Mississippi verdict greeted by a generation gap

Jamar Hardy, hanging out in a parking lot with fellow twentysomething Bryan Storey, exemplifies this new outlook. "It doesn't matter if you are white, black, or purple. What matters is who you are," Hardy says.

"Yeah, if it had happened today, we would have raised more hell about it," says Mr. Storey, who is white.

Although of different races, the two have been friends since grade school and consider themselves brothers.

Storey, an offshore oil-rig worker, says his father is elated that justice is finally being served. The son, however, sees no benefit to dragging the town into the US spotlight in order to lock up an aged felon.

This was the first state trial in Philadelphia's Freedom Summer case. In 1967, when no state charges were brought, 18 Klansmen were tried on federal civil rights charges. A hung jury failed to convict Killen and only seven others were found guilty, receiving very light sentences.

Stanley Dearman was newspaper editor of the Neshoba Democrat during those years, finally retiring in 2000. He says after the federal trials in 1967, "nobody wanted to talk about it. I welcomed anybody who wanted to talk about it, but nobody ever would."

He credits the Killen prosecution, in part, to the success of other high-profile cases in recent years, several in Mississippi (see list below). "Those other cases gave us the courage that justice could be done here," says Mr. Dearman.

Some believe the manslaughter convictions didn't send a strong enough message and were hoping for first degree murder convictions. But with lost evidence and dead witnesses, some say the verdicts were appropriate.

"While these trials prove that it's never too late for justice, I worry that juries get caught up in the emotion of these 'atonement trials' and feel pressure to convict," says Jack Davis, a civil rights expert and historian at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "And that isn't justice."

Others believe while these trials may serve to soothe tensions in town, they do little to change the cultural stereotypes about the region. "Most people will never set foot in Alabama or Mississippi," says Joshua Rothman, a civil rights expert at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. "They still have that attitude that these states are backward, racist, redneck, and religiously fanatic."

1994 Murder conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi.

1998 Murder conviction of former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers in a 1966 firebombing, also in Mississippi.

2001, 2002 Murder convictions of Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry in the 1963 bombing that killed four black girls at a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Robert Chambliss was also convicted in 1977.

June 2005 Manslaughter convictions of Edgar Ray Killen in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss.

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