It was a hot Sunday afternoon in June of 1964 when three young civil-rights workers - Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney - were arrested on a trumped-up speeding charge outside Philadelphia, Miss. They were held for eight hours, then released in the deepening darkness of rural Mississippi. By prearrangement, they were again stopped on a lonely road by the same Neshoba County deputy sheriff who had arrested them earlier, this time accompanied by a party of Ku Klux Klansmen. They were murdered in cold blood, transported to an earthen dam several miles away and buried with a bulldozer.
More than 150 F.B.I. agents ultimately descended on Neshoba County to investigate the disappearance of the civil-rights workers, two of them, Goodman and Schwerner, whites from New York, and the third, Chaney, a black who lived in Neshoba County.
It was 44 days before the investigators pen…
