James Chaney - Murder

Murder

Chaney and the other men were killed near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. He and fellow workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were investigating the burning of Mt. Zion Methodist Church, which had been a site for a CORE Freedom School. In the wake of Schwerner and Chaney's voter registration rallies, parishioners had been beaten by whites. They accused the Sheriff's Deputy, Cecil Price, of stopping their caravan, and forcing the deacons to kneel in the headlights of their own cars, while white men beat them with rifle butts. That same group was identified as having burned the church.

Price arrested the three (Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman) for an alleged traffic violation and took them to the Neshoba County jail. They were released that evening, without being allowed to telephone anyone. As they drove back to their quarters in Meridian, they were stopped on a remote rural road by two carloads of KKK members. The men shot and killed Schwerner, then Goodman, and finally Chaney, after chain-whipping and mutilating him. They buried the young men in an earthen dam nearby.

The men's bodies remained undiscovered for 44 days. The FBI was quickly brought into the case by John Doar, the Department of Justice representative in Mississippi monitoring the situation during Freedom Summer. The missing civil-rights workers became a major national story, especially coming on top of other events as civil rights workers were active across Mississippi in a voter registration drive. As rivers were dredged, investigators found the bodies of other black men and women who had been murdered, but their deaths were not investigated at the time.

Schwerner's widow Rita, who also worked for CORE in Meridian, expressed indignation that the press had ignored previous murders and disappearances of blacks in the area, but had highlighted this case because two white men from New York had gone missing. She said she believed that if only Chaney were missing, the case would not have received nearly as much attention.