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1/ On this date in 1964, Civil Rights activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi. They were working with the Freedom Summer Project to register African Americans to vote.
2/ The three had spent the afternoon investigating the burning of Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, a possible location for a Freedom School, before the KKK pulled their car over, abducted, and brutally killed them.
3/ While many white Mississippians denounced the disappearance as a hoax to get attention for Freedom Summer, President Johnson sent in national guardsmen and sailors from a nearby naval base to scour the county in search of the three workers.
4/ On June 23, the station wagon they had been driving was found burned. On August 4, 44 days after their disappearance, the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were found buried on a farm near Philadelphia, MS.
5/ Despite the murders, by the end of the summer, volunteers registered more black voters and initiated a challenge to the all-white Democratic Party. Within two years, 100,000 new black voters registered in the state and began running for office
6/ In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was charged and convicted of 3 counts of manslaughter and given a 60-year sentence. In 2016, federal and state authorities officially closed the case and dispensed with the possibility of further prosecution. Killen died in prison in 2018.
