The Klan's diminishing shadow

On the other hand, 26 of the 28 national and state politicians linked to the Council of Conservative Citizens, which some describe as a "hate group" for its racial views, come from Mississippi.

"It's less that the politicians are secretly Klansmen themselves and more that these are people who are perfectly willing to appeal to white supremacists for votes, and that's clearly still going on," says Mr. Potok. "There's a coded way of reaching out to whites with ugly views about blacks and others."

Born out of protest against the abolition movement of the 1820s, the Klan also had strong ties to primitivist "fork of the creek" churches, congregations of poor and poorly educated farmers that once ruled the rural South. Clinging to snippets of Genesis, they became a powerful force against integration not only during the Civil War but throughout Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. Early in the 20th century, they topped out at about 5 million members. Killen himself was an ordained Baptist minister, whose moral authority played into the plotting against the three civil rights workers, authorities say. After a Justice Department investigation of the case, 19 men were indicted on federal civil rights charges. Seven were convicted, but a deadlocked all-white jury freed Killen.

The South responded to the abolition movement in the 1820s with "an ideology of white supremacy, where Southerners came to believe that keeping blacks in place was the paramount necessity," says Pitcavage. "Luckily, as the 20th century progressed, there was a decreasing number of white Southerners who bought into that ideology."

For many blacks, racism was - and remains - implicit in the power structure, including local sheriffs who aided and abetted the Klan for decades. But some point to the Killen arrest as a sign of the South's readiness to address those sympathies with the rule of law. Indeed, two years ago, nearby Meridian appointed its first black police chief - a sign, to many, of blacks' emergence into law enforcement, which in the South largely sided with supremacists during the 1960s.

Moreover, it's hard to prove that blacks are suffering economically more than anyone else due to government policy in states like Mississippi, though some say lotteries affect poor minorities to a great extent. Indeed, one reason many blacks move from the North is the rapidly evolving middle class, which is changing the demographics and culture of the New South.

"One thing that's different from 40 years ago is that even in states like Mississippi, for the most part, [white supremacists] are relegated to the fringe," agrees Mr. Pitcavage

The South, many say, remains the most enigmatic province of America, unique in its ability to change so rapidly - while in some ways not changing at all.

Says Paul Gaston, history professor emeritus at the University of Virginia: "Faulkner had it right when he said, 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.'"

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