In the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 three civil rights activists in America’s Deep South – two of whom were Jewish - were lynched in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
In 1988 the murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney became the subject of the Oscar-winning film Mississippi Burning. But it took more than four decades for their killer to be brought to justice, when a jury indicted Edgar Ray Killen on three counts of murder.
Ex-Klansman and part-time Baptist minister Killen, 80, was convicted of orchestrating and directing the murders six months later and given three consecutive 20-year sentences. His appeal in 2007 was unsuccessful.
Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said after the sentence was handed out that it was “long overdue, but…nonetheless gratifying to see that justice delayed is not necessarily justice denied.”
