1964 Civil Rights case finally reopened

The Washington Post's Manuel Roig-Franzia reports on this stunning development in an article entitled "Civil Rights Murder Case Reopened; 1 Man Arrested":

One of the most notorious murder cases of the Deep South's anguished civil rights era was resurrected late yesterday as authorities in central Mississippi arrested a reputed former Ku Klux Klan leader on charges of killing three civil rights workers in 1964.

Neshoba County sheriff's deputies arrested Edgar Ray Killen, known as "The Preacher," after a grand jury convened to hear evidence in the four-decade-old case yesterday morning in Philadelphia, Miss. The town of 7,300 was made infamous by the slayings of three young men whose names -- Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney -- became synonymous with the violent consequences of challenging Jim Crow's hold on the South. Indictments are expected today.

"It's something that was late in coming," Goodman's mother, Carolyn Goodman, 89, said in a phone interview from her home in New York. "I just knew that somehow this would happen -- it's something that had to be."

Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were killed during the voter-registration drives of what came to be known as the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The slayings of the multiracial trio -- Schwerner and Goodman were white, Chaney was black -- were later dramatized in the film "Mississippi Burning."

It may be 40 years after the murders, but it's great to see that the case is finally reopened. Even if the people arrested in this case are in their eighties, I certainly hope they go to jail for every remaining second of their lives.