Neshoba County, Miss. - For 40 years now, an inmate in the prison of national public opinion for failing to hold anyone accountable for three particularly senseless and vicious civil rights era murders appears close to having completed its sentence with time served.
The June 21, 1964, murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney are the subjects of at least a dozen books, four movies and some 11,400 Web page "hits" when the names are plugged into the Google search engine.
The trio was detained subsequent to their investigation of the burning of an African-American church and later shot to death on an isolated rural road.
Their bodies were buried in an earthen pond dam. Why were they killed? For trying to help the African-American citizens of Neshoba County register to vote.
A massive FBI investigation into the murders of the three civil rights workers produced 21 arrests, 18 indictments and seven convictions on charges of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the slain trio by men linked to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. But despite those 1967 conspiracy convictions, none of the men implicated in the Neshoba murders has ever faced the scrutiny of a state court grand jury considering murder charges against them.
Now, four decades later, Attorney General Jim Hood has announced that he will convene a grand jury to consider evidence in the murders of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. In that process, 21 Neshoba County men and women will hear evidence in the case and make their own judgment.
Neshoba County is a far different place in 2004 than it was in 1964. The leadership of the city and county that resisted social change four decades ago is today firmly committed to seeing justice done in the murder case.
Hood isn't the only public official who is up to the challenge of this historically daunting case.
District Attorney Mark Duncan of Philadelphia, a classmate of mine at Philadelphia High School, possesses both the intellect and the nerve to guide this difficult case through the judicial system, come what may. The realities of 40 years of change in Neshoba are evident.
Unlike the 1967 federal trials, it's a certainty that African-American jurors will serve on the grand jury. If indictments are handed down, African-American jurors will serve on the trial juries as well.
Conversely, 40 years takes a toll on the chain of evidence. So many of the people who took part in the 1967 federal trials are dead. But the record of that trial remains and is admissible in court.
It's evident that the work of Neshoba County men and women of conscience is beginning to pay off. Former Neshoba Democrat Publisher and Editor Stanley Dearman, his successor Jim Prince, former Secretary of State Dick Molpus and the members of the Philadelphia Coalition led by Prince and Leroy Clemons - comprised of white, black and Choctaw Indian citizens of the county - refused to let four decades erode public awareness of the case.
Dearman, who over the course of his career made Goodman's mother, Carolyn, now 89, familiar to the people of Neshoba through groundbreaking, powerful interviews, has spoken and written of a "reckoning" in the case.
It appears that the reckoning is on the horizon. Reputed Klan leader Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen, 79, is believed to be the prime target of the grand jury probe.
It's past time a Neshoba County grand jury heard evidence in this case. It's time the doors of the prison of public opinion be flung wide open - and let the truth march where it needs to go.
