Bowers is currently serving a life sentence for ordering a 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a Mississippi civil rights leader—another crime that took decades to successfully prosecute.
James Earl Chaney
(May 30, 1943 - June 21, 1964)
James Chaney was born May 30, 1943 in Meridian, Mississippi to Ben and Fannie Lee Chaney. In 1963, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1964, CORE led a massive voter registration and desegregation campaign in Mississippi called Freedom Summer. As part of the Freedom Summer activities, Chaney was riding with two white activists in Mississippi when they were attacked and killed by the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964.
Chaney was twenty-one when he died on Rock Cut Road. Chaney had begun volunteer work at the new CORE office in Meridian in October, 1963, after a girlfriend introduced Chaney to Matt Suarez, the office's first director. Chaney soon became Suarez's chief aide, guide, and companion. His work ranged from constructing bookshelves at the community center to traveling to rural counties to set up meetings. Chaney, being black, was able to go places white CORE members were afraid to go. To Mississippi whites, Chaney was "as inconspicuous as an alley cat." When the Schwerners arrived in January to assume direction of the Meridian office, they found Chaney to be their most willing volunteer.
Chaney was a native of Meridian and the eldest son in a family of five children. His mother, a domestic servant, was protective; his father, a plasterer, left his mother when James was in his mid-teens. He was slightly built, but athletic. He was described as shy in public, but a cutup in his home.
Chaney first encountered problems at the Catholic school for Negroes he attended in 1959, when he was sixteen. Chaney was suspended for a week when he refused to remove a yellow paper NAACP "button." The next year he was expelled from school for fighting. Chaney tried to join the army, but his asthma resulted in a 4-F disqualification. Unemployed and restless, Chaney joined the Negro plasterer's union, where he apprenticed with his father. His work as a plasterer ended in 1963 after a fight with his father.
Andrew Goodman
(November 23,1943 - June 21, 1964
Andrew Goodman was born and raised in New York City, one of three sons of Robert and Carolyn Goodman, in an intellectual and socially-aware family. An activist from the age of 15, he graduated from the progressive Walden School there. He then attended the University of Wisconsin for a year before transferring to Queens College, New York City, where he was a classmate of Paul Simon. With his brief experience as an off-Broadway actor, he originally planned to study drama, but switched to anthropology.
Goodman was intelligent, unassuming, happy, and outgoing. He grew up as the second of three sons in a liberal household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Goodman attended the progressive Walden School, widely known for its anti-authoritarian approach to learning. While a high school sophomore at Walden, Goodman traveled to Washington, D. C. to participate in the "Youth March for Integrated Schools." As a senior, he and a classmate visited a depressed coal mining region in West Virginia to prepare a report on poverty in America.
After graduating from Walden, Goodman enrolled at Queens College in part because of its strong drama department. Soon, however, his longing for commitment led him away from his interest in drama and back to politics. In April 1964, Goodman applied for and was accepted into the Mississippi Summer Project. Although not seeing himself as a professional reformer, Goodman knew that his life had been somewhat sheltered and thought that the experience would be educational and useful.
He volunteered, along with fellow activist
Mickey Schwerner, to work as part of the
"Freedom Summer" project to register blacks to vote in Mississippi. Having protested U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's presence at the opening of that year's World's Fair, Goodman then left with Schwerner to develop civil rights protest strategies at Western College for Women [now part of Miami University] in Oxford, Ohio. In mid-June, Goodman and Schwerner were then sent to Mississippi and began registering blacks to vote.
On the night of June 20,1964 the two reached Meridian. There, they were joined by a black man named
James Chaney, who himself was a civil rights activist. On the morning of June 21, 1964 the three of them set out for Philadelphia, Neshoba County, where they were to investigate the recent burning of a local black church, the Mount Zion Methodist Church.
The three
(Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman) were initially arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for allegedly driving 35 miles over the 30 mile per hour speed limit. The trio was taken to the jail in Neshoba County where Chaney was booked for speeding, while Schwerner and Goodman were booked "for investigation."
After Chaney was fined $20, the three men were released and told to leave the county. Price followed them on state route 19 to the county line, then turned around at approximately 10:30 p.m. On their way back to Meridian, they were stopped by two carloads of KKK members on a remote rural road. The men approached their car and then shot and killed Schwerner, followed by Goodman, and finally Chaney.
Eventually, the Neshoba County deputy sheriff and conspirators were convicted by Federal prosecutors of civil rights violations, but were never convicted of murder. The case formed the basis of the made-for-TV movie Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Kuk Klux Klan and the feature film Mississippi Burning.
On September 14, 2004 the Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood announced that he was gathering evidence for a charge of murder and intended to take the case to a grand jury. On January 7, 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was arrested and found guilty of manslaughter - not murder - on June 21, 2005, exactly 41 years to the day after the murders.
Goodman Mountain, a 2,176 foot peak in the Adirondack Mountain town of Tupper Lake, NY, where he and his family spent their summers, is named in Andrew Goodman's memory. "Those Three are On My Mind" (Pete Seeger) was written to commemorate the three victims, and the Simon & Garfunkel song "He Was My Brother" was dedicated to Goodman.
Michael Schwerner
(November 6, 1939 - June 21, 1964)
Called Mickey by friends and colleagues, was a CORE field worker killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by the Ku Klux Klan in response to the civil-rights work he coordinated, which included promoting registration to vote among Mississippi African Americans.
Born and raised in New York, he attended Michigan State University, originally intending to become a veterinarian. He transferred to Cornell University, however, and switched his major to sociology, going on after graduation to the School of Social Work at Columbia University. While an undergraduate at Cornell, he integrated the school's chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity.
Twenty-four-year-old Schwerner had come to Mississippi in January of 1964 with his wife Rita after having been hired as a CORE field worker. In his application for the CORE position, Schwerner, a native of New York City, wrote "I have an emotional need to offer my services in the South." Schwerner added that he hoped to spend "the rest of his life" working for an integrated society. On January 15, 1964, Michael and Rita left New York in their VW Beetle for Mississippi. After talking with civil rights leader Bob Moses in Jackson, Schwerner was sent to Meridian to organize the community center and other programs in the largest city in eastern Mississippi. Schwerner became the first white civil rights worker to be based outside of the capitol of Jackson.
Once in Meridian, Schwerner quickly earned the hatred of local KKK by organizing a boycott of a variety store until the store, which sold mostly to blacks, hired its first African American. He also came under heavy attack for his determined efforts to register blacks to vote. After a few months in Meridian, despite hate mail and threatening phone calls and police harassment, Schwerner believed he made the right decision in coming to Mississippi. Mississippi, he said, "is the decisive battleground for America. Nowhere in the world is the idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched, or more cancerous, than in Mississippi."
"Goatee" to the klan of Neshoba and Lauderdale counties, was the most despised civil rights worker in Mississippi. Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers ordered Schwerner's "elimination" in May, 1964. The Klan finally got their chance to carry out the elimination order on June 21. Because they were with Schwerner, and would know too much if they were not killed, James Chaney and Andy Goodman also had to die.
Schwerner's murder occurred near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he and fellow workers,
James Chaney and
Andrew Goodman were undertaking field work for CORE.
The three (Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman) were initially arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for an alleged traffic violation and taken to the jail in Neshoba County. They were released that evening and on the way back to Meridian were stopped by two carloads of KKK members on a remote rural road. The men approached their car and then shot and killed Schwerner, then Goodman, and finally Chaney.
The film Mississippi Burning is loosely based on the murders and ensuing FBI investigation (as is the TV-movie Attack on Terror), and the events leading up to the deaths of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were dramatised in Murder in Mississippi.