Freedom Summer Volunteers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Are Murdered
The Klan, with a Neshoba County deputy's help, kidnaps and kills three civil rights workers investigating a burned church
Quick facts
- Location
- Neshoba County, Mississippi
- Victims
- James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner
- Arresting deputy
- Cecil Price
What happened
SNCC and allied groups organized Freedom Summer in 1964 to send roughly a thousand mostly white Northern volunteers into Mississippi to register Black voters and staff Freedom Schools. On June 20, James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, and two white volunteers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, drove to Philadelphia, Mississippi to investigate the burning of a Black church. On June 21 they were arrested by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, allegedly for speeding, then released around 10:30 p.m. into a Klan ambush prearranged with local law enforcement; the three were never seen alive again. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later. By summer's end, the SNCC Digital Gateway counts 6 known murders, 35 shootings, and more than 1,000 arrests connected to Freedom Summer across the state.
Why it matters
The murders, which drew national media attention partly because two of the three victims were white, forced the FBI to commit major resources to Mississippi civil rights cases for the first time and helped build the political case for the Voting Rights Act the following year.
How we know
The FBI's own history of the case, which it called "Mississippi Burning," documents the timeline of the arrest and disappearance, and the SNCC Digital Gateway tallies the summer's broader violence from SNCC's internal casualty reports.
Sources
- Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mississippi Burning · Primary source (author-declared)fbi.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- SNCC Digital Gateway. Freedom Summer · Primary source (author-declared)snccdigital.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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