Reputed Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen watched from a wheelchair Monday as jury selection began in his murder trial in one of most shocking crimes of the civil rights era – the 1964 slayings of three voter-registration volunteers.

The case against the 80-year-old Killen represents Mississippi’s latest attempt to deal with unfinished business from the state’s bloodstained racist past.

In a measure of how much things have changed over the past 41 years, about a quarter of the jury pool was black, roughly reflecting the racial makeup of the county’s 28,700 residents. In 1964, very few blacks were registered to vote in Neshoba County, and juries were usually all white.

The slayings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – three young men who were helping register blacks during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 and were investigating a church burning the night they disappeared – galvanized the civil rights movement and helped win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The case was dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Killen, a part-time preacher who has been free on bail, looked straight ahead and said nothing as he was taken into the two-story, red-brick courthouse. Killen is in a wheelchair because of arthritis that was aggravated after his legs were broken in a tree-cutting accident in March.

Killen’s name has been associated with the slayings from the beginning. FBI records and witnesses indicated he organized the carloads of Klansmen who followed Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner and stopped them in their station wagon.

Chaney, a black man from Mississippi, and Schwerner and Goodman, white men from New York, were beaten and shot to death. Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

Killen was tried along with several others in 1967 on federal civil rights charges. The all-white jury deadlocked in Killen’s case, but seven others were convicted. None served more than six years. Killen is the only person ever indicted on state murder charges in the case.

Opening statements could start Thursday.