Patti Miller: Most of the students had been oriented in Oxford, Ohio. It was a very intense kind of orientation. Many young, naive, white students getting together for a week and being educated by these black people who had been working in the Civil Rights movement for years trying to tell them how dangerous a situation they were entering. 

(Dramatized radio announcer) The three missing Civil Rights workers who disappeared in Mississippi last Sunday night have still not been heard from. A search so far has produced only one clue, a burned out station wagon in which the three were last seen riding. Andrew Goodman, a white college student from New York. James Chaney, a local black man from Meridian, Mississippi. And Mickey Schwerner, also white from New York, but who had been in Mississippi for some time working on voter registration in the area around Meridian. 

Marcia Moore: “And someone came in and said something to Bob Moses who was up at the front and he was quiet for a while. And then he told us about the three Civil Rights workers who had gone missing the day before as they had gone out to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County.”

Shel Stromquist: “We, as the hours went on, we realized, and we knew really from the beginning and the first sketchy reports that we had heard that the likelihood of them having been intercepted and killed was pretty high.” 

(music)

Moore: “Bob Moses had this heavy burden about what he was asking people to do. He really wanted us all to seriously think was this something that we still wanted to participate in and he wanted us all to call our families.” 

Miller: “And so they made that very, very clear to the students at the orientation that now it was obvious this was a very dangerous situation, they could die and they needed to really think clearly if they wanted to go.”

Marvin Gatch: “Once the three boys went missing it was like, I've got to go put my body on the line.” 

Miller: “Very few people went back home. Most people went on.”