The corrosive fear and pain I knew in Mississippi has gone

Fear is nine parts imagination and one part memory, and so it was as I turned my rented car northwest out of the large town of Meridian in eastern Mississippi and headed towards Neshoba county. Anxiety opened the sweat-pores on my hands as I gripped the increasingly slippery wheel.Forty-three years ago Neshoba was the scene of the most notorious triple murder in American history. One black and two white civil rights activists went missing after Ku Klux Klansmen forced their station-wagon off the road late at night. The car was found, shot-up and burnt, but the young men were gone.

Their disappearance prompted President Lyndon Johnson to order a manhunt across Mississippi. It was a month before one of the killing party confessed, and revealed where an excavator had covered their bodies with earth.

The activists had been organising black people to register to vote. National and international outrage at the murder led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act the following year, the last piece of unfinished legislative business in the long struggle for African-American equality. So what began as horror ended in triumph, a rare case of heroes not dying in vain.

How many of today's other road-users remembered all this, I wondered, as the car approached Philadelphia, Neshoba's county seat. It was a glorious spring afternoon with white dogwood in bloom. Diesel-powered mowers were giving front lawns the year's first trim, and schoolbuses were delivering children home. But I could not help looking into the rear-view mirror and imagining darkness with car lights closing in behind me, and then overtaking, and more lights behind, and another car at my side edging nearer as the one in front slowed to a halt.

In 1964 I was also an activist on the Mississippi Freedom Summer, as the voting rights project was called. The Neshoba abductions cast fear into all of us, even though my group was a hundred miles away on Mississippi's western edge. Scores of black people had been lynched with impunity in the state's history, but the Klan had never dared to kill whites before. Curiosity was bringing me to this county of horror for the first time in my life, plus a feeling that I had to put a taboo aside.

Philadelphia's town centre looked as I expected it, a small square dominated by a courthouse, run-down hardware stores, barbers' shops and cafes, though there was hardly anyone on the pavement, and certainly no tobacco-chewing farmers on the watch for strangers.

Nowadays life revolves round a vast Wal-Mart shopping plaza half a mile beyond the courthouse. Here by arrangement I was met by Nettie Cox, a black retired teacher who ran as the Democratic party's candidate for mayor three years ago. She did not win, although the town is 60% black. Her campaign was one clear sign of change, in spite of apathy and low-turnouts.

Along with George Roberts, the head of the neighbouring county's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the US's oldest civil rights organisation, she took me round the death sites, the place where the car was dumped, the gravel road leading to the burial mound (still owned by the same man who owned it in 1964 and still blocked by No Trespassing signs), and the spot where the three were shot. Less than a mile away we passed the seedy bungalow, with several wrecked cars in the front yard, where "Preacher" Killen lived. Two years ago, aged 80, he became the only man convicted of manslaughter in the case.

You come across Philadelphia's most visible change three miles out of town. Two super-casinos with accompanying hotels and restaurants sit astride the highway. Inside, acres of slot machines enthral mainly white, elderly, and often obese punters. It is owned by the small Choctaw Indian reservation, now the area's biggest employer.

One of the casino's staff is Leroy Clemons, the head of Neshoba's NAACP and a member of the Philadelphia Coalition, a group of white and black leaders who three years ago organised a public apology for Neshoba's past and campaigned to re-open prosecutions for the 1964 murder.

Nettie Cox believes the surviving Klan members ought to be prosecuted, but Clemons argues there are no witnesses left. "The only thing is if Killen had turned state's evidence, but it doesn't seem he will. It was touch and go even to convict him," he says. "A lot of people say everybody knows who was involved. But most are dead and it's all hearsay."

Aged two at the time of the murders, Clemons represents a new generation. "The older people still have that 1960s mentality of 'knowing your place'. The younger people say 'This is our town'. We don't know that fear," he says.

Now there are black people in the police and sheriff's department. The fire chief is black. Today's problems are economic empowerment in the private sector, and education. Apart from a barber's and a beauty shop, there is no black-owned business in Philadelphia. The banks are almost entirely white, and few businesses give black employees management positions. It is hard for black people to get loans to buy homes or start a business, Clemons complains, though he says they sometimes have unrealistic expectations. The drop-out rate from public schools in the county is 29%, above the Mississippi average which itself is one of the worst in the US. The NAACP's top priority is to address this by getting teachers and parents to work out new ways of connecting education to life.

In his large home on the edge of Philadelphia I found Stanley Dearman, who owned the Neshoba Democrat, the local paper, from 1966 to 2000. A liberal who used his columns to win an apology from the state of Mississippi 25 years after the murders (although it took Philadelphia another 15 years), he recalls the terrifying grip the Klan once had. "The police department in Meridian used to be wall-to-wall Klan," he told me. "It's hard to look back now and remember how powerful they were. When the FBI came in to break the case, it took just 30 minutes for someone to be informed on if they talked, and 30 more minutes to let it be known across the county. Ostracism and phone-threats would follow."

For Philadelphia to be known nowadays as nothing more special than the home of two super-casinos may be progress, even if it is a tawdry way to reduce joblessness. But fear is the most corrosive agent of pain, and that is gone. In Neshoba, you no longer gamble with your life. By any measure that is real, if invisible, change.

Jonathan Steele