It could have been a mere performance, an example of surface-deep Southern hospitality masking the same old feelings — but it wasn't. The truth is that the change in the South in the years since Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were killed has been profound. Not just in Philadelphia — where Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter Tuesday — but in Memphis, Tenn., Nashville, Tenn., Birmingham, Ala., and the other Deep South cities I visited. A native Southerner myself, I find that the South today is so transformed that it's hard for most people to understand what it was once like.

Forty-three years ago, in the fall of 1962, I was in Oxford, Miss., on the night of the huge white riot that accompanied the forced entry of James Meredith — a black student — into the all-white University of Mississippi. The defiant governor, Ross Barnett, had called on all Christian Southerners to resist integration, and 3,000 people showed up at the Ole Miss campus. Their violence killed two people and left 29 U.S. marshals wounded by gunfire. I was tear-gassed, threatened and had four bullet holes stitched in a door frame behind me.

But last week, when I went back to Oxford, nobody was even talking about race. Seventeen percent of the Ole Miss student body is now black, and two recent presidents of the student body were African-American. The Confederate flag has been banned.

I was in Jackson, Miss., on the day in 1963 that Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was assassinated, and I watched cops snatch U.S. flags from the hands of old men, women and children and club them to the ground as they marched in peaceful protest.

This time, though, nobody paid attention to whites and blacks dining together at a suburban mall. A friend and I recalled that of 500,000 eligible black voters in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s, fewer than 1 percent were registered — because of intimidation, beatings and the bombing and burning of their churches and houses. Now Mississippi has more black elected officials (50 percent) than any state in the union.

In Birmingham in 1963, Police Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed attack dogs and fire hoses in Kelly Ingram Park on peaceful marchers led by Martin Luther King Jr. But last week, I saw black steel replicas of the fire hoses and dogs in the park, and a statue of King himself, carrying the inscription " . . . his dream liberated Birmingham from itself and began a new day of love, mutual respect and cooperation."

I know that for many people who never spent time in the Old South, the changes may not seem so impressive. Racism certainly still exists in the South, though it is more subtly expressed.

But few remember today the degree to which black people in the 1960s South lived in constant fear. That fear is gone. King always said that there would come a day when the South would be the best place in the nation for whites and blacks to live harmoniously together. Going back and seeing more true integration than I have seen anywhere in the country, I came to believe that though problems persist, this day clearly has come. I felt very much at home again.

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Karl Fleming's new book, "Son of the Rough South," was published last month by PublicAffairs.