June 21, 1964 - A day of shame
It is the date on which three young men, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, "disappeared." All three were involved in Freedom Summer, the attempt to register - and educate - Blacks in Mississippi.
They had been arrested on false charges, released from the jail in Neshoba County and ordered to leave the county, but then re-arrested as they were living the county by deputy sheriff Cecil Price and held until a murder squad from the KKK arrived. They were murdered, their car burned and dumped into a swamp, and their bodies buried in an earthen dam.
It was not the first murder of people involved in Civil Rights, nor would it be the last.
They had gone to Philadelphia to examine the scene of a church burning - one of almost two dozen black churches torched by the KKK in an attempt to suppress, terrorize (is there a more appropriate word?) and intimidate and thereby crush the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi.
The disappearance caused a national outrage. Lyndon Johnson had to politically threaten J. Edgar Hoover to
They had been arrested on false charges, released from the jail in Neshoba County and ordered to leave the county, but then re-arrested as they were living the county by deputy sheriff Cecil Price and held until a murder squad from the KKK arrived. They were murdered, their car burned and dumped into a swamp, and their bodies buried in an earthen dam.
It was not the first murder of people involved in Civil Rights, nor would it be the last.
They had gone to Philadelphia to examine the scene of a church burning - one of almost two dozen black churches torched by the KKK in an attempt to suppress, terrorize (is there a more appropriate word?) and intimidate and thereby crush the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi.
The disappearance caused a national outrage. Lyndon Johnson had to politically threaten J. Edgar Hoover to