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 to civil rights groups caused him to resist until Johnson used indirect threats of political reprisals. One hundred and fifty FBI agents including Major Case Inspector Joseph Sullivan were sent to Neshoba county to investigate. During the investigation, searchers including Navy divers and the FBI discovered the bodies of at least seven other Mississippi blacks, whose disappearances over the past several years had not attracted attention outside of their local communities.
The disappearance of the three activists captured national attention; it took 44 days for investigators to discover where they had been buried. Johnson and civil rights activists used the outrage over their deaths in their efforts to bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Walter Cronkite's CBS newscast broadcast on June 25, 1964 called the disappearences as "The focus of the whole country's concern."
Mississippi officials resented the outside attention. The Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey said, "They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity for this part of the state." The Mississippi governor Paul Johnson dismissed concern by stating that "they could be in Cuba".
Read more about this topic: Mississippi Civil Rights Workers' Murders
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