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James Chaney

1943–1964 · 21 years Specialist

A Meridian plasterer who spent his last summer registering voters

Portrait of James Chaney — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

James Chaney was born in Meridian, Mississippi, the eldest of five children of Fannie Lee and Ben Chaney Sr., who separated during his childhood. He attended Catholic school through ninth grade and apprenticed afterward as a plasterer. At fifteen, he and several classmates wore NAACP badges to their segregated high school and were suspended for a week — an early sign of where his instincts ran. In 1962 he joined the Freedom Rides moving through Mississippi, and by late 1963 he was volunteering with the Congress of Racial Equality, organizing voter education classes and serving as the liaison between CORE's outside organizers and local Black churches in Neshoba County, the most dangerous ground CORE worked.

During Freedom Summer in 1964, Chaney worked alongside Michael Schwerner, a CORE organizer from New York, and Andrew Goodman, a young volunteer, registering Black voters and setting up Freedom Schools in Neshoba County. On June 21, the three were investigating the arson of Mount Zion Methodist Church near Philadelphia, Mississippi, when Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price arrested them on a pretextual traffic charge, released them that night, and let Ku Klux Klan members intercept their car on the road out of town. The three were driven to a remote spot and shot — Chaney, the only Black man among them, beaten first and shot three times. Their disappearance set off a massive FBI search, and their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

Chaney's murder mattered to Neshoba County precisely because he was a local Black man doing the most dangerous version of the work; what actually pulled the story onto the nation's front pages was that his two co-workers were white and from New York, a fact the movement understood and sometimes resented even as it used it. A 1967 federal trial, brought under an 1870 civil rights statute because Mississippi would not prosecute murder, convicted seven men, including Price, but a hung jury let Edgar Ray Killen, who organized the killings, walk free. It took new evidence uncovered by journalist Jerry Mitchell and a group of Illinois high school students, decades later, to reopen the case.

On June 20, 2005, forty-one years after the murders, Mississippi convicted Killen on three counts of manslaughter and sentenced him to 60 years. Chaney's younger brother Ben, who was twelve when James was killed, founded the James Earl Chaney Foundation in 1998 to continue the work. In November 2014, President Obama posthumously awarded Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner the Presidential Medal of Freedom together, half a century after Freedom Summer. Meridian named a street for him, and the three men's names are now spoken as one, the way they died.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

James Chaney's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Neshoba County voter registration campaign mission
Freedom Summer, organized with CORE 1964
CORE organizing, Meridian office mission
Liaison between outside organizers and local Black churches 1963
United States v. Price case
Supreme Court case, arising from the murder investigation, that upheld federal jurisdiction over the killings 1966

Life in brief

with age at each point

May 30, 1943 aged 0 Born in Meridian, Mississippi
1958 aged ~15 Suspended for wearing an NAACP badge at his segregated high school
1962 aged ~19 Joins the Freedom Rides through Mississippi
Late 1963 aged ~20 Begins organizing full time with CORE
June 21, 1964 aged 21 Murdered with Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
August 4, 1964 aged 21 Bodies found buried in an earthen dam
1967 aged ~24 Federal trial convicts seven men, including Deputy Cecil Price
June 20, 2005 aged 62 Edgar Ray Killen convicted of manslaughter, 41 years later
November 2014 aged 71 Posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom