Justice, delayed: America revisits some of the most painful episodes of the civil rights era.

BACKGROUND

This article examines recent examples of how America is revisiting some of the most painful episodes of the civil rights era. Virginia's scholarships for those who were rocked out of schools in the 1950s and a prosecution in Mississippi for three 1964 murders are among the ongoing efforts to right the wrongs of the past.

BEFORE READING

* Ask a student to read aloud the first paragraph of the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizens "equal protection of the Laws." Virginia's "massive resistance" laws enabled Prince Edward County to close its schools, give vouchers to white children to attend private schools, and effectively deny education to black children.

* In the 1964 case Griffin v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County, the Supreme Court ruled that in shutting its school system, the county had denied black students equal protection of the Laws as guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.

WRITING PROMPTS

* Write a Letter from the Virginia Legislature to the scholarship recipients expressing regret for the school closings.

* When Edgar Ray Killen's case was reopened, some residents of Neshoba County, Miss., felt that it was better to "leave it alone" and not reopen old wounds. Write a five-paragraph essay explaining why you agree or disagree with them.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

* Why do you think Virginia officials in the 1950s were so opposed to white and black children sharing classrooms?

* Was justice fully served in the recent felony-manslaughter conviction of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen?

CRITICAL THINKING

* For some people, Virginia's scholarship program might raise questions about the issue of reparations.

* Are people today who had no part in the school closings responsible for the actions of Virginia officials in the 1950s?

FAST FACT

* In 1959, the Virginia General Assembly repealed the state's compulsory school-attendance laws, in defiance of efforts to integrate its schools.

WEB WATCH

www.mercyseatfilms.com/ timeline.html provides a time line comparing racial issues in the nation, Virginia, and Prince Edward County from 1865 to 2001.

Warren Brown was about to enter first grade in 1959 when officials chained up the public schools in Prince Edward County, Va., rather than allow black children to sit beside white children in a classroom.

Brown stayed home for four years, until his mother found a local church offering classes to black children. He graduated from high school in 1972, winning basketball scholarships from three colleges, only to turn them down because he feared the academics would have been too challenging. "I didn't get a proper foundation," he says. "If you're not prepared, what good is the school going to do for you?"

This fall, however, Brown, at the age of 51, plans to go to college to study criminal justice.

Five decades after Prince Edward County and other Virginia locales closed their public schools in defiance of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the state is confronting its racist past. Virginia is, in effect, apologizing and offering reparations in the form of scholarships, providing up to $5,500 a year for any state resident who was denied a proper education when the public schools shut down. More than 80 people have been approved for the scholarships, and thousands are potentially eligible.

Virginia's program reflects a larger move toward atonement for past injustices. In other states, notorious civil rights-era cases have been reopened, and the U.S. Senate recently issued a formal apology to lynching victims and their descendants. In the first half of the 20th century, the Senate failed several times to make lynching a federal crime.

'MASSIVE RESISTANCE'

Most of the scholarship applicants still live in Prince Edward County, where an important chapter of America's civil rights struggle played out. In 1951, a lawsuit challenging school segregation was consolidated with four others to become the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal education for blacks and whites was unconstitutional. (Brown effectively overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, an 1896 case in which the Court had ruled that separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional.)

Virginia officials largely ignored the Brown decision. A 1956 series of laws known as "massive resistance" created a voucher program to allow white children to attend private schools. The Farmville Herald, a Prince Edward County newspaper, said in a 1959 editorial that efforts to enforce Brown were "part of the diabolical Communist plan to disrupt American life."

In June 1959, Prince Edward County withdrew all financial support of its public schools as a way to close them and get around the Brown decision. (This plan also affected white families who couldn't afford private-school tuition, even with a voucher. Therefore, some whites will also be eligible for Virginia's new scholarship program.)

These segregationist policies led to a later Supreme Court decision--Griffin v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County, in 1964. The Court declared that every American child had a constitutional right to a public-school education, forcing local officials to reopen their schools for all children.

But lives had already been shattered, families were split, dreams died. "You've got to find a way to move on," says Brown, now a deputy sheriff. The anger is something you're going to have with you as long as you live ... You just have to deal with it."

More than 40 years after the fact, in 2003, Virginia's General Assembly was considering a resolution to express "profound regret" for the Prince Edward school closings. That's when Ken Woodley, editor of The Farmville Herald, came up with the idea for the scholarships. He was all too familiar with his newspaper's segregationist past and, as a white man, felt ashamed of it. He decided that the people of his community deserved something more than a resolution. "At the end of the day, it's just a piece of paper, and it doesn't empower anybody to do anything," says Woodley. "It doesn't give back anything that was taken away."

Woodley then started a one-man campaign to create the scholarships. He wrote columns, lobbied for additional support from Virginia's Governor, Mark Warner, and found sponsors in the state legislature. Last year, bills were passed and signed by Warner, who announced the names of the first scholarship recipients in June.

MISSISSIPPI HEALING

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of felony manslaughter for his role in the murders of three civil rights workers who were registering black voters during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964. Killen, now 80 years old and in a wheelchair, received the maximum sentence of 60 years. June 21, the day that he was convicted, marked the 41st anniversary of the killings, which were dramatized in the 1988 film Mississippi Burning.

The national media converged on Neshoba County in 1964, and coverage of the murders helped galvanize the civil rights movement. In 1967, the federal government tried 18 men, including Killen, for violating the victims' civil rights. According to trial testimony, Killen was not present at the killings but organized the mob that chased down and shot Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. But the all-white jury deadlocked, and Killen was able to resume his life as a sawmill operator and preacher. His case was reopened, decades later, in 1999 after a Mississippi newspaper uncovered information implicating him as the "main instigator" in the murders.

For Angela Lewis--who was 10 days old when her father, James Chaney, was killed--the conviction of Killen represents a bittersweet victory.

"It's what he deserves," says Lewis, "but he's had 41 years to sit down to dinner with his children. That's something that me and my dad will never have." (Killen has since been released on bail pending an appeal of his case.)

'IT'S NEVER TOO LATE'

Another high-profile Mississippi case being reinvestigated is that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American who was murdered in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman. In June, Till's body was exhumed and autopsied for the first time. Two white men tried for the murder 50 years ago were acquitted by an all-white jury. They have since died, but prosecutors believe that others may have been involved.

Like murder victims' families who wait decades for justice, many of those eligible for Virginia's scholarships can never entirely forgive or forget the wrongs of the past.

Rita Moseley, 58, was about to begin sixth grade when the schools were closed in the 1950s. Now working as a secretary at a high school she would have been barred from attending, she plans to use her scholarship to study business management. "I'm the kind of person who thinks it's never too late," says Moseley.

But images of rejection still haunt her. "I lived behind one of those schools; they were closed with chains," she says. "I looked at it every day of my life."

Woodley, the Herald's editor, acknowledges that it is impossible to rewrite history.

"But we can make history," he says. "The scholarships are a piece of goodness in a world that wasn't there before."

Michael Janofsky in Farmville, Va.

Michael Janofsky is a reporter for The New York Times, additional reporting by Shaila Dewan, Ariel Hart, and Robert D. McFadden.