Miss. justice - partial and belated

The three young men were the best the nation had to offer.Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were roaring into their 20s as tyranny was being challenged in the southeast quadrant of the United States. Though the republic prided itself as a citadel of freedom and democracy, the powerful white establishment of the South denied the vote to non-white citizens. When blacks insisted on their rights, these old white men let contracts to the knights of the Ku Klux Klan.Terrorism reigned throughout the South.The long nightmare of tyranny was challenged by hundreds of black and white college students recruited to register Southern blacks at the polls. This was the mechanical part of operation Freedom Summer '64. The spiritual part required these volunteers to risk their lives daily for the cause. When it came to maintaining apartheid, Mississippi whites, especially, were as ill-tempered as Nile crocodiles and just as vicious.Thousands of blacks had been brutalized and murdered in this ungodly state over the years, and their killers, far from prosecuted, were celebrated as pillars of Oxford, Natchez and Meridian. The organizers of Freedom Summer calculated that if white students joined the voter campaign it might stay the dagger of the Klan. Then, as now, in this Christian republic, a white life was far more highly valued. Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Queens College student, signed on to go South and risk the night riders' rope, shotgun and faggot. He was white, as was Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old New Yorker, who teamed up with James Chaney, 21, a black Mississippian, to register voters. On the night of June 21, 1964, the three young men were pulled over by a local sheriff's officer near Philadelphia, Miss. The trio was reportedly beaten by some 19 men of the Klan. For good measure, the gentlemen shot Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner and buried their bodies in a hole that had been dug prior to the attack.The local sheriff felt no compulsion to investigate his department's handiwork, despite media reports that the young men were missing. The FBI, as things went back then, nodded to the locals. The two white victims from up North, however, generated enormous pressure all the way to the White House. President Lyndon B. Johnson pressured FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to break precedent and locate these victims of the Klan.Though everyone knew the celebrated killers, the wheels of American justice never forced Mississippi to bring murder charges in the case. The federal government convicted seven Klansmen for conspiracy related to depriving the victims of their civil rights. They drew sentences from 3 to 10 years. The infamous case generated several books and even a hit 1988 movie, "Mississippi Burning." This particular Philadelphia loomed in civil-rights history as a weeping widow tree of murderous bigotry. Its mere mention puts goose bumps on proud white racists and dread in the hearts of black Mississippians. Seldom has a town so epitomized hatred, save perhaps Oxford, Birmingham, Money. Ronald Reagan willfully chose to launch his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., as a sign of his foul intentions for the national GOP. This launch venue of the former Hollywood actor warmed the hearts of the Klan as it set blacks' teeth on edge. So upset was one proud black woman from Meridian that, when John Hinckley shot President Reagan, she bowed down on her knees and prayed earnestly that he would die.Last week, the prayers of those who sought justice for Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner may have been answered, in part.Some 40 years after the crimes, Mississippi authorities arrested the first person ever charged with murder in the case, Edgar Ray Killen. The 79-year-old preacher reportedly organized and led the gang that ambushed and murdered the three young men.What took so long?This latest indictment is a sure sign that the white Mississippi establishment is finally recognizing the potential of its black population. Alabama, its neighbor in the barbarism of race hatred, came to this realization a few year ago when it prosecuted Klansmen for involvement in the infamous church bombing. Still, the roster of unsolved political murders in these states and others stands as but one monument to the unfullfilled promise of this republic as a land of justice for all.Michael Schwerner, in particular, took on the fight to make things better four decades ago. "Nowhere in the world is the idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched or more cancerous than in Mississippi," he once said. This apartheid, Schwerner knew to be "the battleground for America."