FANNIE: And just when you think your heart can’t break much more, they killed them three boys: Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner…
On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers—Andy Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner—went to investigate the Ku Klux Klan’s burning of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Driving back through the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the three were arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, a member of the KKK who had been looking for Schwerner and other civil rights workers. Schwerner and Goodman—both white New Yorkers—had come to Mississippi to work with the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE), focusing on voter registration, education, and organizing. Chaney was a local Black man who had joined CORE the year previously.
FANNIE: Mickey had told me that the KKK was out to get him. They didn’t just hate him cause he was white helping the coloreds but he was also Jewish. That’s the thing about hate—it don’t make friends with no color or no religion.
The three men were held in the Philadelphia jail for seven hours, long enough for Deputy Price to notify his fellow Klansmen that he had three civil rights workers in custody.
Soon after they were released from jail, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were apprehended by Deputy Price and a group of Klansmen and forced into their cars. They were driven to an earthen dam a few miles from Mt. Zion Methodist Church, where they were shot to death and then buried.
FANNIE: Took forty-four days ’fore their bodies was found. Forty-four days!
The next day, the FBI began an investigation into the disappearance of the three men. Ultimately, 200 Federal agents came to Mississippi and the case garnered national attention, in large part because Schwerner and Goodman were both white Northerners. As Schwerner’s wife Rita said during the search: “The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.”
After 44 days of searching, the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were finally found buried in the dam.
FANNIE: But their deaths brought national attention, helped push President Johnson pass the Civil Rights Act, the same law Kennedy was trying to pass before he was assassinated.
On December 4, 1964, Deputy Price, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, and more than a dozen other suspects were indicted and arrested. After several court battles spanning three years, seven defendants were found guilty, though not of murder. One of the conspirators, Baptist minister and member of the KKK Edgar Ray Killen, was not found guilty, as one juror refused to convict a preacher.
Killen was eventually convicted of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, 41 years after the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.
FANNIE: A year later, in ’65, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, a law y’all know they been chippin’ away at ever since. But them boys, James, Mickey, and Andy, sadly joined all the other boys that tried to do right in the face of wrong.
For more information:
“Murder in Mississippi” from PBS’s American Experience
“August 4, 1964: Slain Civil Rights Workers Found” from This Day in History
“Mississippi Burning” from the FBI’s History archives