James Chaney

Activist

• Born: May 30, 1943
• Birthplace: Meridian, Mississippi
• Died: June 21, 1964
• Place of death: Neshoba County, Mississippi

Chaney was a young African American civil rights worker in the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964 to register African American voters in Mississippi. The brutal murder of Chaney and two of his coworkers shocked the nation and brought the Justice Department deeper into civil rights enforcement.

Early Life

James Earl Chaney (CHAY-nee) was born on May 30, 1943, in Meridian, Mississippi, the second of five children of Ben and Fannie Lee Chaney. Ben worked as a plasterer, a well-paying trade job in the South. Fannie worked as a domestic servant. The Chaneys were a close family, but there also was underlying tension, as Ben openly kept a mistress in the nearby town of Laurel. James Chaney and his siblings attended St. Joseph’s Academy, a Roman Catholic school for African Americans, and when money became short, the local public schools. Chaney was small for his age and asthmatic and for that reason eventually would be rejected from enlistment by the Army.

At sixteen, Chaney enrolled in Harris Junior College and became involved in civil rights advocacy. He was suspended for a week for wearing a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) button to class. He eventually was expelled from college and joined his father’s trade as an apprentice plasterer. In October, 1963, Chaney was recruited by Matt Suarez of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to provide assistance to civil rights workers in Mississippi. Most of these workers were from out of state, and Chaney’s knowledge of the area and streetwise savvy would be invaluable in organizing activities.

Life’s Work

At the time, Mississippi was a firmly segregationist state, perhaps the most rigid in the South. After eighty years of Jim Crow restrictions, only 6.7 percent of the African Americans in the state were registered to vote. Traveling around Mississippi as a plasterer, Chaney witnessed both deplorable conditions and the nascent Civil Rights movement. In April, 1964, Chaney decided to work for CORE full time organizing civil rights activities. For example, he helped organize a picket of the segregationist Woolworth’s store in Meridian.

In early 1964, the various civil rights groups decided to make a concerted civil rights drive in Mississippi, which would come to be called “Freedom Summer.” CORE, the NAACP, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized the Freedom Summer campaign to increase the registration of African American voters. They also established Freedom Schools throughout Mississippi to increase African Americans’ awareness of their civil rights. Hundreds of young volunteers from the North descended on Mississippi to register voters. In preparation for Freedom Summer, Chaney began organizing efforts with two Jewish civil rights workers from were chosen, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. In April, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner visited the African American community in Longdale, Neshoba County, about thirty-five miles from Meridian, to begin a voter registration drive. On May 31, they returned to Longdale to continue their efforts, speaking at Mount Zion Methodist Church. On June 16, a group of white men arrived at Mount Zion Methodist Church, assaulted some of the church elders, and burned the church to the ground.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began to investigate the arson under the code name MIBURN, short for “Mississippi Burning.” On June 21, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman returned to Longdale. At the time, Chaney’s girlfriend, Mary Nan McCoy, was one week from giving birth to their child. After speaking with some local residents, the three civil rights workers headed back to Meridian in their blue Ford station wagon. Along the way, they were stopped and arrested by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were placed in the Neshoba County jail in Philadelphia, the county seat. Later that night, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey ordered their release, and they headed back to Meridian. They never arrived.

Testimony at the subsequent trials indicated that the June 16 fire at Longdale was set to trap the civil rights workers and that plans for their murder were finalized during their incarceration. The mastermind of the operation was reputed to be a country preacher named Edgar Ray Killen. The civil rights workers’ station wagon was intercepted on a dark country road outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, by several carloads of Ku Klux Klan members. Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were taken out of the car and executed with bullets fired at point-blank range. On June 23, their burned-out car was discovered. On August 4, FBI agents found their bodies buried beneath a dam.

On December 4, the FBI arrested twenty-one men in connection with the deaths of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. The arrested men were linked to the Ku Klux Klan, including Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Murder is a state crime under most circumstances, and the state of Mississippi declined to bring homicide charges against any of the arrested men.

The U.S. Justice Department, however, decided to bring charges against the men for violation of federal laws that dated back to the Reconstruction era: They were charged with conspiring to deprive Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman of their civil rights. Efforts to proceed to trial followed a tortuous route, with several dismissals and reinstatement of the charges. On February 28, 1966, a federal grand jury indicted nineteen defendants. In March, 1966, the United States Supreme Court upheld the indictments. At trial, several of the defendants revealed aspects of the plot to execute Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. On October 20, 1967, Price, Bowers, and five other men were convicted in the United States District Court in Philadelphia. They received prison sentences ranging from three to ten years. The other defendants, including Rainey and Killen, either were acquitted or received mistrials. In 2005, Killen was retried in Mississippi state court and convicted of manslaughter.

Significance

The murder of the three civil rights workers was one of the most infamous acts of violence of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. The nation was shocked by the killing of three young men for the act of trying to register voters, by the conspiracy of silence in Neshoba County, and by the refusal of the state of Mississippi to indict any of the accused killers. Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were considered by many as martyrs of the Civil Rights movement. The brutality of the crime accelerated the involvement of the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI in securing civil rights for African Americans in the South.

The 1988 film Mississippi Burning, starring Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, and Frances McDormand and nominated for several Academy Awards, was loosely based on the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman and the subsequent FBI investigation.

Bibliography

Ball, Howard. Murder in Mississippi. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. This account of the murder of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman included a plea for the reopening of the murder cases.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Justice in Mississippi. The Murder Trial of Edgar Ray Killen. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Ball’s follow-up to Murder in Mississippi investigates the reopening of the case against Edgar Ray Killen in the context of the changing racial culture of Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Nation Books, 2006. Reconstructs the murder of the three young civil rights workers on the basis of records from the FBI investigation and the 1967 trial.

Huie, William. Three Lives for Mississippi. 1965. Reprint. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Originally published two years before the federal trial, this book identified several of the men involved in the murders, resulting in libel suits that sought damages of $9 million. Originally published with an introduction by Martin Luther King, Jr., in which he described the book as a call to the conscience of America.