Neshoba County is located in the central part of the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2010 census, the population was 29,676. Its county seat is Philadelphia. It was named after Nashoba, a Choctaw chief. His name means "wolf" in the Choctaw language.
Andrew Goodman was an American social worker and activist. He was one of three Civil Rights Movement activists murdered during Freedom Summer in 1964 by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mississippi Burning is a 1988 American biographical crime thriller film directed by Alan Parker that is loosely based on the 1964 Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner murder investigation in Mississippi. The film stars Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as two FBI agents assigned to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers in fictional Jessup County, Mississippi. The investigation is met with hostility by the town's residents, local police, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist in Mississippi, the state's field secretary for the NAACP, and a World War II veteran who had served in the United States Army. He worked to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for African Americans, which included the enforcement of voting rights.
Michael Henry "Mickey" Schwerner, was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) field/social workers killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Schwerner and two co-workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were killed in response to their civil rights work, which included promoting voting registration among African Americans, most of whom had been disenfranchised in the state since 1890.
Freedom Summer, or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. Blacks had been cut off from voting since the turn of the century due to barriers to voter registration and other laws. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local black population.
James Earl Chaney was born on May 30th, 1943 in Meridian, Mississippi. He was one of three American civil rights workers who was murdered during Freedom Summer by members of the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The others were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City.
Edgar Ray Killen was an American white supremacist and convicted criminal. A Ku Klux Klan organizer, he planned and directed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights activists participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He appealed the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on April 12, 2007, by the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, six days before his 93rd birthday.
The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, also known as the Freedom Summer murders, the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders or the Mississippi Burning murders, involved three activists who were abducted and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi in June 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement. The victims were James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign by attempting to register African-Americans in Mississippi to vote. This registration effort was a part of contesting over 70 years of laws and practices that supported a systematic policy, begun by several states in 1890, of disenfranchisement of potential black voters.
United States v. Cecil Price, et al., also known as the Mississippi Burning trial or Mississippi Burning case, was a criminal trial where the United States charged a group of 18 men with conspiring in a Ku Klux Klan plot to murder three young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi on June 21, 1964 during Freedom Summer. The trial, conducted in Meridian, Mississippi with U.S. District Court Judge W. Harold Cox presiding, resulted in convictions of 7 of the 18 defendants.
Murder in Mississippi is a 1990 television film which dramatized the last weeks of civil rights activists Michael "Mickey" Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, and the events leading up to their disappearance and subsequent murder during Freedom Summer in 1964. It starred Tom Hulce as Schwerner, Jennifer Grey as his wife Rita, Blair Underwood as Chaney, and Josh Charles as Goodman. Hulce received a nomination for Best Actor in a TV Miniseries at the 1990 Golden Globes.
Annie Bell Robinson Devine (1912–2000) was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement.
Mississippi Cold Case is a 2007 feature documentary produced by David Ridgen of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the Ku Klux Klan murders of two 19-year-old young black men, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, in southwest Mississippi in May 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement and Freedom Summer. It also explores the 21st-century quest for justice by the brother of Moore. The documentary won numerous awards as a documentary and for its investigative journalism.
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. They originated in Mississippi and Louisiana in the early 1960s under the leadership of Samuel Bowers, its first Grand Wizard. The White Knights of Mississippi were formed in 1964, and they included roughly 200 members of the Original Knights of Louisiana. The White Knights were not interested in holding public demonstrations or in letting any information about themselves get out to the masses. Similar to the United Klans of America (UKA), the White Knights of Mississippi were very secretive about their group. Within a year, their membership was up to around six thousand, and they had Klaverns in over half of the counties in Mississippi. By 1967, the number of active members had shrunk to around four hundred.
Freedom on My Mind is a 1994 feature documentary film that tells the story of the Mississippi voter registration struggles of 1961 to 1964, which was characterized by violence against the people involved, including multiple instances of murder.
Freedom Summer is a 2014 American documentary film, written, produced and directed by Stanley Nelson Jr. The film had its world premiere at 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2014.
The history of the 1954 to 1968 American civil rights movement has been depicted and documented in film, song, theater, television, and the visual arts. These presentations add to and maintain cultural awareness and understanding of the goals, tactics, and accomplishments of the people who organized and participated in this nonviolent movement.
This is a timeline of the 1954 to 1968 civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for African Americans. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally established racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.
1964 is a documentary film produced by Insignia Films for the American Experience series about political, social and cultural events in the United States for the calendar year 1964. It is based partly on Jon Margolis book The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964. The documentary depicts the year 1964 as significant and epic in that following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in late 1963, 1964, as a presidential election year, becomes a departure point for American history, with lasting effects today. It is also the year of the British Invasion led by the Beatles, when Cassius Clay fights Sonny Liston for the World Heavyweight Championship, the year after Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, is published, and the year Republican activist, Phyllis Schlafly's book, A Choice, Not an Echo, is published. It is also the year of Freedom Summer, an initiative by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register African-Americans in Mississippi, the subsequent murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, three CORE activists, in Mississippi by white supremacists that created a national sensation, and the Harlem riot of 1964, culminating in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. A recurrent theme of the film is its departure as a presidential election year, with President Lyndon B. Johnson running as the expected Democratic Party nominee and the nomination of U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater selected through a grassroots campaign for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, that defines the future divisions of the US political party competition.
