Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, civil rights workers from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), went missing on 21 June after investigating the burning of a black church in Lawndale, Mississippi. Following six weeks of intense searches, their bodies are found in an earthen dam on a farm outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. The young men had been arrested by the Neshoba County police, released, and then shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan on a country road.