The morning of June 22, 1964, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy formally directed the FBI to take over a case that was already drawing national alarm. Three civil rights workers — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman — had vanished overnight in Neshoba County, Mississippi. They had last been seen leaving the Philadelphia, Mississippi jail at roughly 10:30 the previous evening. By dawn they were missing, and within hours the Department of Justice had committed the full weight of the federal government to finding them and finding out who was responsible.
The three had come to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, the 1964 campaign in which thousands of civil rights volunteers descended on the state to register Black voters and challenge the systemic disenfranchisement that had endured for generations. Schwerner, 24, was a Jewish civil rights organizer from New York who had been working in Mississippi for months as a field director for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. Chaney, 21, was an African American activist from Meridian, Mississippi, who had been deep in the local voter registration effort. Goodman, 20, was a white anthropology student from New York who had arrived in Mississippi just days before his disappearance. On June 21, the three drove to the Longdale community in Neshoba County to investigate the arson of Mt. Zion Church — a fire set by white supremacists to intimidate the local organizing effort.
On their way back, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price pulled them over and arrested them on a charge of speeding. The charge was a pretext. Price held them in the Philadelphia jail for hours, and according to confessions later obtained from Klan members, he used that window to contact Edgar Ray Killen — a Baptist minister and local Ku Klux Klan leader — to coordinate what came next. When Price released the three men at around 10:30 that night, a group of KKK members was waiting.