The families of three US civil rights volunteers who were murdered 41 years ago in Mississippi have welcomed the convition of former Ku Klux Klan man Edgar Ray Killen.
Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner - two white New Yorkers - and James Chaney, a black Mississippian, were stopped by Klansmen in their station wagon on June 21, 1964.
Their bodies were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam, in a case that was dramatized in the 1988 film "Mississippi Burning."
Rita Schwerner Bender
Prosecutors said Killen - a part-time preacher and sawmill operator - organised the carloads of Klansmen who hunted down and killed the three young men.
Cheers could be heard outside the two-story, red brick courthouse yesterday after Killen was convicted.
The brother of one of the victims, Mr Ben Chaney, thanked prosecutors and "the white people who walked up to me and said things are changing. I think there's hope."
Mr Schwerner's widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, hugged District Attorney Mark Duncan and called it "a day of great importance to all of us." But she said others also should be held responsible for the slayings.
"Preacher Killen didn't act in a vacuum," she said. "The state of Mississippi was complicit in these crimes and all the crimes that occurred, and that has to be opened up."
Killen's wife, Betty Jo, went to her husband with tears in her eyes and hugged him. Killen, who was in a wheelchair because of a logging accident in which he broke his legs, was surrounded by more than a dozen armed officers as he was wheeled from the courthouse and taken off to jail.
Prosecutors had asked the jury to send a message to the rest of the world that times have changed in Mississippi and that the state is committed to bringing to justice those who committed violence to preserve segregation in the 1950s and '60s.
Andrew Goodman's 89-year-old mother, Carolyn, said from her home in New York that the real heroes were those who stood up to the hate groups.
"I know a lot of people in Mississippi who have risked their lives," Carolyn Goodman said. "I would say those are the most important people in my life. All the people who have stood up and the victims of the Klan.
"I think most of the people are wonderful down there," said Goodman, who was in Philadelphia last week to testify about her son. "There are a few rotten apples in every barrel."
Killen was only person ever brought up on murder charges in the case by the state of Mississippi.
AP