Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner

The Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders involved the 1964 slayings of three political activists during the American Civil Rights Movement.

The murders of James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker also from New York, symbolized the risks of participating in the Civil Rights Movement in the South during what became known as "Freedom Summer", dedicated to voter registration.

The case also underscored the extensive participation of Jewish-Americans during the Civil Rights era working in concert with African-Americans.

The case

The killings of the three young men occurred in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964, when they came to investigate the burning of a church that supported civil rights activity. Chaney was a local Freedom Movement activist in Meridian. Goodman was a volunteer for the Summer Project and he and Schwerner had just finished a week-long training on the campus of Western College for Women (now part of Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio) regarding strategies on how to register blacks to vote.

After getting a haircut from an African-American barber in Meridian, the three men headed to Longdale, 50 miles away in Neshoba County, in order to inspect the ruins of Mount Zion United Methodist Church. The church, a meeting place for civil rights groups, had been burned just five days earlier.

Before they left the area, they stopped by the local office of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group of four civil rights organizations. Schwerner, aware that the station wagon's license number had been given to members of the notorious local Citizens Council, told COFO workers to contact the FBI if he hadn't called them by 4:30 p.m.

At approximately 5:00, Neshoba County deputy Cecil Price stopped the blue Ford carrying the trio. He arrested Chaney for allegedly driving 35 miles per hour over the speed limit. He also booked Goodman and Schwerner, "for investigation."

Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were all denied telephone calls during their time at the jail. COFO workers made attempts to find the three men, but when they called the Neshoba County jail, the secretary followed her instructions to lie and told the workers the three young men were not there.

While awaiting their release, the men were given a dinner of spoonbread, green peas, potatoes and salad. Chaney was then fined $20, and the three men were ordered to leave the county. Price followed them to the edge of town, and saw them heading toward Meridian on State Highway 19, at approximately 10:30 p.m.

Disappearance

The three men never arrived in Meridian. Police found guns in the charred remains of the station wagon, which had three of its hubcaps removed. They noted the car was facing the opposite direction from what Price had told investigators.

Some local officials were hardly sympathetic to the situation. Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey said, "They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity for this part of the state". Mississippi governor Paul Johnson dismissed concern by stating that "they could be in Cuba".

For a while, the trail went cold. When the FBI offered a $25,000 reward for news of the men's whereabouts, a break came in the case. After paying at least one participant in the crime for details, the FBI found the men's bodies on August 4. They were buried in an earthen dam on Olen Burrage's Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had each been shot once in the heart; Chaney, the lone African-American, had been savagely beaten and shot three times.

Known as "Mr. X.", the identity of the informant was a closely held secret for 40 years. In the process of reopening the case, journalist Jerry Mitchell and teacher Barry Bradford uncovered his real name.

Reaction

The national uproar caused by the disappearance of the civil rights workers led President Lyndon Johnson to force J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to investigate the case. Hoover's antipathy against civil rights groups caused him to resist until Johnson used indirect threats of political reprisals. During its investigation, the FBI also discovered the bodies of several other Mississippi blacks, whose disappearances over the past several years had not attracted attention outside their local communities.

The disappearance of the three activists captured national attention for six weeks until their bodies were found. Johnson used the outrage over their deaths and his formidable political skills to bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Trial

The US Justice Department charged eighteen individuals under the 1870 US Force Act, with conspiring to deprive the three of their civil rights (by murder). The charges were lodged against Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and 16 other men. Cecil Price was among the seven men found guilty (see U.S. v. Cecil Price et. al.). Two of the defendants, E.G. Barnett, a Democratic candidate for sheriff, and Edgar Ray Killen, a local minister, had been strongly implicated in the murders by witnesses, but because the jury came to a deadlock on their charges, they were acquitted.

Aftermath

For much of the next four decades, no legal action was taken on the murders. Several films dramatized the events of that summer. In 1974, a CBS made-for-television movie aired, Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan, co-starring Wayne Rogers and Ned Beatty. This was followed in 1988 by Mississippi Burning, with Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman; and in 1990 by Murder in Mississippi, starring Tom Hulce, Blair Underwood and Josh Charles. The sympathetic portrayal of FBI agents in the first two movies angered civil rights activists, who believed they received too much credit.

Journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, wrote extensively about the case for many years. Mitchell had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in several other high-profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham Church Bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer.

In the case of the civil rights workers, Mitchell developed new evidence, found new witnesses, and pressured the state to take action. Barry Bradford, a high school teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, and three of his students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel, joined Mitchell's efforts. Bradford later achieved recognition for helping clear the name of Civil Rights martyr Clyde Kennard.

Together the team produced a documentary for the National History Day contest. It presented important new evidence and compelling reasons to reopen the case. The team also obtained an interview with Edgar Ray Killen, which helped convince the State to reinvestigate. Partially by using evidence developed by Bradford and the students, Mitchell was able to determine the identity of "Mr. X", the mystery informer who had helped the FBI discover the bodies and smash the conspiracy of the Klan in 1964.

Mitchell's investigation and the high school students' work in creating Congressional pressure, national media attention and a taped conversation with Killen prompted action. On the 40th anniversary of the murders, a multi-ethnic group of citizens in Philadelphia, Mississippi, issued a call for justice. The multi-ethnic Philadelphia Coalition, which had gathered to work on racial reconciliation, issued a call for justice in the case of the civil rights workers. More than 1500 people, including civil rights leaders and Mississippi Gov. Haley R. Barbour, joined them in Philadelphia to publicize a desire to revisit the case.

2005 Trial

On January 6, 2005, a Neshoba County grand jury indicted Edgar Ray Killen on three counts of murder. When Mississippi Attorney General prosecuted the case, it was the first time the state took action against the perpetrators. On June 21, 2005, a jury convicted Killen on three counts of manslaughter.

Mob Involvement

In 2007 Linda Schiro testified in a different court case that her late boyfriend, Gregory Scarpa Sr., a soldier of the Colombo crime family, had been recruited by the FBI to help find the civil rights workers' bodies. She said that Scarpa told her he had forced a Klansman to reveal the whereabouts of the victims by placing a gun in his mouth. The notion that Scarpa strong-armed a Klan member into giving up information about one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era had been talked about in mob circles for years.