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All the sources are linked throughout the article in green with a complete source list at the end of the article. This article was originally written in 2017 and updated in 2018 and links were updated in 2025. The image was last updated in 2020.
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Today, February 22, 2025, we honor the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project. “In 1964, civil rights organizations including the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized a voter registration drive, known as the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, aimed at dramatically increasing voter registration in Mississippi. The Freedom Summer, comprised of black Mississippians and more than 1,000 out-of-state, predominately white volunteers, faced constant abuse and harassment from Mississippi’s white population. The Ku Klux Klan, police and even state and local authorities carried out a systematic series of violent attacks; including arson, beatings, false arrest and the murder of at least three civil rights activists.”
“On the project’s first day, June 21, three workers (James Chaney, [Michael] Schwerner and Andrew Goodman) were kidnapped and murdered.” Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman went missing “…while visiting Philadelphia, Mississippi, to investigate the burning of a church.” “The abduction of the three civil rights workers intensified the new activists’ fears, but Freedom Summer staff and volunteers moved ahead with the campaign.” “The case was drawing national attention, in part because Schwerner and Goodman were both white Northerners. [Michael] Schwerner’s wife Rita, who was also a CORE worker, tried to convert that attention to the overlooked victims of racial violence…Throughout July, investigators combed the woods, fields, swamps, and rivers of Mississippi, ultimately finding the remains of eight African American men. Two were identified as Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who had been kidnapped, beaten, and murdered in May 1964. Another corpse was wearing a CORE t-shirt. Even less information was recorded about the five other bodies discovered.”
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