Forty years after 2 civil rights workers and a local African American
attempting to register African American voters in Mississippi were murdered, the alleged killer may finally be held to account.
An 80-year-old Mississippi man was arrested Thursday in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers whose bodies were buried in an earthen dam outside the town of Philadelphia -- killings that spurred national support for the civil rights movement.
These killings were the subject of the 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning, starring a favorite of mine, Gene Hackman. What struck me when I first saw this movie was how far I thought we'd come from 1964. Ha!
Just two generations ago, even the voter registration of African Americans was a life and death struggle. These days, it's a "clean" kill: no real evidence of wrong doing, no smoking guns.
Today was supposedly a victory for American progressive thought: in contrast to the 2000 debacle, we had one Senator join the House in forcing floor debates.
The debates? Lots of chest beating from the left, lots of mockery from the right. Disappointng and reprehensible, respectively, this was a symbolic farce.
This quote spoke volumes for me:
Claude McInnis, the executive vice chair of the state Democratic Party, said, "My hat's off to them in making this arrest."
"Justice always prevails and if you commit crimes, you face justice," said McInnis, a former sharecropper and civil rights activist. "But there is another old saying that justice delayed is justice denied."
I think a great many of us understood the dire implications of 2004's voter suppression; our leaders, real or imagined, did not.
Justice delayed, again. It'a not a good thing.