Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner

In 1964, a voter registration project called “Freedom Summer” was organized in Mississippi. Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner were two white students from New York who came down to help register black voters, but on June 21, a gang of policemen and Ku Klux Klansmen kidnapped and murdered Goodman, Schwerner, and a black man named James Chaney, after an accelerated car-chase through rural Neshoba County. The bodies of the men were found 44 days later by FBI agents, terribly decomposed in an earthen dam. These murders caused even more questions about racism to circulate and what people would have done if the murdered civil workers had been black. Eventually, the case was solved and eight men were convicted of murdering Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, but each only served at most, 10 years in prison.