Aug. 4, 1964: Civil Rights Workers Bodies Found

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools. 24 pages.
A series of role plays that explore the history and evolution of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including freedom rides and voter registration.

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Unit with three lessons on voting rights, including the history of the struggle against voter suppression in the United States.

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
A companion lesson to the Eyes on the Prize segment on school desegregation.

Teaching Activity. By Julian Hipkins III, Deborah Menkart, Sara Evers, and Jenice View.
Role play on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) that introduces students to a vital example of small “d” democracy in action. For grades 7+.

Article. By Emilye Crosby and Judy Richardson. 2015.
Key points in the history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act missing from most textbooks.

Book — Non-fiction. By John Dittmer. 1995. 560 pages.
A detailed, grassroots description of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.

Rev. George W. Lee, one of the first African Americans registered to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction and head of the Belzoni, Mississippi NAACP, was murdered.

Lamar Smith, 63-year-old farmer and WWI veteran, was shot dead in Brookhaven, Mississippi, for urging African Americans to vote.

James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were tortured and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

The bodies of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, were found in the Mississippi River. They had been tortured and murdered by the Klan two months earlier.

Jimmie Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by an Alabama state trooper during a peaceful voting rights march on Feb. 18. He died eight days later.

Vernon Dahmer was killed when the Ku Klux Klan fired bombed his home. This was one day after Dahmer offered to pay the election poll tax for anyone who could not afford it.

U.S. District Judge issued an injunction ordering police in Grenada, Mississippi to stop interfering with lawful protest. This ruling followed weeks of arrests and beating of demonstrators who had been attempting to desegregate businesses in the town.