He helps us know the young victims personally, furthermore introducing us to their killers and to the loathing and suspicion that direct relentlessly to their execution. This Banner Books edition includes Huie's report on the trial three years later. Nineteen local men were charged and seven found guilty of conspiracy but not any of murder. William Bradford Huie went to this exasperated community sent by the New York Herald Tribune to cover the breaking account. Inquiring for answers and conducting interviews, he wrote this documentary description in the intensity of the risky and melodramatic moment.
Their names were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Two were from the North and labeled locally as "outside agitators." Chaney was a Mississippi black. The murders not only disturb the nation and humiliated the state of Mississippi, nevertheless forced to loose the strong control of white supremacy in the South.
Three Lives of Mississippi was a center of the American Civil Rights Movement and especially exposed the national stage in 1963 and 1964. Few white leaders in the state defended the endeavor to obtain voting and other rights for African Americans. Over this book is the only inclusive on-the-scene account of the atrocious Freedom Summer murders in Mississippi. According to Martin Luther King, Jr: "This book is a part of the arsenal decent Americans can employ to make democracy for all truly a inheritance and not a distant dream. It relates the story of an atrocity committed on our doorstep." In the civil rights movement, 1964 was the year of Freedom Summer. On June 21, Mississippi, one of the last strongholds of segregation in America and a bloody battleground in the fight for civil rights, reached the low point.
When I saw the book assignment I was dreading reading the book and put the assignment off as long as I could. However, once I started reading I could not put it down. Huie does a great job, through his interviews and expedition for the truth, at putting you as close to the people and events of this historical time as one possibly could. It displays the most severe and explicitly admitted amount of prejudice toward the African Americans held by the citizens of the state of Mississippi during the 1960's. What makes this book interesting is that it was written between the murders and the trial. Huie knew who the murderers were, how they did it, and never expected a guilty verdict.
