In the summer of 1964 this picture of the burned out car of three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner flew over the wire services around the world. The three had been reported missing several days earlier in the midst of Freedom Summer, an intensive effort to register Negroes to vote across the South where they had long been denied that right. The streets were fraught with danger for those who were organizing and those who went to register. Churches had been burned and people threatened with clubs and guns.

The search for the boys reached as far as the White House, with President Lyndon Johnson cajoling Senator James Eastland, who opined the disappearance “was just a publicity stunt,” to talk to the governor to move state authorities into the search.

“News from Mississippi swamp scavengers intervened before Eastland could relay the Governor’s reply. Hours earlier, local FBI agent John Proctor had roared at high speeds over the thirty-eight miles from Meridian to the Choctaw Reservation outside Philadelphia to hear what the superintendent would not say over the telephone. Indians had come upon a smoldering Ford Fairlane in a thicket about eighty feet off the highway just past the bridge over Bogue Chitto Creek… As soon as Proctor rounded up the agents to find the burned out hulk, and saw that the license tag matched the CORE-owned station wagon driven by Micky Schwerner … he sent a coded message through New Orleans to FBI headquarters: car found, no bodies.

America in The King Years: 1963-1965, Taylor Branch

The bodies were found several weeks later, buried beneath an earthen dam. James Chaney, a Negro, had been savagely beaten. All three had been shot. In January 1965 18 men, members of the local Ku Klux Klan were arrested for conspiracy to deny the three their civil rights; none charged with murder. In October of 1967, seven of the defendants were convicted of Federal conspiracy charges and begin serving 3 to 10 years in jail.

It was not until June of 2005, after a campaign by the local newspaper, The Neshoba Democrat, that one man, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty, not of murder but of manslaughter of the three, and at the age of 80 began serving a 60 year sentence.

What brings this to mind is that on Tuesday, the town of Philadelphia elected its first black mayor.

James A. Young defeated incumbent Mayor Rayburn Waddell, 1,021-975, certified results from Tuesday’s Democrat primary runoff election show.

Forty-four affidavit ballots were examined by the Democrat Executive Committee Wednesday starting at about 5 p.m., and only 15 were accepted.

Young, a former four-term county supervisor, Pentecostal minister and paramedic who led the county ambulance service for nearly two decades, unseated Waddell to become Philadelphia’s first African-American mayor Tuesday with 51.15 percent of the vote.

The Neshoba Democrat

Todd Mosley, his campaign organizer, said Young’s election changed history.

“A few committed and positive voices can change history today. Philadelphia, Miss. won tonight. We have once and for all proven that 1964 is over. Only one candidate won this election but no one lost – an entire community won,” Mosley said.

Progress comes, hour after hour, town following town. Amazing day.

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