For Blacks of a certain age, the May 25 knee-on-neck killing of George Floyd by a White police officer evokes that awful time in the summer of 1964 when young civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi by a Klan mob.
Patricia Towner, now 67, was in the front room of her grandparents’ shotgun-style house in rural Neshoba County on August 4, 1964 when TV news anchorman Walter Cronkite reported that the bodies of the three men had finally been found, concluding an exhaustive search by federal agents and others.
Each in his twenties, the men had come to Neshoba County to register Black voters as part of the month-long Freedom Summer voter drive organized by an alliance of civil rights organizations.
The act of terror began when Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price arrested Chaney on a speeding charge and held Goodman and Schwerner for questioning, later releasing all three men after Chaney posted a $20 bond.
Towner voted for the first time in November 1973 in the election that made Coleman Young the first Black mayor of Detroit.
