1964 August 4

Bodies of Murdered Civil Rights Workers Found

 

The bodies of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964, were finally recovered on this day.

Chaney was an African-American native of Mississippi; Goodman and Schwerner were white volunteers in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project that began on June 21, 1964, the night Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered.

Freedom Summer was a summer-long effort that brought about 1,000 volunteers to Mississippi to register African American voters and to conduct Freedom Schools for young African-Americans.

The perpetrators of the murder were eventually convicted on October 20, 1967.

In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner,

Watch the new documentary film: Freedom Summer (2014), http://firelightmedia.tv/project/freedom-summer/

Watch a documentary on Freedom Summer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op6YLm8XxeA

Read About the murders and Freedom Summer: Bruce Wilson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy (2010)

Read: Howard Ball, Murder in Mississippi: United States v. Price and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2004)

Beware of the film Mississippi Burning: The Hollywood film Mississippi Burning about the civil rights struggle in Mississippi has been heavily criticized by civil rights activists and other knowledgeable observers for major falsehoods and distortions. Start with Wikipedia and read the sources it cites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Burning#cite_note-2

Visit the Andrew Goodman Foundation web site: http://www.andrewgoodman.org/

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