Sixty years ago, on June 21, 1964, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman mailed a postcard to his parents in New York City.
“Dear Mom and Dad,” Goodman wrote. “I have arrived safely in
Meridian Mississippi. This is a wonderful town, and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”
He had arrived in Meridian, Mississippi, the day before to work with Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old former New York social worker, and James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black man from Meridian, to
register Black voters in what became known as Freedom Summer.
Mississippi had become a focal point for voter registration because fewer than 7% of Blacks were registered, but members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, dedicated to preserving segregation and to keeping Black people from voting, intended to stop the people challenging their power.
They had come to loathe Schwerner, a Jewish man— who along with his wife, Rita, had taken over the field office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Meridian and had begun grassroots organizing.
At meetings, Klan members routinely talked about killing Schwerner. But without authorization from the Klan’s state leader,
Sam Bowers, they held off.
Several weeks before Goodman arrived in Mississippi, they got that authorization.
On June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman set out to investigate the recent burning of a church whose leaders had agreed to participate in voter registration.
The burning was an act of arson that, unbeknownst to them, was committed by the same Klan members who had received authorization to kill Schwerner.
After the three men left the burned church, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped their car, arrested Schwerner for speeding, and held Chaney and Goodman under
suspicion that they were the ones who had burned the church.
After they paid the speeding ticket and left the Philadelphia, Mississippi, jail, Price followed them, stopped them, ordered them into his car, and then took them down a deserted road and turned them over to two carloads of his fellow terrorists.
They beat the men, murdered them, and buried them in an earthen dam that was under construction.
Aside from the murderers, no one knew where the three men had gone.
Their fellow CORE workers began calling jails and police stations as soon as they
didn’t turn up according to schedule, but no one told them where the men were.
By June 22, FBI agents from New Orleans had joined the search.
(The story of their search was depicted in a movie starring Gene Hackman called Mississippi Burning.)
On June 23 the agents found the vehicle the men had been driving. It was still smoldering from an attempt to burn it.
The FBI's search turned up 8 murdered Black men, but not the three they were looking for.
President Lyndon Johnson, who had pushed hard for stronger civil rights laws since becoming president, harnessed the growing outrage over the missing men.
The House had passed a civil rights bill in February 1964, but southern segregationists in the Senate filibustered it from March till June.
Then, a news story broke about a hotel owner pouring acid into a whites-only swimming pool in Florida.
He did this after Black and white people jumped into the water together.
The water diluted the acid, and the swimmers were not injured, but
law enforcement arrested them.
A white man pouring acid into a swimming pool to drive out Black people created so much outrage that senators abandoned their opposition to the measure. And on June 19, the Senate passed the bill.
Johnson also used the outrage over the three missing voting
rights workers to pressure the House to pass the bill, and it did.
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.
Just before he wrote his name, Johnson addressed the American people on television. Tying the new law to the upcoming anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,
he noted that...
“Those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning.
Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own
borders.
My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.”
Those opposed to Black equality saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act as a call to arms.
Two weeks after Johnson signed the bill, and a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared, and while they were still missing, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for president.
To thunderous applause, he told delegates that...
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
On August 4 the bodies of the missing men were found in the dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
It turned out that Deputy Sheriff Price, who had arrested Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, and his boss, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, were members of the Klan.
Price had alerted his fellow Klansman, Edgar Killen, that he had the three men in custody, and Killen called the local Klan together to attack the men when they got out of jail.
Then Price dropped the three civil rights workers into their hands.
While the state of Mississippi would not prosecute, claiming insufficient evidence, in January 1965 a federal grand jury indicted 18 men for their participation in the murders.
The Ku Klux Klan members, who were accustomed to running their states as they saw fit, did not believe they would be punished.
An infamous photograph caught Price and Rainey laughing after their federal arraignment on charges of conspiracy and violating the civil rights of the murdered men.
