Neshoba County, Mississippi, is chiefly remembered today as the site of the Klan-orchestrated murder of three voting rights activists, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, in June, 1964.  This paper, which is drawn from a broader project on the history and memory of the Neshoba murders, examines a now-forgotten case from a decade before, involving the contested estate of Sim Burnside, last in the line of a wealthy mixed-race family descended from a white slaveowner, William Burnside, and an enslaved woman named Mariah.  Hailed by locals as “the trial of the century,” the fight over the Burnside estate raises pointed questions about race, law, identity, and the politics of historical memory.