On this day in 1964 Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi after being held in the Neshoba County jail. Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were working in the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drives.
Sheriff L. A. Rainey, a burly, tobacco-chewing man, showed little concern over the report that the workers were missing. "If they're missing, they just hid somewhere, trying to get a lot of publicity out of it, I figure," he said.
Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later. Eight members of the Ku Klux Klan went to prison on federal conspiracy charges; none served more than six years.
Now, nearly 50 years after these young men were murdered for encouraging poor, rural minorities to register to vote, republican dominated legislatures across the south and midwest are pushing highly restrictive voting legislation. A grand old party, indeed.
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