The town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, just elected a man of color as mayor for the first time in its history. For those who are not familiar with this city, the town is best known for the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

The new black mayor, James Young, defeated Rayburn Waddell, a white man, by a slim margin of 46 votes. This tight victory shows how segregated small towns in the south still are. 55 percent of the the city is white.

Change is happening in America. For those who lived through terrorism under the KKK, this news is a miracle. Does this change mean that people have changed in the South? Or is change coming to the Southerners? As the Pygmies of equatorial forest of Congo say, “The snake changes his skin–but not his character.”