The early years of the civil rights movement passed me by. Brown vs. Board of Education. Rosa Parks refusing to sit on the back of the bus. The integration of Little Rock High School. But cut me a break: I was only ten years old when four Black students sat at the Woolworth's counter In Greensboro.

I don't really remember Bull Connor turning fire hoses and police dogs on black children, or the assassination of Medgar Evers. The March on Washington didn't register on my radar; neither did the four little girls who died in the bombing of a Birmingham church.

After all: segregation was a southern problem and I lived in the North, land of racial equality. This had nothing to do with me. In school, our current events discussions were more likely to cover the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba than the burning of the Freedom Riders' bus in Anniston, Alabama.

But I do remember the murders of civil rights workers Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner. I remember because they were murdered in Philadelphia and I lived in the Philadelphia suburbs, less than 100 yards from the city line. This wasn't the Philadelphia I knew.

And, I soon learned, it wasn't. Philadelphia, Mississippi, not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Still, every time Walter Cronkite announced the dateline Philadelphia during that summer of 1964 my head snapped around and I paid attention. The evil twin of the city of brotherly love. I needed to know more about my hometown's doppelganger.

On June 21, 1964, as we've recently been reminded, three civil rights workers were set up by the Ku Klux Klan: lured to Neshoba County, falsely arrested, released, hijacked and brutally murdered. After six weeks of investigating, an informer led the FBI to their grave, the hollow of an earthenwork dam, covered with tons of dirt.

It took federal indictments to bring the 18 conspirators to trial, including the Neshoba County Klan kleagle, or recruiter, Edgar Ray Killen. In October 1967 the jury delivered its verdict. Seven defendants were convicted, receiving sentences of between four and ten years. Eight were acquitted. In three cases, including that of Killen, the jury was hung, unable to reach a verdict.

The Judge in the case, James Cox, said of his sentences, "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man-- I gave them all what I thought they deserved."

As outrageous as this may seem to our 21st Century sensibilities, the convictions were the first ever in Mississippi for the killing of a civil rights worker. The New York Times called the verdict "a measure of the quiet revolution that is taking place in southern attitudes." It was progress, but not yet justice.

Close to a thousand white students, two-thirds of them white, northern and middle class north, were drawn to Mississippi that summer to register black voters and teach at freedom schools.

"Don't come to Mississippi this summer to save the Mississippi Negro," organizer Bob Moses warned the volunteers. "Only come if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one."

I initially paid attention because of the Philadelphia connection, but stayed to listen because it revealed to me that his freedom and my freedom were one. The reason that we didn't have any racial unrest in my cozy suburb was because everyone was white, and that didn't happen by accident. That was a brutal but necessary lesson for a naïve 12 year old.

On January 6, 2005, the State of Mississippi charged 79-year-old Edgar Ray Killen with murder in connection with the slayings of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. He was convicted of manslaughter on Tuesday, 41 years to the day after the three civil rights workers were murdered. The manslaughter conviction was less than the prosecution and the victim's families hope for, but it's enough to guarantee that he will spend the rest of his life in jail.

Some say that justice delayed is justice denied, but it's vital for the state of Mississippi to send a signal, however symbolic, that the evil chapter in their history is closed.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.