Free Republic

NATCHEZ - Thomas Moore doesn't know how close he is to justice. But he believes the best opportunity to solve his brother's 41-year-old murder is at hand. The climate is right, the time is right, and the spotlight is on. Moore's crusade for convictions in the killings of his brother, Charles Eddie Moore, and a friend, Henry Hezekiah Dee, culminated this week in U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton's pledge to re-investigate the Franklin County murders, along with the truck bomb killing of Natchez's Wharlest Jackson in 1967. "For the first time in 41 years, the people that can bring this to...

A big secret they couldn't escapeBy William Neikirk Tribune senior correspondent Published June 26, 2005 By October, Mississippi's searing heat usually gives way to the cool spells of fall. And so it was in 1967, in the graceful city of Meridian, where I had come to cover a federal trial as a reporter for The Associated Press. But a different kind of heaviness hung in the air that October long ago, a feeling no less oppressive than the swelter of a Mississippi summer. You could sense it by viewing Confederate flags some people had unfurled near the federal building. You...

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. (AP) -- Reputed Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen watched from a wheelchair Monday as jury selection began in his murder trial in one of most shocking crimes of the civil rights era -- the 1964 slayings of three voter-registration volunteers. The case against the 80-year-old Killen represents Mississippi's latest attempt to deal with unfinished business from the state's bloodstained, racist past. In a measure of how much things have changed over the past 41 years, about a quarter of the jury pool was black, roughly reflecting the racial makeup of the county's 28,700 residents. In 1964, very...

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - Hicks. Rednecks. Racists. People who live in this town of 7,300 have heard the epithets slung their way for decades. And many - black and white - cringe as they anticipate how the world will view their town when reputed Ku Klux Klansman and part-time preacher Edgar Ray Killen goes on trial Monday in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers. "People make it sound like it’s a hick town. It’s not," said Bryon Whitley, a white 21-year-old who works in a music store on the downtown square, just across from the red brick Neshoba County...

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, Associated Press PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - Hicks. Rednecks. Racists. People who live in this town of 7,300 have heard the epithets slung their way for decades. And many — black and white — cringe as they anticipate how the world will view their town when reputed Ku Klux Klansman and part-time preacher Edgar Ray Killen goes on trial Monday in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers. "People make it sound like it's a hick town. It's not," said Bryon Whitley, a white 21-year-old who works in a music store on the downtown square, just across...

<p>Some people say old unsolved civil rights-era murder cases should be left alone. The quest for long-delayed justice, they say, is not worth reopening those old social wounds. For others among us, those wounds never healed.</p> <p>Forty years have passed, for example, since "freedom summer," but I still vividly remember the massive project to register black voters in the South. The Constitution had granted African-Americans the right to vote almost 100 years earlier, but that radical notion had not taken hold in the South.</p>

<p>PHILADELPHIA, MS — Another anniversary, another year without justice for the killers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, speakers said Sunday.</p> <p>"All of us know that people who helped and aided in the murders are still alive," Leslie McLemore, a member of the Jackson City Council, told the 200 or so gathered at Mount Zion United Methodist Church to remember the three civil rights workers killed by the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. "They need to be brought to trial."</p>