Murder in Mississippi: The Origins of Mississippi Burning
As described by Douglas O. Linder (1), ôit was an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials, that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration.ö Linder (1) is referring to the murder of three civil rights workers û Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney û on June 21, 1964, near Philadelphia, Mississippi. As this report will demonstrate, some 19 Mississippians were involved in the conspiracy that led to these there murders but, it was not until 2005 that justice was finally being served. The thesis to be explored herein is that ômurder will outö as Shakespeare wrote and that certain criminals eventually are brought to justice.
Attached to this report is a chronology depicting the events prior to and after the murders of the three civil rights workers. This chart (ôMississippi Burning Trial: A Chronology,ö 1) depicts Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman as civil rights volunteers participating in the Mississippi Summer Project to register blacks to vote. All three volunteers were students and both Schwerner and Chaney were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). On June 21, the three young men drove to the site of the burned Mount Zion Church in Neshoba County, Mississippi. On their return to Meridian, Mississippi they were arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and taken to the county jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi (McFadden, 2).
In a conspiracy involving local members of the Ku Klux Klan, Price released the three civil rights activists from jail at 10 PM. Their station wagon was overtaken on a rural road and the three men were beaten to death and then shot. Linder (2) describes the scene as one in which Deputy Sheriff Price, in a county vehicle, followed by two other cars filled with young Klan members, pursued the car driven by Chaney in a high speed chase. For some reason that is still u...