Flame Out

The only person to face manslaughter (sic) charges over the lynching of three civil rights workers in the Mississippi Burning case has died in prison. The case was dramatised in Alan Parker's 1988 film, in which truth and justice are pluckily pursued by two white liberal employees of the well-known civil rights campaigner J Edgar Hoover. None of Edgar Ray Killen's accomplices ever faced trial for murder, doubtless because there were very fine people on both sides. In the immediate aftermath of the killings, comparatively few unarmed Klansmen were shot to death by law enforcement officers, and it took forty years before Killen was convicted. When the state government of Mississippi refused to prosecute anyone, the federal government charged eighteen people with conspiring to deprive American citizens of their constitutional rights; and in the regrettable greatness-lacking spirit of the sixties, seven of the accused served prison sentences of up to six years rather than being allowed to run for President.