Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney Deaths
The Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney deaths refer to the brutal murders of three civil rights activists—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—who disappeared on June 21, 1964, in Neshoba County, Mississippi. These men were part of the Mississippi Summer Project, aimed at increasing voter registration and educational opportunities for African Americans in the South. Their tragic fate unfolded after they were detained by a local deputy sheriff, who was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, leading to their abduction by a mob shortly after their release. The activists were taken to a secluded area where they were murdered, and their bodies were concealed beneath a dam.
The incident received widespread media attention, highlighting the violent resistance faced by civil rights workers during this pivotal period in American history. The national outcry following their disappearance underscored the urgent need for federal intervention in the South, ultimately contributing to the passage of civil rights legislation. In a historical context, the case marked a significant moment in the civil rights movement, illustrating the lengths to which activists went for equality and the severe dangers they encountered. The perpetrators were later brought to trial, with a notable conviction that represented a rare instance of accountability for crimes against civil rights workers in Mississippi.
Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney Deaths
Date: June 21, 1964
Three civil rights workers murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. The outrage over their murders brought unprecedented publicity and pressure for the federal government to enforce civil rights of African Americans in the southern states.
Origins and History
The Civil Rights movement reached the high-water mark in 1964. A number of Supreme Court decisions had forced racial integration in the South, and on July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, did more to ensure the political rights of African Americans than anything since the Emancipation. However, actions by the federal government were only a part of the civil rights struggle of the 1960’s. Thousands of civil rights activists from both the North and South fought, and sometimes gave their lives, for equality of all citizens under the law, regardless of race.
One group in the forefront of the civil rights struggle was the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group of affiliated civil rights organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). The COFO’s main activity for 1964 was the Mississippi Summer Project, designed to bring hundreds of northern college students to the southern states to help register African American voters and run “freedom schools,” which taught southern African Americans their legal and constitutional rights and basic reading and writing in areas where schools were lacking.
The COFO expected a violent reaction to its efforts in the South. To prepare the volunteers who would serve in the South during the summer of 1964, the COFO held a training camp at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. The volunteers were taught techniques such as nonviolent resistance, how best to protect themselves against police batons, and how to travel in groups for safety.
It was at this training camp that twenty-four-year-old Michael Schwerner, a recent graduate of Cornell University, met fellow New Yorker Andrew Goodman, a twenty-year-old student at Queens College. By the middle of June, they were assigned to work in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where they met twenty-one-year-old James Chaney, a local NAACP activist. Chaney, the only African American of the three, had grown up in the area and served as a local contact who could guide them through what was essentially foreign territory.
On Sunday, June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were in Longdale, a rural part of the county where, a week earlier, the local Ku Klux Klan had burned down a church and attacked and beaten many of its leaders. The three activists were investigating the attack with the idea of helping track down the perpetrators and offering their assistance in rebuilding the church. Schwerner had spoken at the church the previous Memorial Day, and the Klan attack sent a clear message about the welcome civil rights workers would receive in Neshoba County. After surveying the burnt-out church and speaking with church leaders, the three began to drive back to their headquarters in Meridian, Mississippi, about thirty miles away. Their training had taught them it was not safe to be out in rural Mississippi after dark.
The Murders
At about 4:00 p.m., Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped the car carrying Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, ostensibly for speeding. The local police and Klan were well aware that the station wagon belonged to civil rights organizers, and the speeding charge may have been a pretext for Price, a Klansman, to arrest and harass the three men. In any event, the three were locked up in Neshoba County Jail a dangerous situation, they realized, since civil rights workers had previously been severely beaten by the police in southern jails. They were released unharmed, however, at about 10:00 that evening. While they were being detained at the jail, Price alerted a number of local Klansmen and their sympathizers that he had detained the three civil rights activists. The Klansmen arranged to intercept the trio on their way out of Neshoba County. Just before Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were to cross the county line, Price, followed by two other carloads of a self-selected “posse,” caught up with them. Price pulled the civil rights workers’ car over, as he had earlier that day, but this time he ordered the three into the back seat of his police cruiser, striking Chaney across the back of his head when he did not move fast enough.
The Klansmen drove the three terrified civil rights workers to an isolated meadow. When the caravan of cars stopped, one of the lynch mob, Wayne Roberts, opened the rear door of Price’s cruiser and pulled Schwerner out, yelling, “Are you that nigger-lover?,” then shot him point-blank in the heart. He then grabbed Goodman and shot him in the chest. Another member of the lynch mob, James Jordan, pulled Chaney from the other side of the police cruiser, and he and Roberts both shot him in the abdomen. After Chaney fell, Roberts shot Chaney again, in the back of the head.
The killers loaded the three bodies into the station wagon and drove to a nearby farm where an earthen dam was being constructed. They threw the bodies at the foot of the dam and bulldozed earth over them. They arranged to have the station wagon torched and pushed into a swamp. The burnt-out hulk of the car was found within a few days, but the decomposed bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman lay undiscovered until August 4.
Impact
The disappearance of the three civil rights workers caused a national sensation. Journalists from the national media and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents descended on Neshoba County in droves. For forty-four days, the nation followed the search in the newspapers and on television. President Lyndon B. Johnson obtained regular updates from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and personally phoned the news to the families of the missing men.
The immense publicity surrounding the disappearance of the three activists brought home to the nation like never before the violent nature of the resistance to the Civil Rights movement in the South. Some African American southerners bitterly noted that hundreds of African Americans had been lynched in the South during the previous half century, but it took the murders of two white Northern students for national attention to be focused on the South’s vicious and illegal resistance to their efforts to obtain civil rights.
On October 20, 1967, an all-white Mississippi jury found seven men, including Deputy Sheriff Price and Roberts, guilty of murder. The jury could not agree on charges against or acquitted a number of other defendants, including the sheriff of Neshoba County, Lawrence Rainey. This marked the first time a Mississippi jury ever found a white person guilty of crimes perpetrated on a black person or civil rights worker. After exhausting their appeals, the guilty men all served lengthy prison sentences at various federal penitentiaries.
Additional Information
A well-written story of the incident, set in the broader background of the Civil Rights movement, is Seth Cagin and Phillip Dray’s We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (1988); a more focused and immediate account by a journalist covering the civil rights struggle in Mississippi is William Bradford Huie’s Three Lives for Mississippi (1965).