The arrest of a white man in Mississippi on charges of killing a black caretaker 34 years ago is the latest example of the reopening of unsolved murders from the US civil rights era.
Mr Ernest Henry Avants (69) was indicted this week by a federal grand jury in the killing of Mr Ben Chester White (67) on June 10th, 1966. The authorities believe Mr White was killed as part of a plot to provoke a protest by the civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King, in Natchez where he could be assassinated. Dr King was shot dead two years later in Memphis, Tennessee.
Mr Avants was acquitted in a Mississippi state court of the killing of Mr White in 1967 but the case was reopened following an ABC television documentary last November reporting that Mr White had been killed in a national forest which is federal property. This has permitted prosecutors to charge Mr White with the same crime under federal law.
According to an FBI report on the case, Mr Avants had confessed to taking part in the killing of Mr White but the local prosecutor did not present it in court because Mr Avants "had not been advised of his rights against self-incrimination and had been drinking".
The acting Assistant Attorney General, Mr Bill Lann Lee, said in a statement that the time had finally come to right this wrong from the past.
Justice Department officials said they were committed to bringing people who committed acts of racial violence to justice even if the crimes occurred many years ago. During the civil rights period in the 1960s, courts with white juries in southern states often acquitted those accused of crimes against black people.
Mr Brad Pigott, US Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, who reopened the case, said: "No time is too late to vindicate our country's repudiation of acts of racial violence. We are committed to bringing to justice those who commit such acts no matter how long it takes."
Last month two former members of the Ku-Klux-Klan were charged in connection with the murders of four black girls in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Mississippi is now investigating the case of three civil rights workers murdered in 1964 while registering voters in Neshoba County. Seven men were convicted of conspiracy in that crime but none went to prison.
A former Ku-Klux-Klan leader, Sam Bowers, was convicted in 1998 for the 1966 fire-bombing death of a civil rights activist, Vernon Dahmer, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
In Rome the Colosseum amphitheatre will be lit up today to celebrate a decision by the governor of Maryland to spare a death row prisoner. Human rights groups want to turn the Colosseum - a site of bloodshed in imperial Rome - into an anti-death penalty beacon.
Maryland Governor Parris Glendening said on Wednesday he had commuted to life in prison the death sentence because he was not absolutely certain of Eugene Colvin-El's guilt.