Learn about key events in history and their connections to today.
On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers went missing after the authorities in Philadelphia, Miss., had arrested them, then released them.
Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white men from New York, had been working with James Chaney, a black man from Mississippi, as part of the “Freedom Summer” campaign to help register blacks to vote.
The New York Times article the next day reported immediate concern over the well being of the three men, as the registration campaign “had led to an increasing number of violent incidents” in the area. The Neshoba County police officers who arrested the three men were not troubled by their disappearance. “If they’re missing, they just hid somewhere, trying to get a lot of publicity out of it, I figure,” Sheriff L. A. Rainey told The Times.
Nevertheless, the federal Justice Department ordered an F.B.I. inquiry into the matter. The F.B.I. soon found the bodies of at least eight black men who had been lynched. On Aug. 4, the F.B.I. discovered the bodies of the three men in an earthen dam.