For The First Time, Documents From the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” Murders of Civil Rights Activists Have Been Made Public

For the first time, 57 years after their deaths, never-before-seen case files, photographs, and other materials documenting the investigation into the infamous slayings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi are finally exposed to the public.

The assassinations of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County in 1964 caused national indignation and aided in the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They were later featured in the film “Mississippi Burning.”

In 2019, the previously sealed documents, dating back to 1964 and 2007, were transferred from the attorney general’s office to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. They are presently on display in the William F. Winter Archives and History Building in Jackson, where they have been since last week.

The records include cases, memoranda, research notes, and federal reports by informants and testimonies by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to an announcement from the Mississippi Department of Archives, there are also pics of the exhumation of the victims’ remains and subsequent autopsies, along with aerial photos of the burial place.

The collection is kept in three catalog records: Series2870 contains the research files of the Attorney General, Series2902 contains the FBI notes, and Sery2903 contains the photos.

They were caught on a traffic charge by a deputy sheriff in Philadelphia, who subsequently released them once a mob was alerted.

The FBI was ordered by President Lyndon Johnson to assist local police officers in searching for the missing men. Johnson’s assistant, Lee White, told him that the men had “disappeared from the face of the earth.” Members of Civil Rights concerned that the KKK had been nabbed. The then governor of Mississippi claimed that their disappearance was a falsehood and the Sen. Jim Eastland told President Johnson that it was an advertising stunt.

Finally, on August 4, 1964, their bodies were discovered buried on a Klansman’s remote property. Chaney had been heavily beaten and all three men had been shot at point-blank range.

In the 1967 case, nineteen persons were indicted on federal counts. Seven people were found guilty of infringing on the victims’ civil rights. None of them lasted longer than six years.

The investigation was renewed by the Mississippi Attorney General’s office in 2004. Edgar Ray Killen, a 1960s Ku Klux Klan leader and Baptist minister, was convicted of manslaughter in June 2005 as a result of this.

Witnesses stated during Killen’s state prosecution in 2005 that on June 21, 1964, he proceeded to Meridian to pick up carloads of klansmen in order to ambush Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, ordering some of the klan members to carry plastic or rubber gloves. Witnesses alleged Killen then went to a funeral home in Philadelphia as an alibi while the fatal attack was taking place.

In 2018, Killen died in prison. In 2016, Mississippi’s then-Attorney General, Jim Hood, pronounced the investigation ended.