The brutal assassination of Medgar Evers, the Field Secretary of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963, revealed to the entire nation the great difficulty of bringing multicultural democracy to the brutal Deep South. Several months after Evers's death, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi Delta, Charles Cobb, came up with an idea that might concentrate media and political attention on the state's mistreatment of Blacks. Cobb proposed that SNCC create a mass mobilization, “Mississippi Summer,” that would recruit about one thousand mostly white college students and volunteers into the state to assist in desegregation and voter registration organizing. A central task for these volunteers would be the construction and operation of “Freedom Schools,” that teach African-American history of the Black Freedom Movement, as well as mathematics, English, and other academic disciplines. Bob Moses, the director of SNCC's Mississippi Project, liked the proposal and when Northern students began to volunteer to do organizing in Mississippi during the spring 1964, many were informed that they should be prepared to teach. Others were to work on the ongoing voter registration efforts.

McComb, Miss., police had just finished escorting five battered Freedom Riders into a Greyhound bus (TIME, Dec. 8) when an onlooker turned in disgust to a group of newsmen. "Is anybody here from Jimmy Ward's paper?" he asked. "I want him to look at them n

For four weeks a 60-man FBI task force roamed Mississippi's Pearl River County (pop. 22,000). Agents questioned both whites and Negroes, prowled through farmyard and country thicket, homed in on the mob that had dragged Mack Charles Parker, Negro rape sus

Natchez Oct 15, 1965

LAST WEEK'S murder indictment of a former Alabama state trooper for the 1965 shooting of a young black voting-rights demonstrator is one more Deep South prosecution of a long-forgotten white defendant who ended up on the wrong side of the civil rights rev

Their deaths could be characterized as mere embers in the case that has come to be known as Mississippi Burning. For 43 years, the murders of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were overshadowed by the deaths of three civil rights workers, dramati