Mount Zion is a Black Methodist church in Longdale, about eight miles east of Philadelphia, and it is where the story of the 1964 Neshoba County murders begins. Freed people began farming their own land in Longdale around 1870, and in 1879 Thomas and Harriet Jones filed the first deed there held by Black owners. A church has stood on this ground since 1899. In 1964 its members voted, to let civil rights workers use it for a Freedom School, after Michael Schwerner and Dave Dennis spoke to them on May 31.
On the night of June 16, Klansmen set up roadblocks at both ends of the church drive. They beat Bud Cole, breaking his jaw, and Georgia Rush, breaking her collarbone, and later that night burned the church. No one was ever charged with the arson. On June 21, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner came to see the ruins and talk with church members. Arrested in Philadelphia that afternoon and released after dark, they were murdered by a Klan mob that night and buried in an earthen dam. The FBI found their bodies on August 4.
The congregation rebuilt on the same spot with a loan from the Methodist conference and gifts from a biracial Committee of Concern, and turned down a gift from the white First Methodist Church in Philadelphia because it came with conditions on how the building could be used. The new church was dedicated in February 1966. Two granite memorials to the three men stand on the grounds, beside a state marker. The dam is on private land.
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