On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—vanished near Philadelphia, Mississippi, after investigating a church burning. Local Klansmen, aided by police, had ambushed and murdered them. Their deaths, and the 44-day search that followed, forced national attention onto Mississippi's violent resistance to Black voter registration during Freedom Summer.
Chaney, a 21-year-old Black Mississippian, Goodman, a 20-year-old white college student from New York, and Schwerner, a 24-year-old white organizer, had driven to Longdale, Mississippi to investigate the burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church, targeted because it was slated to host a Freedom Summer voter-registration school. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price arrested them on a pretext, held them for hours, then released them into the night—straight into a Klan ambush.
The men were shot at close range and buried in an earthen dam. Their car was found burned in a swamp days later, but the bodies stayed hidden for 44 days while FBI agents, ordered in by a reluctant Johnson administration, searched Mississippi in an operation code-named MIBURN. The search itself uncovered other Black bodies long ignored by local authorities, exposing a deeper pattern of unpunished violence.
The murders shocked the nation and helped push the Civil Rights Act of 1964 toward passage that summer. It took until 2005—41 years later—for Edgar Ray Killen, a local Klan organizer, to be convicted of manslaughter for orchestrating the killings.