Freedom summer 1964

Answer 1

In the summer of 1964, civil rights organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) urged white students from the North to travel to Mississippi, where they helped register black voters and build schools for black children. The organizations believed the participation of white students in the so-called "Freedom Summer" would bring increased visibility to their efforts. The summer had barely begun, however, when three volunteers--Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a black Mississippian--disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African-American church by the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive FBI investigation (code-named "Mississippi Burning") their bodies were discovered on August 4 buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Although the culprits in the case--white supremacists who included the county's deputy sheriff--were soon identified, the state made no arrests. The Justice Department eventually indicted 19 men for violating the three volunteers' civil rights (the only charge that would give the federal government jurisdiction over the case) and after a three-year-long legal battle, the men finally went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. In October 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the defendants guilty and acquitted the other nine. Though the verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory--it was the first time anyone in Mississippi had been convicted for a crime against a civil rights worker--the judge in the case gave out relatively light sentences, and none of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.