Selection of Mississippi Burning jury begins

REPUTED Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen watched from a wheelchair yesterday as jury selection began in his murder trial in one of most shocking crimes of the US civil rights era — the 1964 slayings of three voter-registration volunteers.

The case against the 80-year-old Killen represents Mississippi's latest attempt to deal with unfinished business from the state's bloodstained racist past. In a measure of how much things have changed over the past 41 years, about a third of the jury pool was black, roughly reflecting the racial makeup of the county's 28,700 residents.

In 1964, very few blacks were registered to vote in Neshoba County, and juries were usually all-white.