On a hot summer day in Mississippi, June 21, 1964, a 20-year-old white, Jewish civil rights worker from New York named Andrew Goodman was murdered. He, along with two other activists, James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black man from Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white, Jewish man also from New York, disappeared after investigating the burning of a church in Neshoba County. The three men were in Mississippi as part of the 'Freedom Summer' campaign, an effort to register African American voters. Their day took a fateful turn when their station wagon was pulled over by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, a known member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Price arrested the three men on a speeding charge and held them in the Philadelphia, Mississippi jail. During their time in custody, Price alerted local Klansmen to their presence. After their release late that night, the activists were ambushed by a group of Klansmen. They were taken to a secluded road where they were shot and killed. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were each shot once in the heart. The perpetrators then used a bulldozer to bury their bodies in an earthen dam on a nearby farm. An intensive FBI investigation, codenamed 'Mississippi Burning,' led to the discovery of their bodies 44 days later, on August 4, 1964.
The murders sparked national outrage and a lengthy pursuit of justice. Because Mississippi officials were unwilling to prosecute, the federal government initially brought charges against 18 men in 1967, not for murder, but for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. The trial resulted in the conviction of seven men, including Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The sentences handed down were relatively light, with no one serving more than six years in prison. Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey was among those acquitted.
For decades, no one was held accountable for the murders themselves in a state court. The case was eventually reopened, and in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klansman and Baptist preacher who was believed to have orchestrated the killings, was charged. Exactly 41 years to the day after the murders, on June 21, 2005, a jury found the then 80-year-old Killen guilty of three counts of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, where he died in 2018. The state of Mississippi officially closed the case in 2016.
