“The most momentous venture this year in terms of civil rights is Edgar Ray Killen’s indictment and conviction for manslaughter. The trial exposed what we had expected over 40 years ago – that there was a massive conspiracy against black people.”

– Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality

What I found strange about the local coverage of the ex-Klansman’s June 23 conviction is that few reports mentioned that two of the slain civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were from New York City and were members of CORE. I contacted Mr. Innis to get his reaction on the case. He said he felt that justice had been finally served, but he considered it a bittersweet victory that the conviction was only for manslaughter. Clearly, the murders were premeditated, but the conviction for the lesser charge avoided a hung jury.

Back in 1964, Mr. Innis and Sandy Feldman picketed the Abyssinian Baptist Church to protest Robert Kennedy, then attorney general, who was a guest of Adam Clayton Powell. They wanted to push him to urge J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the murders.

“There was no way that due to the depth and openness of the conspiracy that the FBI could not have known of its existence and danger to the citizens,” Mr. Innis said in a recent statement. “Part and parcel of this conspiracy is the lack of action on the part of the U.S. Congress – in particular, the Senate of the United States.”

Let me remind readers that Mr. Innis was referring to the Senate of the 1960s, but what happened back then bears some resemblance to recent senatorial conflicts.

“Numerous times legislation was proposed to outlaw mob rule, better known as lynching. Those legislations were always frustrated even after passage by the House of Representatives because of the parliamentary tactic of the filibuster. Thus, the filibusters, mostly Democratic senators from the South, were clearly co-conspirators with the lynchers. The murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by a group of lynchers led by Edgar Ray Killen had the U.S. Senate as a co-conspirator in their crime,” asserts Mr. Innis.

He continues: “It is a painful, bitter irony today, in the same year that we were able to obtain the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen that the black congressional caucus and most of the civil rights leadership establishments, along with the only African-American senator, Barack Obama, could find themselves in the bosom of Robert Byrd, senator from West Virginia, one of the last great segregationists and filibusters, as partners in the use of that scurrilous parliamentary tactic in the Senate, that they were partners in an attempt to maintain filibusters as a viable and necessary procedure in the U.S. Senate.”

Goodman and Schwerner were not only New Yorkers, they were also Jews, and one would think that Mayor Bloomberg would have made some formal statement applauding the sacrifice of these New York natives to the civil rights cause, but I could find no such declaration on the official mayoral Web site.

Independence Party leader Lenora Fulani refused to repudiate a statement she made in 1989 in which she called the Jews “mass murderers of people of color.” Mr. Bloomberg still accepted the endorsement of the Independence Party and a spokesman for his campaign excused this by saying, “You don’t hold 90,000 [party members] responsible for one person’s comments.”

Oh, but you must, Mr. Mayor. It’s time that we start holding everybody responsible for inciting hate in speeches, especially those made by candidates.

I recently watched the film “Mississippi Burning” on cable again, and was still spellbound by its plot. The film is loosely based on the murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, whose sisters later worked for Mr. Innis in Harlem. It is a stark reminder of the Jim Crow days when blacks would be beaten if they so much as looked at a white man.

It was into that world that two New York Jews went to do battle so that politicians like Ms. Fulani and others could exercise their constitutional right to rant at will. The least they could do is acknowledge their sacrifice.