their limbs stiffen with age, have become a kind of modern archetype of the southern fringe. A bleak procession of them, a few only months away from death, trickled through courthouses across the region over the past decade, sometimes fingered as killers by aging prosecution witnesses dragging oxygen tanks.

Edgar Ray Killen, a 79-year-old reputed Ku Klux Klan leader who was a familiar face on the streets of this old lumber town, joined the procession last week. He was charged with leading the pack of men who committed one of the greatest atrocities of the civil rights era: the 1964 murder of three young men who had come to his home town to tell black people that they should have the same rights as whites.

Killen, whether he is innocent or guilty, embodies an archetype on the verge of extinction. His case will most likely be one of the last -- perhaps the last -- of its kind: the blockbuster southern murder trial looking back to the civil rights era. More than a dozen white supremacists have been convicted of civil-rights-era killings in the past decade. But time is running out on other possible cases -- witnesses and suspects are growing old and dying, and the roster of unresolved marquee murders that capture the public imagination and spur prosecutors to action is shrinking.

"We're coming to the end of an era," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala., organization often credited with defusing the modern Ku Klux Klan.

Pronouncements about the end of the 11-year period of prosecuting old civil rights cases are everywhere these days. But Killen's indictment and his relocation from a country house outside Philadelphia to an isolation jail cell -- have given renewed hope to activists pursuing other long-stalled cases. The most prominent among them is the killing of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago who was dragged from his bed in Money, Miss., beaten to death and dumped into the Tallahatchie River in 1955 after whistling at a white woman.

But there are others, growing colder with the passage of time or inattention or both. In Florida, a state senator last month appealed to Gov. Jeb Bush (R) to do what prosecutors in Jacksonville have refused to do: reopen the investigation of the death of Johnnie Mae Chappell, a maid who was gunned down late one night in 1964 as she walked home while race riots raged a few miles away. Newspaper editorialists in Florida are also calling for prosecutors to re-investigate the deaths of civil rights activist Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette, who died when a bomb exploded under their Mims home on Christmas night in 1951.

In the best of worlds, there might be exponentially more cases to consider. The squishy bogs and brown rivers of the South were frequently used as dumping grounds, and researchers believe hundreds of murder victims may lay buried in decades of muck, their killings never investigated or even documented.

When dredging crews combed the waters around Philadelphia in the 1960s looking for missing civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, they found several corpses of black men. As the saying goes: "When Gabriel blows his horn, so many dead will rise out of the river that he'll be able to walk across dry-footed."

The surge of reopened civil-rights-era cases began in the late 1980s with the investigation of Byron de la Beckwith, who was convicted in 1994 of murdering NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in 1963 in Jackson, Miss. Four years later, former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard Sam Bowers, then 73, was convicted in the 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer.

Then, in 2001 and 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry, then 71, and Thomas Blanton Jr., then 62, were convicted in the 1963 bombing deaths of four girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Another Klan member, Ernest Avants, then 72 and a stroke survivor, was convicted in 2003 of killing sharecropper Ben Chester White in 1966 as part of a bungled plot to lure Martin Luther King to southern Mississippi and murder him. All but Blanton have died in prison; Avants died last spring, 16 months after his conviction.

Each of their court appearances played out as a reminder of a time many here would like to forget but simply cannot. Dick Molpus, a Philadelphia native and former Mississippi secretary of state, describes the cases as a regional catharsis.

"We really can't get to the business of racial reconciliation until we've dealt with these dark, shameful issues of our past," said Molpus, who may have lost a gubernatorial bid because he publicly apologized to the families of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner at the ceremony commemorating the 25th anniversary of their slayings.