James Chaney, Andrew Goodman & Michael Schwerner

Case background and investigation

James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black Mississippian, and Michael Schwerner, 24, of New York, worked for the Congress of Racial Equality in Meridian, Mississippi. Andrew Goodman, 20, a Queens College student, had just arrived as a volunteer for the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration project. According to PBS's American Experience, Klan members had beaten congregants and burned Mount Zion Church in Neshoba County on June 16, a church where Schwerner had been organizing.

On Sunday, June 21, 1964, the three men drove to Neshoba County to look into the fire. That afternoon Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price stopped their station wagon and arrested them; Chaney, who was driving, was charged with speeding and the other two were held for investigation. They were released from the jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi, at about 10:30 p.m. and drove off toward Meridian. The FBI's case history states that Klan members followed them according to a plan made in advance. They were not seen alive again.

The Justice Department asked the FBI to investigate the next day. The burned station wagon was found on June 23, leading the bureau to name the case MIBURN, for "Mississippi Burning." Agents, assisted by the National Guard, searched the area for weeks. On August 4, acting on an informant's tip, the FBI recovered the three bodies from beneath an earthen dam on a local farm. They had been shot.

Mississippi brought no murder charges at the time. Federal prosecutors charged 18 men with conspiring to violate the victims' civil rights. On October 20, 1967, a federal jury convicted seven of them: Cecil Price, Klan leader Sam Bowers, Alton Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billy Wayne Posey, Horace Doyle Barnette and Jimmy Arledge. None served more than six years. Others, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, were acquitted. The jury deadlocked on Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time preacher, reportedly because one juror would not convict a minister.

The Clarion-Ledger reports that Mississippi authorities reopened the case in 1999. A Neshoba County grand jury indicted Killen for murder in January 2005; The New York Times reported that the grand jury heard evidence concerning the surviving original defendants but indicted only him. On June 21, 2005, the 41st anniversary of the killings, a jury found Killen, then 80, guilty of three counts of manslaughter rather than murder. He was sentenced to 60 years and maintained his innocence. State and federal authorities announced in June 2016 that the investigation was closed. Killen died in prison on January 11, 2018, at 92. No one was ever convicted of murder in the case.