Julia Chaney-Moss, sister of slain civil rights worker James Chaney, talks ‘the other Philadelphia’

The Rev. Julia Chaney-Moss was 17 “when it happened.”

That’s how Chaney-Moss, who now lives in South Jersey, sometimes talks about the night of June 21, 1964.

That was the night her brother, James Earl Chaney, 21, Michael Schwerner, 24, and Andrew Goodman, 20, were killed by Ku Klux Klan members who were accompanied by a local deputy sheriff, Cecil Price.

The young civil rights activists — Chaney was Black and lived in Meridian, Miss.; Schwerner and Goodman were white, Jewish and both from New York — were working to help Black people register to vote in Mississippi during “Freedom Summer.” The FBI called the case “Mississippi Burning,” and it garnered world-wide attention. It helped spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Last month, the Underground Railroad Museum of Burlington County honored James Chaney and several former New Jersey residents for Black History Month at Rowan College at Burlington County in Mount Laurel.

Chaney-Moss, now 77, accepted the Wall of Honor Award on behalf of her brother, whom she called “J.E.”

Chaney-Moss spoke in a soft, measured voice and did not go into details about the pain of losing her brother to racial violence.

She talked about how her father, Ben Chaney Sr., was a builder who worked on many of the university and office buildings across the state.

Her mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, had been a baker. They lived in an integrated neighborhood in Meridian, with Black and white families on the same block.

“It was kind of a mixed neighborhood, although the neighbors didn’t mingle,” she later told The Inquirer. “That was the kind of environment we grew up in. Everybody minded their own business.”

Also honored that night at Rowan were former Palmyra Police Chief Payton I. Flournoy; Franco Harris, the Pittsburgh Steeler running back and Mount Holly native; Carl Lewis, the Olympic gold medalist from Willingboro; Eugene Stafford the first Black police officer and first Black mayor of Mount Holly, and the Women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an predominantly Black battalion of the Woman’s Army Corps (WACs), who served in Europe during World War II.

There have been documentary films and televised movies about the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. However, perhaps the most well-known Hollywood film about the case, Mississippi Burning, (1988) has been widely criticized for centering the white FBI agents who investigated the case as the film’s heroes. One reviewer wrote: “The fact that black people were not just victims, but activist-heroes in their own struggle, is totally left out.”

On June 13, 1964, nearly 1,000 college students from across the country arrived at the Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio, for two weeks of training before setting out as volunteers for Freedom Summer.

Schwerner and Chaney, who were already working as CORE staffers in Meridian, had traveled to Ohio to help train the new volunteers. On campus, they met Andrew Goodman, a new volunteer. They were in Ohio, when they learned that a Black church, Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Miss., had been burned to the ground. Before leaving for Ohio, Chaney and Schwerner had gotten permission to host a Freedom School at the church that summer.

On Saturday, June 20, Chaney and Schwerner, joined by Goodman, drove from Ohio to investigate the church burning. After visiting the church and meeting with church officials, the three men set out to drive back to Meridian on Sunday afternoon, June 21.

At about 5 p.m., as they drove into Philadelphia, Miss., the civil rights workers were stopped by Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price. Price claimed that Chaney, who had been driving, was speeding. They were arrested and taken to jail and were released about 10:30 p.m. They never made it back to Meridian.

The civil rights workers’ burned-out blue station wagon was found two days later near Philadelphia, Miss. — news accounts at the time described the town, as “the other Philadelphia.”

But the bodies of the men would not be found until 44 days later, on Aug. 4, 1964.

» READ MORE: Murder in Mississippi

There was worldwide attention focused on the activists. And that was because two of the victims were white, family members of both Chaney and Schwerner have said.

Indeed, during the 44 days, while FBI agents and others searched for the bodies of the three civil rights workers, they recovered the bodies of a 14-year-old boy, two 19-year-old men, and five unidentified men from the Mississippi River. All were Black.

In 1967, only seven of 18 men initially tied to the killings were convicted of federal civil rights violations. None served longer than six years. In June 2005, 41 years to the day after the killings, a jury convicted Edgar Ray Killen, 80, a Klansman and a Baptist preacher, of manslaughter. He died in 2018 at age 92 at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

In the months after her brother was murdered, Chaney-Moss said white men drove through her mother’s neighborhood, blasting firecrackers and tossing eggs at the family home.

At the time, Chaney-Moss had recently graduated from nursing school and gotten married. She wasn’t living at home with her mother.

Three of the four surviving Chaney siblings were already adults in 1964. Only the youngest brother, Ben Chaney Jr., who was 11, still lived at home.

Terrifying phone calls were being made to her mother’s house, calls that threatened to “dynamite” the home, and members of Schwerner’s and Goodman’s families helped Chaney-Moss’ mother and younger brother move to New York.

Chaney-Moss remained in Meridian for several years after her brother was killed.

She tried to persuade her husband to move to New York also. She was now the mother of two young daughters and feared for their lives.

But her husband not only did not want to leave the state, he also didn’t want her to work, either. Chaney-Moss said she was restless and wanted to do more with her life.

Five years after her brother’s murder, she took her two daughters to New York, leaving her husband behind. The two never divorced.

In New York, she took a secretarial job at New York University, after she learned she could take classes for free if she worked there. She earned certificates at NYU and eventually worked at the New York Foundling, a social service agency for 40 years.

Sometime in the 1990s, she moved with her mother to Willingboro, where another sister, Barbara, had already moved.

“One day, my mother said to me, ‘I am tired of walking out on this concrete. I want to walk on some grass,‘” Chaney-Moss told The Inquirer.

Today, she is the last of the five Chaney siblings from Meridian, Miss. The day after she spoke at Rowan College, Chaney-Moss buried her remaining sibling, her brother, Ben Chaney Jr., who was 71.

About 30 years ago, Chaney-Moss became a minister. Asked how she could have faith after living through such a tragedy, Chaney-Moss said:

“Because I have a relationship with the God of my understanding.”