unfinished business

Let's hope that this time, justice is served.

The bodies of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner were discovered by FBI agents near Philadelphia, Miss., on Aug. 4, 1964. The three men, civil rights workers who came south to register African Americans to vote, were shot to death sometime on June 21. Their Ford station wagon was torched and their bodies were bulldozed 17 feet under an earthen dam.

But for civil rights activists of long standing, and for a brother of one of the murdered men, the forthcoming trial of the principal suspect in the crime is unfinished business for America.

On Monday, in what’s thought to be one of the last pursuits of justice postponed from the civil rights era, the trial of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen begins in Philadelphia with jury selection.