60 years on from Mississippi Burning – three martyred civil rights workers remembered
'There are those who are dead, yet will live forever.'
‘There are those who are alive, yet never live. There are those who are dead, yet will live forever. Great deeds inspire and encourage the living.’
On a hilltop in a small Mississippi town, that quote is inscribed on the grave of James Chaney, a Black activist, who was gunned down at point-blank range by white supremacists.
His death only came to national spotlight because he was killed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) alongside two white civil rights activists.
Six weeks earlier, the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, hadn’t been a familiar sight in national newspaper headlines.
That changed on June 21, 1964, when James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner went missing in the southern town.
After digging for hours on a steamy August morning, investigators finally found who they were searching for.
14 feet deep in the Mississippi mud, investigators found James, Andrew and Michael, lying face down and side by side.
Mississippi Burning
Throughout Mississippi and the south, the Ku Klux Klan had been unleashing a revamped campaign of terror across the south in response to the civil rights movement gaining traction across America.
Churches were burned to the ground, Black men and women were lynched. Less than a year earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to thousands of people in Washington D.C. That message didn’t stretch to much of America.
Members of the Congress of Racial Equality, an organisation which pioneered nonviolent action in the pursuit of civil rights, James, Michael and Andrew had spent their summer working in the south.
The three travelled together to Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 20, 1964, to look at the remnants of Mt Zion Methodist Church, which had been burned down for housing a CORE Freedom School.
CORE Freedom Schools were educational institutions set up in the most deprived parts of the south for Black children during the civil rights movement, in Mississippi.
After interviewing witnesses, they stayed in Philadelphia for a night before piling into their station wagon to travel home.
Around 5pm on June 21, 1964, Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price pulled over the three men for ‘speeding’. After being told they could go, they were tailed by members of the KKK, who had been tipped off about the three.
When they failed to return home, James, Michael and Andrew were reported missing immediately, and their burned out station wagon was discovered with no trace of the men.
A desperate search – and delayed justice
For the next month, the small southern town was swamped with FBI agents searching for the three missing men.
Family and friends of the activists knew something was amiss and suspected the KKK was involved. Local authorities – including the state governor – claimed the disappearance was a ‘hoax’ and ‘publicity stunt’.
However, on August 4, deep in the Mississippi mud, the FBI finally found them. An informant tipped off authorities to a farm on the edge of town, where the men were found in an earthen dam.
All three had been shot at point blank range. James, the only black member of the group, was shot three times and castrated.
It was a case that caught the attention of America – three civil rights workers, two of them white, had been brutally murdered.
But the headlines also were criticised. Michael’s wife, Rita Bender, was thrust into the spotlight after her husband’s death – and used her platform to highlight the disparity of the case, as she knew it wouldn’t have received the attention it did had white men not been some of the victims.
She said at the time: ‘My husband, Michael Schwerner, did not die in vain.
‘If he and Andrew Goodman had been Negroes, the world would have taken little notice of their deaths. After all, the slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news.
‘It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.’
In the years following her husband’s death, Rita has dedicated her life to civil rights and practises law.
But she has continually pointed out how the nation only paid attention to the killings because two of the men were white.
In a 2014 interview, she said: ‘We have yet as a nation to come to terms with the fact that this is a country that was built on racism and continues to an appalling degree to thrive on racism.’
It’s important to note that during the search for Michael, James and Andrew, eight other bodies of black men were discovered.
19 white men in total were indicted on federal charges in a 1967 case – but none of them served more than six years in prison.
Edgar Ray Killen, a local KKK leader Baptist minister, was arrested in 2005 after Mississippi’s Attorney General reopened the investigation. He died in prison in 2018.
‘We ain’t perfect’ – Philadelphia 60 years later
Around Philadelphia, multiple memorials have been set up in honour of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
A stone memorial at Mt Nebo Baptist Church commemorates the three activists. Their murder site on the side of a road is marked by a plaque.
The town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, once a hotbed of KKK members, is now governed by a Black mayor, James Young.
He told the Washington Post: ‘We have made strides to be better. I’m gonna put it just like that. We ain’t perfect. But we have made strides to be better.’
The town still has echoes of its past. A confederate monument still stands outside of the courthouse.
Last month, residents of the town spoke to the Washington Post about their town and lives 60 years on, and how they’ve been shaped by the events six decades years ago.
Dawn Lea Mars Chalmers father defended one of the men who went on trial in 1967.
She said: ‘The Klan, they were terrorists. They were hatemongers, extremists who were burning down churches and beating up congregants.
‘The feeling around [now] feels like that sometimes, that feeling of anger and hate. My God, can we not move forward while still talking and understanding what happened in the past?’
Philadelphia is a town with a dark past, but its residents don’t dwell in it. They look to move forward, remembering the men who were so brutally murdered 60 years ago.
An anniversary service is held yearly in June to remember the events of June and August 1964.
Mayor Young added: ‘I don’t dwell in the past. I know what it used to be. And I tell youth sometimes: I’m thankful that I’m old enough to know what went on, but young enough to see the benefits of those struggles.’
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