WASHINGTON: The American nation watched this month as the trial of Klansman Edgar Ray Killen forced the white citizens of Philadelphia, Mississippi, to come to terms with their history. But Killen’s manslaughter conviction in the 1964 killing of three young civil rights workers should be a time for all Americans to confront their complicity in Southern-style segregation.

For generations too young to remember the actual events, the film Mississippi Burning recounted a version of the lynching. Produced in 1988, the film is still widely shown on cable. But the filmmakers got the story only half right: The movie whitewashed the FBI. I know, because I dealt with the FBI during the hours leading up to the murders, when a simple intervention might have saved three lives.

As an 18-year-old volunteer at the Atlanta headquarters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I had been assigned to staff the telephone lines from Mississippi during the evening shift on June 21, 1964.

The movie accurately shows that Mississippi cops seized James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman that afternoon, after they came to Neshoba County to investigate the burning of a black church. As the movie also recounts, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price held them incommunicado at the county jail, then released them at 10pm — only to follow them to the county line, stop them again and hold them until his fellow Klansmen arrived to carry out their murderous scheme.

But the movie’s portrayal of an FBI agent as a hero distorts the truth of this story. When the three activists failed to return to their Meridian, Mississippi, headquarters on schedule, we launched a well-established procedure.

We had enough experience with both vigilante and police repression to know that their missed deadline was not a simple oversight and that the young men were probably in grave danger.

My calls to FBI agents in their Meridian and Jackson offices brought a practiced mantra from that era: “The Bureau is not a law enforcement agency.” If we could supply proof that a federal law had been broken, they told us, they would investigate.

If an FBI agent had rushed to the scene of the real crime, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman could have been with us last summer to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.—Dawn-LAT/WP News Service