On the morning of June 21, 1964, three young men drove into Neshoba County, Mississippi, and never came back. Michael "Mickey" Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were civil rights workers, and that day they had come to investigate the burning of the Mt. Zion Methodist Church in the Longdale community — a Black church that had agreed to host a Freedom School. By nightfall they had vanished. It would take 44 days, a federal manhunt, and an informant inside the Ku Klux Klan to learn what had happened to them, and more than four decades to put a single man behind bars for the killings in a state court.
The three were part of the Mississippi Summer Project — Freedom Summer — a 1964 campaign organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition that included the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to register African American voters in a state that had spent generations keeping them from the ballot. James Chaney was 21, a Black CORE field worker who had grown up in nearby Meridian and knew firsthand the violence the work invited. Michael Schwerner was 24, a Jewish social worker from New York City who had moved south to organize for CORE and had become a marked man to local Klansmen. Andrew Goodman, 20 and also from New York, was the newcomer — he had finished his orientation in Ohio only days before, drawn by the same conviction that brought hundreds of volunteers to one of the most dangerous places in America.
The timing made the danger sharper. The U.S. Senate had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 just two days earlier; President Lyndon Johnson would sign it into law two weeks later. To Mississippi's segregationists, the movement looked like an existential threat, and they answered it with terror.