In a Mississippi Town, A Late Summer

"It's not a perfect verdict, but it wasn't a perfect case, either," Mark Duncan, the local district attorney who prosecuted the case along with the state attorney general, said at a televised news conference after the verdict.

"Of the four people testifying against Mr. Killen, three of them were dead. . . . I'm not going to criticize" the jury. It's a fair legal point, and also a fair cultural one. There was no physical evidence linking Killen to the crime, nor was there any testimony that he was present when the young men were killed. Most of the testimony was from Klan informants who had been paid for their court appearances by the FBI. If you're looking for reasonable doubt, that is something to hang your hat on, and not just in Mississippi.

Further, this case has never rested easy here, particularly among the conservative, churchgoing white population, who remembered only too clearly what happened in 1964. It wasn't just a triple homicide by some local roughnecks. What made the story so shocking was that local police officers were Klan members who participated in the slayings. Afterward, no one in Neshoba would help the FBI. Reporters were treated with contempt. The state refused to press murder charges.

The 1964 killings took on iconic status in national history. They were also the worst thing that ever happened in this very small, very poor town. Time passed, schools were integrated and things moved on, but the killings remained a raw subject. Anyone knowing that history had reason to wonder if prosecutors here would find a Neshoba jury that would vote to convict anyone of the slayings. In fact, it sometimes seemed to me as if a hung jury would be inevitable.

Remember: In 1980, Ronald Reagan managed to find this lost little corner of eastern Mississippi to make his first full-scale campaign speech after winning the Republican presidential nomination. He gave a speech about "states' rights" -- the byword for segregationists -- just a few miles from where the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman had been buried. Cynical? Yes. Successful? Wildly. Reagan carried Neshoba County in a landslide (not to mention the rest of the Deep South, over Georgia's own Jimmy Carter).

In 1989, Neshoba County's facade began to crack when Dick Molpus made an unscripted, moving apology to the families of the three dead civil rights workers at a 25th anniversary memorial service. Molpus was not only the Mississippi secretary of state but also a native of Neshoba County, from one of the area's most respected families. Six years later, when Molpus, a Democrat, was running for governor, his Republican opponent came to Neshoba and ridiculed him for apologizing to the mothers of the three dead boys. Neshobans reacted by voting en masse for Kirk Fordice, the Republican opponent.

"It didn't cost me the election," Molpus said in a telephone interview, "but it did cost me votes."

So were there 12, black and white, who would come together to not let Edgar Ray Killen get away scot-free?

Were there 12 who would decide publicly what everyone knew privately?

Yes, it turns out, as we all found out yesterday morning, mildly surprised. There were -- and most of them his white neighbors. No, it wasn't pretty. No, it wasn't textbook. Past the sunsets, the sweet tea and the lightning bugs in the early dusk, out beyond the porch swing and beneath the pines, Mississippi small towns rarely are.