FOR the families of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three young civil rights workers murdered by a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen in 1964, justice has been long delayed, but ultimately not denied. Forty years to the day after the three idealistic young anti-segregationists disappeared, a Mississippi jury on Tuesday convicted former Klan recruiter Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter. The jury accepted Killen, now 80, was a key organiser of the ambush and abduction of the men. While six of his co-conspirators have been previously convicted on federal charges, this was the first state prosecution of any of those responsible for the events that were fictionalised in the film Mississippi Burning . The case has therefore been seen as a rite of passage for an entire community, rather than simply a criminal prosecution.

Disbanded after the Confederate defeat in the Civil War of 1861-65, when white supremacy appeared a lost cause, the violently racist KKK regrouped after World War I as blacks in the south began to reach out for the completion of the process the war had begun: the granting of their civil rights. Coming a week after the US Senate apologised for years of blocking anti-lynching laws, the conviction of Killen is another important step in the long process of reconciliation between the descendants of those who were brought to the US to toil as slaves and the descendants of those who brought them.

But the US south is far from the only place where a community is still trying to grapple with the darkest moments of its own history. At this very moment, the Howard Government is considering Hungary's request for the extradition of Perth pensioner Charles Zentai, who is accused of committing, 60 years ago, a crime no less serious and no less motivated by pure race-hate than Killen's. When a mob, or a movement, or an entire country commits heinous crimes, and then conspires to conceal those crimes, the task of untangling lines of individual responsibility can take decades, and may never be completed. But it is an unavoidable task for a civilised community coming to terms with the truth of its past.

The Australian, June 23, 2005