Word: meridian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Saturday, June 20, their week-long Oxford orientation course completed, Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman and five other young civil rights workers got into a CORE-owned blue station wagon to drive to Meridian. They had scheduled their trip so as to avoid driving through Deep Dixie after dark, always a perilous proposition for integration workers in such states as Alabama and Mississippi. As they passed through Birmingham, Ala., a car loaded with white teenagers pulled alongside, screamed "Nigger lover!" at a white girl student sitting next to Chaney in the station wagon...
...Church Ruins. The next day, Sunday, June 21, the three men got haircuts from a Negro barber in Meridian. They planned to drive to Longdale, Miss., 50 miles away in adjoining Neshoba County, to inspect the ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church, a meeting place for civil rights groups, which had been burned to the ground five days before. Bombings and burnings seem fashionable in Mississippi nowadays. Recently, churches at Brandon, Ruleville, Clinton and Hattiesburg have been either damaged or destroyed by fire or bombs; a Negro home in McComb has been bombed, and the N.A.A.C.P. meeting place...
...become a commonplace in his life, but in recent weeks they had seemed even more ominous. Besides, he knew that the license number of the station wagon had been circulated by the area's Citizens Council. Chaney had the car's tank filled with gasoline before leaving Meridian; the three workers did not want to make any unnecessary stops in dangerous territory...
...farmhouse of Junior Roosevelt Cole, 58, a Negro and lay leader of the church, who told them that on the night of the fire he was dragged from his car in the churchyard and clubbed unconscious by a mob of whites. Schwerner asked Cole to come to Meridian Tuesday. "We want to get this fire business straightened out," Schwerner told him. "We want to stop all this...
...Search. At 5 o'clock that afternoon, while driving back to Meridian, the Ford was stopped on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Miss. (pop. 5,500), by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Price arrested Chaney on a charge of driving 65 m.p.h. in a 30-m.p.h. zone, took all three to the county jail, just off the town square...