Hey, it's Martine. Just a heads up, this episode includes descriptions of graphic

violence and some profanity, so please keep that in mind while listening.

There's an important event in the civil rights movement

that you might not have heard about in your history class.

It doesn't get the same kind of attention as the March on Washington or the

Birmingham Church bombing or the Selma to Montgomery march over the

Edmund Pettis Bridge. This story starts on a hot night in late June of 1964 when the Ku Klux

Clan carried out an attack on civil rights workers. It was so brazen that it shocked the country.

Three activists, one of them black, the other two white, had gone to Philadelphia, Mississippi

to inspect a black church that the clan had burned down.

The KKK ambushed the activists as they tried to leave town. By the next morning, they were dead.

Walter Cronkite devoted an hour-long special to the FBI's search.

I'm Walter Kite.

Tonight Andrew Goodman and two companions,

Mickey Schwerren and James Cheney,

are the focus of a whole country's concern.

They have been missing since Sunday in Mississippi

where they had gone as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project,

a project designed to draw national attention to the problem of

Negro rights in that state. It took 44 days to find

their bodies, but even then justice for the three young men was a long way off.

18 men were put on trial for conspiring to violate

...