By Dave Welsh
May 20, 2026

In early 1964 I was working as a city reporter for a mass-circulation daily paper, the Detroit News. In June of that year I decided to quit my job and drive to Mississippi to cover Freedom Summer, a voter registration project of the Civil Rights Movement, as a freelance reporter. At that time, only about 7% of eligible Black voters in Mississippi were registered to vote.

I’d barely arrived in Mississippi when I learned that three young Civil Rights workers — James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, white volunteers from New York — had disappeared on June 21, after being released from jail. This was the first day of Freedom Summer.

Their burned-out car was found in a swamp in Neshoba County, Mississippi, two days after their disappearance. Their bullet-pierced bodies were not found until Aug. 4 that year, concealed in an earthen dam.

On June 23, Buford Posey, a white liberal member of the NAACP and prominent resident of Neshoba County, fled the state for Tennessee, under threat by the Ku Klux Klan. He said at the time that “I got out within an inch of my life.”

I interviewed Posey on June 23, 1964, near Knoxville, Tennessee, and made a quarter-inch tape of the interview. I called in the story to the Civil Rights Information Service in Chicago so that they could distribute the Posey interview to a network of Black radio stations.

Recently, in April 2026, I went looking through boxes of materials about 1964 Freedom Summer and discovered tapes I had made for the Civil Rights Information Service, including the Posey tape. I had it digitalized and listened to the following exchange, transcribed here:

Q (David Welsh): Mr. Posey, you believe the three missing Civil Rights Workers are dead? Why do you think so?

Posey: Because the Ku Klux Klansmen in Neshoba County are boasting they killed them. The killers are seen as heroes [by many in the white community] for doing it.

Q: Mr. Posey, is the Klan strong in Neshoba County?

Posey: I’d say the majority of the white men in the county belong to the Klan. If you don’t belong, you’re in trouble.

Q: [On Tuesday, June 16, 1964, Klansmen had burned the Mount Zion church in nearby Longdale and brutalized the Black parishioners] Mr. Posey, could you describe the men who did this?

Posey: There were about 30 people, 20 hooded, 10 not. Sheriff Lawrence Rainey was there.

Q: Was Sheriff Rainey wearing a hood?

Posey: He didn’t need a hood; he was wearing a badge.

Posey went on to name the individuals who were present at the lynching of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner on June 21, 1964 — including Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price, who eventually served four years in prison for his participation in the murders. I gave the names of these suspects to comedian and political investigator Dick Gregory. He passed the names of the lynch party on to the FBI, who “showed no interest” per Gregory.

In October 1967 the federal government stepped in. They charged 18 men with a role in the killing and convicted seven. Years later, a local Klan leader, Edgar Ray Killen (also named by Posey), was sentenced to 60 years for his key role in the lynching. Killen died in prison.

In 1964, most people across the country watched the TV news at night and the lynching of these three young men was a big news story. This contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act by Congress in 1965, following intense pressure from President Lyndon Johnson and Black leaders as well as a lot of public outrage.

The Voting Rights Act

Now, in May of 2026, the Supreme Court has overruled and gutted section two of the Voting Rights Act, claiming this law is “no longer necessary” to protect Black voters. In effect, they have legitimized gerrymandering, which can divide up the Black areas of a state and reduce Black representation. This can make it harder for many Black voters to elect a candidate they support.

In Louisiana, for example, one third of the population is Black. Yet the state has never had a Black senator or governor since the Reconstruction era, which followed the victory of Union forces in the U.S. Civil War. No Congressional district other than a majority-Black district has had a Black representative.

After the recent Supreme Court ruling, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry interrupted the state’s congressional primary election. Other Republican-dominated states have rushed to pass gerrymanders that may shut many Democrats out of power. In the southern states applying this now, it divides up the Black areas of the state and reduces Black representation.

I returned to Mississippi in 2024, 60 years after Freedom Summer. I asked about the changes that have taken place since 1964. For example, the state now had Black police officers and better schools, and Black people did not risk death when registering to vote. “Yet,” several Black people told me, “the people we want never seem to get elected.”

Georgia senate minority leader Harold Jones II said about the recent Supreme Court ruling: “The biggest bloc of middle and working-class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s power away … it strips political power from every single middle and working-class person and hands it to billionaires and large corporations.”