The murders of blacks — and official reluctance to prosecute the cases — have long been a staple of Southern life. Now, however, throughout the region, there is a surging interest in bringing closure to the murder cases. Examples:

• In Philadelphia, Miss., Klansman Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen was convicted last June for the 1964 murders of three young civil rights workers, Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. But at least nine others complicit in the crime — including former Mississippi Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, who approved the assassinations — are still alive. Presumably, they could be tried on the same evidence that convicted Killen, but the Mississippi attorney general's office refused to say if more indictments are planned.

• In May 2004, the FBI and Mississippi authorities reopened the Emmett Till case. Although Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, both dead, claimed they were the only participants in the crime, it is believed that several still-living people participated as accessories, including Bryant's wife, Carolyn.

• Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist last year opened an investigation of the 1951 bombing of the Mims, Fla., home of NAACP leaders Harry and Harriette Moore. A 1990 investigation concluded the perpetrators were dead, but Crist believes some may still be alive. Crist, a Republican, told me, "Good God, these were people just asking for a fair deal who were murdered in their beds on a Christmas night. Our investigation is just the right thing to do."

• Black political leaders in Georgia, led by state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, have called for a renewed investigation of the 1946 Moore's Ford Bridge murders of two young black couples, George and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcolm. At least two men believed to have been members of the lynch mob are still alive and live near the scene of the gruesome crime, which included cutting an unborn baby out of Mae Dorsey. "Closing these cases is absolutely necessary to cleanse the South of the remaining remnants of white supremacists, the Klan, the neo-Nazis," Brooks says.

There's no doubt the South has changed since 1955. In recent years, there have been successful prosecutions of race killers. Bowers was convicted in 1998 for the 1966 firebomb killing of Hattiesburg NAACP activist Vernon Dahmer. After two mistrials in the 1960s, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in 1994 for the 1963 shooting of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. And three men have been convicted for the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, which killed four young girls.

This article appears in Feb 1-7, 2006.