Freedom Summer - Violence

Violence

Many of Mississippi's white residents deeply resented the outsiders and any attempt to change their society. Locals routinely harassed volunteers. Newspapers called them "unshaven and unwashed trash." Their presence in local black communities sparked drive-by shootings, Molotov cocktails, and constant harassment. State and local governments, police, the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan used murder, arrests, beatings, arson, spying, firing, evictions, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent blacks from registering to vote or achieving social equality.

Over the course of the ten-week project:

• four civil rights workers were killed (one in a head-on collision)
• at least three Mississippi blacks were murdered because of their support for the civil rights movement
• four people were critically wounded
• eighty Freedom Summer workers were beaten
• one-thousand and sixty-two people were arrested (volunteers and locals)
• thirty-seven churches were bombed or burned
• thirty Black homes or businesses were bombed or burned

Violence struck the campaign almost as soon as it started. On June 21, 1964, James Chaney (a black CORE activist from Mississippi), CORE organizer Michael Schwerner, and summer volunteer Andrew Goodman (both of whom were Jews from New York) were arrested by Cecil Price, a Neshoba County deputy sheriff and member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They were held in jail until after nightfall, then released into a waiting ambush by Klansmen who abducted and killed them. Goodman and Schwerner were shot at point-blank range. Chaney was chased, beaten mercilessly, and shot three times. Reported on TV and on newspaper front pages, the triple disappearance shocked the nation and drew massive media attention to Freedom Summer and to "the closed society" of Mississippi.

As soon as the men had turned up missing, SNCC and COFO workers began phoning the FBI asking for an investigation. FBI agents refused, saying it was a local matter. Finally, after some 36 hours, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered an investigation and FBI agents began swarming around Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney had been arrested. For the next seven weeks, FBI agents and sailors from a nearby naval airbase searched for the bodies, wading into swamps, and hacking through underbrush. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover came to Mississippi on July 10 to open the first FBI branch office there.

Throughout the search, Mississippi newspapers and word of mouth perpetuated the common belief that the disappearance was "a hoax" designed to draw publicity. But the search turned up the bodies of eight other black men found in rivers and swamps. One of them, 14-year old Herbert Oarsby, was found wearing a CORE T-shirt. Two others, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, had been expelled from Alcorn A&M for participating in civil rights protests. The other five men were never identified. On August 4, 1964, the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were found buried beneath an earthen dam.