James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner became martyrs to the Civil Rights Movement when they were lynched in Philedelphia, Mississippi. The three had travelled to the town to investigate the burning of a church which had hosted civil rights events, a few days earlier.
Upon their arrival, they were arrested on trumped-up charges by Neshoba County deputee, Cecil Price. Price was himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and detained the three young men – Schwerner was 24, Chaney 21 and Goodman 20 – in the county police station for several hours, during which time they were not given their legally entitled phone calls, and callers to the station in search of them were told they were not there.
Once the Klan’s ambush was in place, Price freed the three men, then led them into it. All three were shot repeatedly, and Chaney, who was also black, was beaten severely. Their bodies were buried and their car hidden and burned.
The disappearance of the three led to a national outcry, and public sentiment swung dramatically towards favouring civil rights, allowing President Lyndon Johnson to push through landmark bills like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (signed into law less than a month later on July 2), and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Referenced in:
He Was My Brother – Simon & Garfunkel
Those Three are On My Mind – Pete Seeger
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@CentreCantHold
Although, I personally am so far to the left that even the democrats appear to me to be “right-wing,” I consider myself to be a strict constitutionalist. It is my opinion that since its inception there has been an organized and systematic assault by the conservatives in the United States on the civil liberties written into the US Constitution. The “War on Drugs”; “War on Terror”; “War on Communism” and a host of other wars waged by the right wing are really nothing more than a War on People–an excuse to erode civil rights to the point of non-existence. I invite you to my website devoted to raising awareness on this puritan attack on freedom: http://pltcldscsn.blogspot.com/