Mississippi civil rights workers murders – June 21, 1964

I was 10 in 1964. Racism was the “way it was” in the South. I was in Atlanta. I have all kinds of horrible memories of what it was like then. If I had been older, this might have been me in this story. Thank God our world has changed. While I love my dad, this way of life is one thing we always disagreed on.

The Mississippi civil rights workers murders involved the lynching of three anti-racism and social justice activists near Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi on June 21, 1964, during the American Civil Rights Movement.

The murders of James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from nearby Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker also from New York, demonstrated the dangers faced by civil rights workers in the South, especially during what became known as “Freedom Summer”, dedicated to voter education and registration. Blacks in Mississippi, as throughout the former Confederacy, lived under racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, and had been essentially disfranchised in Mississippi since the passage of the state constitution of 1890.

via Mississippi civil rights workers murders – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.