United States v. Cecil Price, et al., also known as the Mississippi Burning trial, 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 (Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman) in Philadelphia, Mississippi on which date, the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, also known as the Freedom Summer murders, involved three activists that were abducted and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, during the Civil Rights Movement?
Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner 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 that were abducted and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi in June 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement. The victims were Andrew Goodman and Michael "Mickey" Schwerner from New York City, and James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi. 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 of disenfranchisement of potential black voters by several southern states that began in 1890.
Fred Rochelle Fred Rochelle was a black teenager from Bartow, Florida that on May 29, 1901, was lynched and burned at the stake following the murder and rape of a white woman, Rena Smith Taggart, the day before.