Volunteer Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons recalls hearing that James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were missing ... fact that the majority of the summer volunteers were white.

Schwerner, however, was not there that day; he had gone to Oxford, Ohio, to train a group of Freedom Summer volunteers ... college students who had been kidnapped, beaten, and murdered in May ...

and Michael Schwermer—went missing and were later found to have been murdered by a group of angry white supremacists. But there was more to the Freedom Summer than the murders of Chaney ...

They were well aware of the risks they were taking even before Aug. 4, when searchers dug the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers from an earthen dam. Freedom Summer was lurching ...

The missing workers drove that point home because we were quite frank telling the volunteers, "We think they are dead." ... Nelson: When the white community heard that this Freedom Summer was ...