Students' role in case praised

By NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON

The Associated Press

CHICAGO -- Hundreds of miles from a Mississippi courtroom where a suspect pleaded innocent Friday to the 40-year-old slayings of three civil rights workers, three suburban Chicago high school students were getting accolades for their role in publicizing the case.

Stevenson High School students Sarah Siegel, Allison Nichols and Brittany Saltiel spent more than a year working on a 2004 documentary about the killings. Their project included a rare phone interview with the man arrested Thursday, reputed Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, and helped generate a congressional resolution last June asking federal prosecutors to reopen the case.

"I was really happy for all the families who I knew had been waiting for this for 40 years," 17-year-old Siegel said Friday of Killen's arrest. "It was also a little saddening to know that it took 40 years for justice to start working."

The girls and their teacher, Barry Bradford, are humble about their part in renewing interest in the case, which was the subject of the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."

But congressmen including Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and civil rights activist who knew the slain workers, credit the students for working to keep the case in the spotlight and unearthing new details.

"I was very inspired and very moved by the work that these three students brought before us," Lewis said Friday. "I think they were crucial in bringing us to this point."

The girls' odyssey began in the summer of 2003, when they met with Bradford to discuss possible projects for the annual National History Day competition. They stopped him after his first idea: telling the story of 21-year-old James Chaney, 20-year-old Andrew Goodman and 24-year-old Michael Schwerner.

The three young men were participating in Freedom Summer 1964, an effort to register blacks in the South to vote and start educational programs, when they were beaten and shot to death, allegedly by Klansmen. Their ages, not much older than the girls, struck a chord.

"We just thought something about those three men and their dedication to the movement really stood out," 16-year-old Saltiel said.

Although 19 men eventually were charged with federal civil rights violations in the case, Killen's arrest marks the first time Mississippi has sought murder charges.

The Lincolnshire students pored over thousands of pages of court transcripts and interviewed former prosecutors and investigators, witnesses, family members of the victims and government officials for their 10-minute documentary. They also sought out Killen, now 79, for a phone interview.