It was
an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county
officials,
that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration. Dead
were
three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and
James
Chaney, all shot in the dark of night on a lonely road in Neshoba
County,
Mississippi. Many people predicted such a tragedy when the Mississippi
Summer Project, an effort that would bring hundreds of college-age
volunteers
to "the most totalitarian state in the country" was announced in
April, 1964. The FBI's all-out search for the conspirators who
killed
the three young men, two white and one black, depicted in the movie
"Mississippi
Burning," was successful, leading three years later to a trial in
the
courtroom of one of America's most determined segregationist judges....(CONT.-->) |