Mississippi Civil Rights Workers' Murders
The Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders involve the lynching of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner by white Mississippians during the American Civil Rights Movement.
On the night of June 21-22, 1964, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were threatened, intimidated, beaten, shot, and buried by members of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Neshoba County’s Sheriff Office located in Philadelphia, Mississippi. After the largest and most televised search at the time, their bodies were found 44 days later in an earthen dam near the murder site.
Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner’s murders sparked national outrage and spurred the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. African Americans and other minorities in Mississippi, as throughout the former Confederacy, lived under racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, and had been essentially disfranchised since the passage of the state constitution of 1890.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation referred to this investigation as Mississippi Burning or MIBURN. Due to the conspiracy’s sophistication and complexity, the MIBURN case is renowned as one of the Bureau’s greatest accomplishments.
Read more about Mississippi Civil Rights Workers' Murders: Background, Masterminding The Conspiracy, Lynch Mob Forms, Federal Authorities Intervene, Reaction, Investigation, Trial, Aftermath, 1964 Events of The Mississippi Burning Case, Legacy
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Bull: The trouble is Doc, Cole was in front of the gun. The safe place is behind Mississippi when he shoots that thing.”
—Leigh Brackett (1915–1978)
“There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Love your enemies. I saw this admonition now as simple, sensible advice. I knew I could face an angry, murderous mob without even the beginning of fear if I could love them. Like a flame, love consumes fear, and thus make true defeat impossible.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 2, ch. 2 (1962)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)