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The article presents the author's views on segregation and racism in the United States following several criminal trials that involved the reinvestigation of racially motivated crimes, including the recent conviction of Edgar Ray Killen. Over the past decade state authorities have been picking up aging white men one by one and parading the down history's perpetrator walk of shame, complete with orange jumpsuits and handcuffs. Since 1989, twenty-three murders have been re-examined in the South, resulting in twenty-seven arrests, twenty-two convictions, two acquittals and one mistrial, according to Mark Potok of the Intelligence Project, a branch of the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Alabama. These developments should, of course, be welcomed. Beyond the importance of the prosecutions to the families of those who died and the communities in which the murders took place, they have a broader symbolic significance. They show that the struggle for justice, while long and arduous, can bear fruit in the most barren soil. They also show that these men, along with scores of others who perished in the same cause, did not die in vain. But while symbols are important, they should not be mistaken for substance. While the crimes that occurred during segregation were rarely systemic -- the individuals who carried them out and the manner in which they carried them out were far too crude for that -- they were systemic. They were born into a system of segregation that worked to preserve white privilege in the face of a concerted progressive onslaught -- a system in which the white community had to collude in a order for it to function. While the scale and nature of those privileges may have changed, the privileges themselves still exist.
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