In January 1964 Michael Schwerner left New York and drove with his wife to Mississippi where he expected to find a “decisive battleground” for human rights.

“Nowhere in the world is the idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched, or more cancerous, than in Mississippi,” he once said. He despised bigotry and its practitioners in the Ku Klux Klan, and the feeling was mutual.

Six months later, Schwerner was dead, along with two civil rights colleagues, Andrew Goodman and James Earl Chaney. Four decades later, the ringleader behind the killings has been found guilty and sentenced to prison for 60 years.

The manslaughter conviction against 80-year-old ex-Klansman Edgar Ray Killen is more symbolic than dramatic, but it is a declaration that at least some Mississippians are eager to erase the image of virulant racism that allowed Killen to escape formal accountability for 41 years.

“We deplore the possibility that history will record that the state of Mississippi, and this community in particular, did not make a good faith effort to do its duty,” declares a resolution by the Philadelphia Coalition, a broad organization of citizens who pressed Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan to pursue justice in the case that tainted Philadelphia, Miss., since 1964.

It would be an overstatement to call the verdict atonement for the audacious conspiracy of silence that enabled Killen to strut about the community, free and defiant, through his 40s, his 50s, his 60s and his 70s. The charge was murder, but stale evidence and a diminishing number of living witnesses made the lesser charge the most that Duncan and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood could get.

While the record has been made that Edgar Ray Killen is a criminal who deprived three civil rights workers – if not more – of the lives they courageously risked, don’t conclude that bigotry has died off along with a number of critical witnesses Duncan and Hood could have used.

There are surviving conspirators among the Klan members Killen recruited for the 1964 killings, but they wouldn’t testify against him. Klan spokeswoman Rachel Pendergraft of Harrison, Ark., brashly theorized that the jury considered Killen innocent but returned the lesser verdict because they feared “retaliation by anti-Klan terrorists.”

Coming from Klan members, such reactions are predictable. But Mississippi, shamed by the original crime and cover-up in 1964, should be embarrassed again by the absence of its two U.S. senators – Thad Cochran and Trent Lott – when the Senate approved a resolution apologizing for years of failure to pass federal anti-lynching legislation.

Philadelphia, Miss., lived up to Michael Schwerner’s expectation of a battleground. Killen and his friends made sure of that. But it’s too early to call it a decisive one.