The  "Mississippi Burning" Trial - 1967

It was an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials, that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration.  Dead were three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, all shot in the dark of night on a lonely road in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Many people predicted such a tragedy when the Mississippi Summer Project, an effort that would bring hundreds of college-age volunteers to "the most totalitarian state in the country" was announced  in April, 1964.  The FBI's all-out search for the conspirators who killed the three young men, two white and one black, depicted in the movie "Mississippi Burning," was successful, leading three years later to a trial in the  courtroom of one of America's most determined segregationist judges.