The case is the latest in a series of civil rights-era killings to be reopened.
In 1993, former Klansman Thomas Blanton went on trial in Birmingham, Ala., for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four black girls. In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of the murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in 1963.
Civil rights-era cases have been reopened in Mississippi almost every year since then, and many are pushing for a retrial in the killing of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy who was slain in Money, Miss., because he whistled at a white woman.
As the 40th anniversary of the Philadelphia killings approached last summer, a multiracial community group, the Philadelphia Coalition, made a renewed push for a trial. They risked angering many of their neighbors.
"They act like, 'Why do we bring this up again?' It's in the dark alley," DeWeese said. "It never goes away."
Jewel McDonald, 58, who is black, remembers the choking fear of that summer, when she was so terrified of arson that she put all her valuables in a cardboard box and stowed it in a chicken coop.
She waited up one night for her mother and brother, who were attending a meeting at Mount Zion Baptist Church, and was horrified to see them return beaten and bloody. They had been attacked by Klan members.
The next day, three young men showed up at her house, inquiring about the beatings. She didn't know their names, but the next night she learned them when reports of the disappearance of three civil rights workers -- two white and one black -- were on the radio.
"Our mouths flew open, and my mother said, 'Oh, my God,' " McDonald said. "That's when we knew: If they weren't dead now, they would be."
McDonald, a member of the Philadelphia Coalition, said Thursday that she was "ecstatic" at the news of the indictments, and regretted only that her mother and brother were not alive to hear it.
"They were here to help us," she said of the three civil rights workers. "They didn't lose their lives -- their lives were taken for something that every human has the right to do: Vote."
