A lot of people in Philadelphia and Neshoba County really, really want this trial to happen.
The Philadelphia Coalition, a local group of white, black and Choctaw residents, has fought for it. The coalition chairmen are Jim Prince, editor of the Neshoba Democrat, the local weekly, who is white, and Leroy Clemons, the president of the local NAACP, who is black. They were high school classmates.
"We're never going to wipe away the bloodstains of that crime, and I don't expect the trial to do that," Prince says. "But regardless of the verdict, the horse is out of the barn. There is a dialogue started, and that is only going to grow and develop."
Clemons says he was stopped on the street recently by a white man who warned him to watch his back because "you ain't no Martin Luther King."
"I told him he was right," Clemons said in an interview. "I told him I didn't believe in nonviolence."
Neshoba can be a pretty place. It's a rural spot of timberlands, pastures and about 28,000 souls, on a branch of the Pearl River. It's not near anything. The county seat, Philadelphia, is about 7,500. It's two-thirds white, 20 percent black and the rest Choctaw.
Drive around, you see neatly kept green lawns and pink petunias by the driveway. So long as you don't break the local taboo against mentioning the civil rights murders, everyone gets along better than people elsewhere think.
Integration, after the disaster of the killings, actually went off pretty smoothly, many locals say. The attempt to set up a whites-only academy failed. Last week one of the city's summer league baseball games progressed in almost absurdly balanced racial fashion. The pitcher was white, the catcher black, the players in the field a variety, and two umpires called the outs -- one white and one black. When the last out was recorded in the deepening twilight, black and white parents in the stands, seated next to one another, leaped to applaud.
Regarding the trial, "the tension isn't coming from the black community," says James Young, a Pentecostal minister and the only black member of the Neshoba County board of supervisors. "We're not threatening anybody. . . . There's still a glass ceiling here. You're only going to go so far. The trial isn't going to fix everything, but it will be a turning point, a stopping point and a beginning point, all rolled into one."
The state legislature recently passed a law renaming a section of a local highway for the slain civil rights workers. When Young made a routine motion to endorse the measure, his white colleagues just looked at him. The motion died for lack of a second.
"You'd have to ask them about it," Young said.
Calls to two members, attempting to do just that, were not returned.
