‘It shocked white middle America’: How the Mississippi Burning murders sparked landmark change in the US



The extensive coverage of the Mississippi Burning investigation would cast a spotlight on the racial discrimination and violence that were taking place in the US, galvanising public and political support for the Democrats’ proposed civil rights legislation. Andrew Goodman’s brother told Witness History that it created “an atmosphere for change” that enabled US President Lyndon Johnson to sign The Civil Rights Act into law on 2 July 1964. “And that was a sensibility that the president understood. He was a shrewd politician and he used it to get the civil rights act passed. And it’s kind of a miracle that it passed, but it did and it changed our country.” The landmark legislation would ban discrimination and segregation in public places, schools and employment.

But speaking to the BBC just five days after the Act was passed, Bond said that the SNCC’s offices were still receiving reports of violent opposition from white residents and police when black people tried to use previously segregated places in the South. Bond pointed to an attack which had happened in Alabama just a few days before where the police force “became the mob”, attacking 60 or 70 black people who were trying to get into a white cinema in Selma. But even in the face of these attacks, “we think this bill is the law of the land and the federal government is behind it, and we intend to go right ahead and exercise our rights under this new law,” Bond told the BBC.

Throughout July, as FBI agents continued to scour the Mississippi swampland looking for the three missing civil rights activists, they repeatedly came across the remains of other black murder victims. One of these was the body of 14-year-old Herbert Oarsby, who was discovered wearing a Core T-shirt. Charles Eddie Moore, who had been one of 600 students expelled from Alcorn State University in April 1964 for participating in civil rights protests, was found alongside the body of his childhood friend Henry Hezekiah Dee. The two 19-year-olds had been abducted in May 1964 by the KKK, who had brutally beaten them with sticks before drowning them in the Mississippi River. In 2007, 71-year-old James Seale, a former policeman, was convicted of the killings after Charles Marcus Edwards, a church deacon and self-confessed Klansman, admitted to participating in their abduction. He was given immunity in exchange for his testimony. The bodies of five other black victims of violence, discovered by the FBI while looking for the missing activists, have never been identified.

On 4 August, after six weeks of searching, FBI investigators finally uncovered the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman buried in a red-clay dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. They were tipped off to their location by an informant, who would later be identified as Mississippi Highway Patrol officer Maynard King. All three had been shot, and Chaney had been tortured before he died. Despite this, state authorities refused to prosecute the case, citing insufficient evidence.



Source link

Share the Post:
Enable Notifications OK No thanks