TIME MAGAZINE - The Deaths of Freedom Riders

(August 14, 1964)

In 101 degree heat, FBI agents swarmed over an earthen dam on Olen Burrage's Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Miss. Through the scrub pines and bitterweed, they bulldozed a path to the dam, then brought up a lumbering dragline whose huge bucket shovel began chewing a V-shaped wedge out of the 25 ft.-high levee. Twenty feet down, the shovel uncovered the fully clothed, badly decomposed bodies of three young men, lying side by side in a pocket of red clay.

A team of pathologists, using dental and fingerprint charts, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what everybody had already suspected. These were the bodies of missing Civil Rights Workers Michael Schwerner, 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, both white, and James Chaney, 21 a Negro.

Thus ended a six-week search that began after the three men disappeared on June 21, just one day after they had arrived in Mississippi. Schwerner, son of a Pelham, N.Y. wigmaker and a graduate of Cornell, had been working for the Congress of Racial Equality in Meridian, Miss., since January, had volunteered to go up to Oxford to instruct Northern students in voter- registration techniques. Chaney, a slender young man from Meridian, had accompanied him. Goodman was the son of a New York City building contractor and a student a Queens College. All were working with the 400 volunteers sent into Mississippi by COFO to help register Negroes.