57 years ago in Philadelphia, Mississippi

[StarfishSaver]

Link to tweet

[PlanetBev]

1. I remember this

They found the bodies on six weeks later on August 4th in an earthen damn. So sickening.

[niyad]

2. We remember.

[Karadeniz]

3. True heroes and patriots... they knew the dangers, but placed equality over personal fear.

[hibbing]

4. Saint Ronnie launched his campaign there

Taking about states rights and welfare queens, almost as subtle as the former guy.

Peace

[summer_in_TX]

8. I didn't know the context of his campaign launch location.

People fell for his amiable persona and easy body language. But he was not a good man.

I remember the huge increase in homelessness under him during his first term.

[dianaredwing]

5. Thanks for posting

I am a child of that era and need reminding of the sacrifices that so many made. This has not been a free ride for most.

[IcyPeas]

6. This is something I never learned in history class

I learned about it from documentaries and movies, like Mississippi Burning for example.

[greenjar_01]

7. Weirdly, on the exact same day, Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game for the Philadelphia Phillies

Little known fact. It was against the Mets, in Queens, June 21, 1964. Andrew Goodman was a student at Queens College.

[Ilsa]

9. A very well written article:

https://main.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/368-no-twang-of-conscience-whatever

me walking up to the Gulf station in search of a mechanic to haul his stalled Buick from outside my motel door. There he was in his oversized brown suit and a Stetson hat that came down low on his forehead, his tie held by a WALLACE tie clip. I was young and blonde with hair past my shoulders, or maybe it was pulled back in a ponytail—I don’t remember from the distance of almost forty years.

It was Meridian, Mississippi, the summer of 1976. Preacher Killen was nine years past his federal conspiracy trial in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in nearby Philadelphia, twelve years from the actual murders, and in 1976 that seemed like a long time, though I realize now it wasn’t and that choosing to interview him in my motel room was not the smartest thing I have ever done.

The viciousness behind the murders was of a magnitude that to utter the words “murders of the three civil rights workers,” even the names Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, was sufficient for most people to summon the gruesome details of the trio’s disappearance and the discovery forty-four days later of their decomposing bodies on the farm of one of the town’s wealthier residents. They were of a magnitude, too, that J. Edgar Hoover opened a field office in Jackson, Mississippi, to investigate the murders and two hundred other unsolved cases of racial violence—all suspected to be the work of a new, particularly virulent Klan known as the White Knights of Mississippi.

The three workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—were engaged in a massive drive to register black voters and had that Sunday, June 21, 1964, driven the forty miles from Meridian to examine the ruins of a burned-out black church that was to have been used as a training school. Chaney was black and a Meridian native; Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish and from New York, and in that charged climate of 1964 they were not welcome in Mississippi, or in most of the South. All three worked with the Congress of Racial Equality. All three were in their early twenties, “hardly more than boys,” the government prosecutor would say at the eventual trial of Killen and seventeen other men.
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