In 1999, I retraced Freedom Summer of 1964, that short period of time when college students left the northern states and traveled into Mississippi to register then-disenfranchised African-Americans as voters.  Much of the training for these students was held at various colleges including Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where a Freedom Summer Memorial was recently erected. 

During my travels, I followed in the footsteps of Mickey Schwerner, a Jewish white man from New York who was a field secretary for the Council On Racial Equality, James Chaney, a Meridian Mississippi plasterer who, at the age of 21, was just joining the civil rights movement in his own backyard, and Andrew Goodman, a twenty year old Queens College student from New York City.  At one point, I drove up the same roads they used that fateful day, starting off where their civil rights office was located at 2505 1/2 Fifth Street in Meridian.  The story is well known--three young Americans, in their prime, trying to bring the right to vote to their fellow Americans, were kidnapped in Philadelphia, Mississippi, murdered and then secretly buried by cowards belonging to the Ku Klux Klan with assistance from two officials in the Neshoba County Sherrif's Department. 

The US Department of Justice provides a quick historical summary on their web site at this link.  A much more detailed chronology and illustrated history of the "Mississippi Burning" case with many interesting photographs appears on the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School web site.  After you read through the UMKC site, the "Mississippi Burning" movie will make quite a bit more sense to you, even if the producers took some license with the historical story line.

The next few photographs will show you some of the historical places related to the civil rights workers' murders during the middle of Freedom Summer.   

On June 16, 1964, the KKK attacked the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, a rural area of Neshoba County, broke into a church meeting, beat three members of the church and left the scene.  Hours later, the Klan returned and burned the church to the ground.  Nothing was left but rubble and the church's 40 year cast bell. 

The church looks like this today with three crosses and a memorial tablet to Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman out front.   

Several days later, on June 21, the three civil rights workers ventured out to collect legal statements on both the assaults and the arson.  They never returned alive from that trip.  The Neshoba County Sherrif's office stopped them for speeding, jailed them, and then set them free late that night after notifying the KKK of the prized prey, namely Schwerner, who was a marked man by the Klan who nicknamed him "Goatee" for his short beard.  The three were murdered later that night by the Klan and their bodies were not found for weeks until an FBI informant told the FBI they were buried under an earthen dam on the Old Jolly Farm.  A subsequent in Federal court proved the three had been turned over to the Klan by two officials of the Neshoba County Sherrif's Department.  The state of Mississippi now acknowledges what happened with an official historical marker outside the Mount Zion Methodist Church.  This sign is located about two hundred feet east from the church.  Surprisingly, this sign and the memorial at the church are not defaced by vandals.

That situation, unfortunately, is not the same at the James Chaney gravesite at Okatibbee Cemetery outside Meridian. 

Take a close look at this picture of his grave and you'll see what I mean--look along the black line I drew on the photograph showing where vandals have shot at the stone, leaving bullet marks.  Behind the main stone, there are large steel supports of upright and angled steel to keep the stone from being pulled out of the ground as was done in the past.   

In honor of the ideal of James Chaney, an eternal flame burns in the grave area which is surrounded by black iron chain. 

Within the city of Philadelphia, there are no historical markers down around the courthouse or the old jail, now an architect's office, to commemorate what happened there in 1964.   Some distance away, on Carver Avenue, is the only public memorial to these three martyrs. 

 On the front lawn of the Mount Nebo Missionary Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr preached a memorial service two years after the murders, stands a stone memorial dedicated to the dead.

While I was the Mount Zion Methodist Church (pictured above), while walking around taking pictures, I noticed the bell from the burned out church hanging on a metal pole frame structure in front of the church.  My trusty civil rights tour guidebook, "Weary Feet, Rested Souls", noted this is the bell that survived the church fire.  As I walked away from this memorial on the grounds after clicking this picture, the bell rang once, clear as a bell, despite the lack of any wind on the blazing hot Mississippi day.  I guess James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were sending me a message.  

* * * * *

For more information, please visit the "Mississippi Burning" trial page on the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School web site.