On this day, 21 June 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered by police and Ku Klux Klan members in Mississippi. James Earl Chaney, a 21-year-old Black former union plasterer and organiser with the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE) from nearby Meridian, Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Jewish anthropology student from New York, and Michael ‘Mickey’ Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish CORE organiser and former social worker from New York were lynched on the night of June 21–22 by members of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County’s Sheriff Office and the Philadelphia Police Department located in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
The three had been working on the “Freedom Summer” campaign, attempting to register African Americans to vote.
While seven of the killers ended up being jailed on federal charges of civil rights violations, the state of Mississippi didn’t prosecute anyone for the murders until 2005, when they eventually charged one of the killers with manslaughter. He was then convicted and sentenced to 60 years imprisonment.
Chaney’s younger brother Ben later joined the Black Panther Party and the urban guerrilla group the Black Liberation Army, for which he ended up serving 13 years in prison.
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