July 21st, 1964
Mississippi Burning
Freedom Summer 1964
Mississippi Burning
The entire purpose of these posts is to help put America’s Thing With Race into perspective so that folks can gain enough knowledge to have effective and civil conversations about race. I’ve had many readers suggest tragic incidents to bring to your attention. But it is not the goal of this project to bring attention to the horrors of American racism. If today’s post seems like a violation of my commitment to not write about past horrors, it’s not.
But today is the 60th anniversary of one of the most significant and tragic episodes of the entire civil rights struggle of the 60’s during what was known as “Freedom Summer” and it’s an important part of America’s history that should be better known and taught in school. This incident, the murder of three Civil Rights organizers was the basis for the 1988 Gene Hackman movie Mississippi Burning and resulted in the largest ever FBI manhunt, lasting 44 days and drawing national attention. Key to the attention of the disappearance of the organizers by both the public and the FBI is that two of the three young men were White.
The organizers had come to Mississippi on this day in a perilous effort to register Black voters. A common expression and sentiment at that time was, “The best way to keep a nigger from voting is to visit him the night before.” And they were serious.
The three activists had arrived to check on the latest church burning, the burning of the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopalian church, one of dozens of Black churches to be torched that summer. But before the sun rose the next morning, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman would all be dead, ambushed by the Ku Klux Klan and led by the local law enforcement as they were heading out of Neshoba County.
The night before, church members had congregated at Mt. Zion to pray and have a normal business meeting. As they left the church the KKK, which had congregated in force around the tiny church, emerged in full hooded regalia and beat three church-goers almost to death…a proven method to discourage voting…and then torched the church.
As the three drove through the town of Philadelphia MS they were stopped and jailed for “speeding’ by deputy sheriff and KKK member Cecil Price. Before being hired by his friend, sheriff and co-Klan member Lawrence Rainey, Price worked as a salesman, fireman, and bouncer. Later that night the three were released with no charges having been brought.
Neshoba County Deputy Sherriff Cecil Price
As the three hurried to leave town they were followed by Deputy Price and 17 or 18 other men. The youngest was 17. The oldest, at 71, was Other Burkes, a 25 year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department. The group’s leader was Edgar Ray Killen, a 39 year old Baptist minister. There is scuttlebutt that the Mississippi State Police were aware of what was going to transpire that night.
Edgar Ray Killen
The group, in various vehicles tried to get Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney to stop and a race ensued as the three tried to get to a safer place. But when Deputy Price pulled up in is patrol car - maybe feeling safe in the presence of law enforcement, they pulled over. From there the three were escorted to a remote location. Chaney - who was Black , Schwerner and Godman were both Jewish - was fastened to a tree and beaten to death with chains while Goodman and Schwerner were forced to watch.
Schwerner was removed from the car and immediately shot in the head. Goodman jumped from the car and ran. He was shot in the back.
After the murders the bodies were loaded into their own vehicle and transported to an earthen dam under construction on one of the men’s farms and buried. A later autopsy of Goodman showed fragments of red clay in his lungs and grasped in his fists, indicating he was still alive when he was buried.
Local and state law enforcement seemed disinterested in becoming involved so the FBI moved in. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was not eager to get involved, so President Lyndon Johnson convinced him by threatening to send ex-CIA director Allen Dulles in his stead. Hoover initially ordered the FBI Office in Meridian to begin a preliminary search. That evening, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy escalated the search and ordered 150 federal agents to be sent from New Orleans.
Two local Native Americans found the smoldering car that evening and the next morning the FBI immediately went to the scene. By the next day, the federal government had arranged for hundreds of sailors from the nearby Meridian Naval Air Station to aid in the search of the swamps of Bogue Chitto.
The car that the organizers drove and was torched after their murders. FBI site https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/mississippi-burning
During the investigation, searchers including Navy divers and FBI agents discovered the bodies of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore two 19 year old Black men whom the Klan believed were involved in the Civil Rights effort who had disappeared in May. They’d been beaten, chained to a Jeep engine block and some railroad ties, and dumped in the river still alive. Federal searchers also discovered 14-year-old Herbert Oarsby, as well as the bodies of five other Black Americans who were never identified. It took the FBI 44 days to find Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman.
By late November 1964 the FBI had accused 21 Mississippi men of engineering a conspiracy to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Most of the suspects were apprehended by the FBI on December 4, 1964. But only the state could bring charges of murder and the state simply refused to prosecute.
So the federal government again stepped in and charged the Klansmen with civil-rights violations. It took three years to reach a verdict. It was 1967 before there were finally seven convictions, eight not-guilty verdicts, and three mistrials. No one spent more than 6 years in prison.
Decades passed, and it was always an open secret that the people responsible for the Freedom Summer murders were still living, breathing, respected members of the community. 40 years after the murders some community members formed a coalition and pressured the state of Mississippi to bring charges. Edgar Ray Killen, who was that Baptist preacher who got off on a mistrial because one juror admitted that she “Just could not convict a preacher” and led the events that night was finally convicted for manslaughter at the age of 80. He died in prison 6 days before his 93rd birthday. He remained an angry, bitter, even dangerous racist until the day he died.
Killen went to prison on a manslaughter conviction, not for murder. No one has ever gone to prison explicitly for murdering James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, or Michael Schwerner. Killen is buried in a family plot in Pine Grove Cemetery in House, Mississippi, about five minutes from where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were killed.
Voter suppression is still alive and well, and even more so after the Supreme Court of the United States gutted the Voting Rights Act that was passed on the basis of what had occurred in Philadelphia on June 21st, 1964.
Postscript: In 1980, just 16 years after the lynchings of Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, Ronald Reagan announced his bid for the presidency from the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia Mississippi. He mentioned a lot of things, but not the racial murder that had captivated the country 16 years earlier that had happened where his feet were now planted. He did however mention ‘states rights’, a clear racist dog whistle and part of the Southern Strategy that the GOP had employed since the 60’s to play off the fear and resentment of White Southerners towards Black Americans. Reagan won his election. The strategy worked.
Sources:
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/mississippi-burning
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2022/05/fighting-remember-mississippi-burning/629913/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Chaney,_Goodman,_and_Schwerner