The conviction yesterday of Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter in the deaths of three civil rights workers – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman – in Mississippi 41 years ago is no less important for the long time it was in coming. It is never too late to pursue a murderer, and it is hard to think of another crime that has had such enduring emotional impact for America and New Yorkers as the slaying of these three brave men, one a black Mississippian and two white New Yorkers, on that fateful day in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Killen is only one member of what prosecutors believe was a group of 18 Ku Klux Klansmen involved in the crime. The rest of the eight survivors from that mob have not been indicted. Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman came to Philadelphia to register blacks to vote during the turbulent summer of 1964. Killen was accused of organizing a mob to abduct and kill the three. In 1967, a federal jury convicted seven members of that mob on charges of violating the civil rights of the victims; the jury hung in Killen’s case. This is the first time state prosecutors had charged anyone with murder in the crime.

The trial of Killen represents but one step in America’s reckoning with the evil of the racism that has stained our country’s history. Yet prosecutors are pursuing cases from this era with renewed vigor. Since 1989, according to Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, 29 cases in seven states have been reopened, leading to 27 arrests and 21 convictions, excluding Killen’s. This trend will strike many as a more meaningful form of racial healing than all the debates over affirmative action or “multiculturalism,” since such cases affirm the value of each individual.

In a criminal proceeding like this, it could not be clearer that the accuser is the state, speaking for all its citizens. Although the 20-year sentence prescribed for manslaughter isn’t as severe as the life term for the top murder counts prosecutors had sought – or the gallows that Killen deserves – the end will be the same. Barring a successful appeal, the ailing 80-year-old Killen will spend what remains of his days in prison. And his name will be marked for all time, while America goes on with the never ending struggle to live up to the honor done to its name by James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.