Over the course of the ten-week project : Volunteers were attacked almost as soon as the campaign started . On June 21 , 1964 , James Chaney ( a black Congress of Racial Equality CORE activist from Mississippi ) , Andrew Goodman ( a summer volunteer ) , and Michael Schwerner ( a CORE organizer ) - both Jews from New York City - were arrested by Cecil Price , a Neshoba County deputy sheriff and KKK member . The three were held in jail until after nightfall , then released . They drove away into an ambush on the road by Klansmen , who abducted and killed them . Goodman and Schwerner were shot at point-blank range . Chaney was chased , beaten mercilessly , and shot three times . After weeks of searching in which federal law enforcement participated , on August 4 , 1964 , their bodies were found to have been buried in an earthen dam . The men 's disappearance the night of their release from jail was reported on TV and on newspaper front pages , shocking the nation . It drew massive media attention to Freedom Summer and to Mississippi 's " closed society . " When the men went missing , SNCC and COFO workers began phoning the FBI requesting an investigation . The parents of the missing children were able to put so much pressure on Washington that meetings with President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were arranged . Finally , after some 36 hours , Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized the FBI to get involved in the search . FBI agents began swarming around Philadelphia , Mississippi , where Chaney , Goodman , and Schwerner had been arrested after they had investigated the burning of a local black church that was a center for political organizing . For the next seven weeks , FBI agents and sailors from a nearby naval airbase searched for the bodies , wading into swamps and hacking through underbrush . FBI director J. Edgar Hoover went to Mississippi on July 10 to open the first FBI branch office there
abducted and killed
Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner
Freedom Summer