Reopened Civil Rights Cases Evoke Painful Past

Reopened Civil Rights Cases Evoke Painful Past

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, January 10, 2005


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.