Case files on 1964 civil rights worker killings made public

[Jilly_in_VA]

JACKSON, Miss. -- Never before seen case files, photographs and other records documenting the investigation into the infamous slayings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi are now open to the public for the first time, 57 years after their deaths.

The 1964 killings of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County sparked national outrage and helped spur passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They later became the subject of the movie “Mississippi Burning."

The previously sealed materials — dating from 1964 to 2007 — were transferred to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History from the Mississippi attorney general’s office in 2019. As of last week, they are now available for viewing by the public at William F. Winter Archives and History Building in Jackson.

The records include case files, Federal Bureau of Investigation memoranda, research notes and federal informant reports and witness testimonies. There are also photographs of the exhumation of the victims’ bodies and subsequent autopsies, along with aerial photographs of the burial site, according to an announcement from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/case-files-1964-civil-rights-worker-killings-made-78519109
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Some of us are old enough to remember this. I am. It still gives me cold chills + flashes of hot anger.

[Scottie Mom]

1. Yes, I am also old enough to remember.

Shocking then and it still is.

[Scottie Mom]

2. Yes, I am also old enough to remember.

Shocking then and it still is.

[ratchiweenie]

3. I remember it well. Horrible.

[shenmue]

4. Rest in peace.

[abqtommy]

5. In 1964 I was 15 years old. I remember. Thanks.

[SharonAnn]

6. I was 19 and I remember. And I remember Reagan kicking off his campaign there.

[gratuitous]

8. Hoo boy

This is going to be like opening a fetid, festering puffy can of former food that lost its label years ago. And for our good friends who like to reach way back in history and talk about how the Ku Klux Klan was started by Democrats, the question should be asked why the Republican leadership that has dominated Mississippi state politics for decades didn't bring anyone to justice for these murders.

Mississippi had to wait until 2005 before Jim Hood and Mark Duncan finally prosecuted and convicted Edgar Ray Killen for recruiting the killers.

[Mr.Bill]

9. Whenever a republican tells me the KKK

was foiunded by Democrats, I remind them they were also Confederate officers and monuments to them still stand in republican states in the south.