Mayor-elect James Young will be the keynote speaker at an annual service memorializing three young men who were murdered here in 1964 registering blacks to vote.
Young, the first African-American elected mayor of Philadelphia, will speak at the 3 p.m. service on Sunday, June 21 at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church on the 45th anniversary of the brutal killings.
An out-of-town group is planning a separate program and march the Saturday before, June 20, according to reports.
The Neshoba County murders were among the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era, in part because the murder plot involved law enforcement.
The young men, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, all in their 20s, were ambushed and later shot by the Ku Klux Klan on Father's Day, June 21, 1964. They were in Neshoba County investigating the burning of Mt. Zion five days earlier.
The Klan believed the church was playing a central role in the black voter registration effort.
Several members were beaten, severely, as they left the church the night of the fire.
In 1967, seven men were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three murder victims.
The 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning" was a highly fictionalized account of the murders.
In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time Baptist preacher and sawmill owner, was convicted on three counts of manslaughter for his role in orchestrating the murders.
Killen received three 20-year consecutive sentences.
Mt. Zion is in the Longdale community about 10 miles east of town off Mississippi 16 on county Road 747.
For more information, contact Jewel McDonald at 601-650-9720 or Elsie Kirksey at 601-656-8277.
The out-of-town group is planning a 10 a.m. march from Nebo Missionary Baptist Church in west Philadelphia to the courthouse, the route that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took in 1966, reports said.
