Mississippi

Mount Zion Methodist Church in the Longdale community of Neshoba County had agreed to host a Freedom Summer voter registration school, and on June 16, 1964 members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan attacked parishioners gathered there and burned the building to the ground that night. James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, volunteers who had been working with the congregation to organize the school, drove to Neshoba County five days later, on June 21, specifically to investigate the burning. They were arrested that afternoon on a pretextual traffic charge, held in jail for hours, and released after dark directly into a Klan ambush that had been arranged with the help of a local deputy sheriff, the three men murdered and buried in an earthen dam before their bodies were recovered weeks later in a search that drew national attention to Mississippi's civil rights violence. The church itself was eventually rebuilt and stands today as a memorial to both the volunteers and the congregation the Klan had targeted for hosting them.

That pattern, rural Baptist and Methodist congregations providing the shelter, meeting space and leadership Freedom Summer organizing depended on, and Klan violence targeting exactly those churches in retaliation, repeated across the state through 1964. Evangelical Protestant identification remains dominant in Mississippi today at forty two percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study, nearly double Historically Black Protestant at twenty.