With the conclusion this week of the trial of an 80-year-old White supremacist in Philadelphia, Miss., state prosecutors have probably tried the last person connected with the 1964 abduction and murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The trio’s deaths were the basis for the movie, “Mississippi Burning.” Although there has been significant progress made since 1964, Mississippi is still burning with injustice.

The defendant, Edgar Ray Killen is a perfect example of justice delayed. Neither of the slain civil rights workers had reached his 25th birthday, yet Killen, an unrepentant racist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, has been allowed to walk free for 41 years. Now, with one foot in the grave, he has been convicted of manslaughter.

In an argument that strains credulity, Killen’s lawyer suggested that we should let bygones be bygones.

“This is a sad day for the state of Mississippi, after 40 years of moving forward, going back and opening up an old crime like this,” said Attorney James McIntyre. “The state of Mississippi needs to be going forward, not backwards.”

Murdering three innocent young men – two Whites from New York and one native-born Black – interested in registering African-Americans to vote is about as backwards as one can get. Mississippi can never go forward until it deals with its blood-soaked past.

We need to go back in order to understand what put Killen, a self-described minister, in his present predicament.

On July 21, 1964, Chaney,21, Goodman, 20, and Schwerner,24, went to Neshoba County to inspect the Mount Zion United Methodist Church, a Black church that had been burned the previous week by the KKK. The vehicle, driven by Schwerner, was pulled over around 3:30 P.M. for allegedly speeding by Cecil R. Price, a deputy sheriff whom witnesses described was a member of the Klan. The civil rights workers were taken to the Philadelphia jail and retained until 10:30 P.M.

Local Klansmen were rounded up while they were in custody. When the civil rights workers were released, they were trailed by two carloads of KKK members, driven off the road, shot at close range and buried in an earthen dam. Their bodies weren’t discovered until 44 days later.

In 1967, federal charges were filed for conspiring to deprive the three young men of their civil rights. Seven men were convicted, serving sentences ranging from three to 10 years, and seven others were set free, including Killen. The jury had voted 11-1 to convict Killen but a lone holdout blocked the verdict, saying she could not vote to convict a minister.

Mississippi decided to bring murder charges against Killen after Sam Bowers, former imperial wizard of the Mississippi Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, boasted that Killen, the ringleader of the murders, had escaped punishment. During the course of the investigation, Mississippi prosecutors interviewed former Klansmen who stated that Killen, leader of a Klan chapter in nearby Meridian, had orchestrated the attack on the civil rights workers. Combative to the end, Killen was escorted to court by two men who identified themselves as members of the KKK.

Killen’s trial was the latest in a series of long-overdue legal proceedings that involve bringing murderers to court. Justice is finally being served because of a combination of the victims’ families life-long campaigns for justice and young, White prosecutors – many of whom were kids at the time of the original crimes – having the courage to re-open the cases.

It was only in recent years that the murderers of Mississippi civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer were imprisoned. The case of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old murdered in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman in Money, Miss., has been re-opened by the Justice Department.

While progress has been made on the legal and political fronts – Mississippi has more Black elected officials than any other state – there is ample evidence that old attitudes die hard.

As recent as Dec. 5, 2002, Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss.) praised the 1948 segregationist campaign of Strom Thurmond and noted that Mississippi had supported the Dixiecrat. “We’re proud of it,” Lott said. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

If well-meaning White Mississippians had provided true leadership at the time, we wouldn’t have the problem of doing today what should have been done 40 years ago.