Freedom Summer: Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Disappear (1964)
On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers — James Chaney, 21, a Black Mississippian; Andrew Goodman, 20, a white college student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, 24, a white civil rights organizer from New York — were arrested in Neshoba County, Mississippi, held for several hours, released at night, and then abducted and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan, including local law enforcement officers. Their bodies were found buried under an earthen dam 44 days later. Their murders became the most galvanizing event of Freedom Summer and helped drive the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Freedom Summer
The summer of 1964 brought hundreds of mostly white Northern college students to Mississippi to register Black voters — a campaign organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other civil rights groups. Mississippi had systematically excluded Black citizens from voting through a combination of literacy tests, poll taxes, economic intimidation, and outright violence. Only about 6% of eligible Black Mississippians were registered to vote, despite being nearly 40% of the state's population. Freedom Summer's organizers, led by Bob Moses, believed that the presence of white Northern volunteers would attract national media attention that the murders of Black Mississippians had failed to generate. They were tragically proven right. Schwerner, a CORE organizer based in Meridian, Mississippi, had been targeted by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for months. On June 21, he traveled to investigate the burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church — a Freedom Summer site that had been attacked and burned — with Chaney and Goodman, who had only just arrived in Mississippi the day before.
Did You Know?
The FBI's search for the three missing men — code-named MIBURN (Mississippi Burning) — became one of the largest federal investigations in Mississippi history. The FBI found the bodies on August 4, 1964, based on a tip paid for with $30,000 in government funds. Nineteen men, including Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, were charged with federal civil rights violations (state murder charges were not possible at the time due to Mississippi's refusal to prosecute). Seven were convicted in 1967 — the first time an all-white Mississippi jury had ever convicted white men for crimes against civil rights workers. Edgar Ray Killen, identified as the organizer of the murders, was not convicted until 2005 — four decades later — when he was sentenced to three consecutive 20-year terms at age 80.
The Murders and the Investigation
The three men were arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for a traffic stop near Philadelphia, Mississippi. They were held in the Neshoba County Jail while Price coordinated with KKK members. Released after dark, they were followed, stopped again on a rural road, and forced into a car by Klan members. They were driven to a remote location and shot — Chaney was beaten as well as shot. Their bodies were buried under an earthen dam on a farm owned by a Klan member. Their car was burned and pushed into a swamp. The disappearance prompted an immediate federal response: President Lyndon Johnson federalized the Mississippi National Guard and sent FBI agents into the state. When it became clear that local authorities were implicated, the FBI took over. The search attracted enormous national media coverage and highlighted the systematic violence used to maintain white supremacy in Mississippi. During the search for the three men, the FBI discovered the bodies of at least eight other Black murder victims whose disappearances had attracted no national attention — a grim demonstration of the racial hierarchy of American news coverage.
Legacy and the Civil Rights Act
The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner provided crucial political momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which President Johnson signed into law on July 2 — just 11 days after the three men disappeared. The Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements. The murders also changed the political calculus around federal intervention in Southern states: the government could no longer pretend that local authorities could be trusted to protect civil rights workers. Mississippi Freedom Summer continued despite the murders; hundreds of volunteers remained in the state. A memorial to Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner was dedicated in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 2014 — the 50th anniversary of the murders. The Neshoba County courthouse, where Deputy Price held the three men before their deaths, still stands. The story was depicted in the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, which was criticized for centering white FBI agents rather than the civil rights workers and the Black community that sustained the movement.