Editing Philadelphia, Mississippi (section)

===Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner===
{{Main|Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner}}
[[File:Goodman Cheney and Schwerner Murder Site Marker.jpg|thumb|right|250px|State of Mississippi roadside marker denoting the location where the 1964 murders of American civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner took place]]
In the mid-20th century, [[Mississippi]] was a battleground of the [[civil rights movement]] as, like other states of the South, it had long [[Disfranchisement after Reconstruction era|disfranchised]] blacks and subjected them to [[racial segregation]] and [[Jim Crow laws]]. Philadelphia in June 1964 was the scene of the murders of civil rights workers [[James Chaney]], a 21-year-old [[African American|black]] man from [[Meridian, Mississippi|Meridian]], Mississippi; [[Andrew Goodman (activist)|Andrew Goodman]], a 20-year-old [[Jew]]ish [[anthropology]] student from [[New York City]]; and [[Michael Schwerner]], a 24-year-old Jewish [[Congress of Racial Equality|CORE]] organizer and former [[social worker]], also from New York. Their deaths demonstrated the risks that civil rights workers took to secure the constitutional rights of African Americans.

[[Ku Klux Klan]] members (including [[Cecil Price]], a deputy sheriff of Neshoba County) released the three young men from jail, took them to an isolated spot, and killed them, then buried them in an earthen dam. It was some time after they disappeared before the bodies were discovered, as a result of an [[FBI]] investigation and national media attention.<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm#1964csg Lynching of Chaney, Schwerner & Goodman] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive</ref> The national outrage over their deaths helped procure support for Congressional passage of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and the [[Voting Rights Act]] of 1965.  The murders and related conspiracy gave rise to the "Mississippi Burning" trial, ''[[United States v. Price]]''.