On the afternoon of June 21, 1964, Deputy Cecil Price stopped a station wagon near Philadelphia, arrested James Chaney for speeding and held Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman for questioning. The three civil rights workers were locked in this jail. When COFO staff in Meridian began telephoning, they were falsely told the men were not there. Price let them go about 10:30 that night. By then Klansmen had assembled. Price stopped the men again outside town, and a mob took them to an isolated spot, tortured Chaney, shot all three and buried them in an earthen dam.
The jail on East Myrtle Street was built in 1955 and used until 1978, the third on its site; the first, of timber, burned in 1906. A state marker placed in 2012 by the Neshoba County Historical Commission names the three men. In 1967 a federal jury convicted seven of eighteen men charged with conspiracy, among them Price and the Klan's Imperial Wizard, Sam Bowers, and no one served more than six years. Edgar Ray Killen, whose first jury hung, was convicted of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, forty-one years to the day.
Downtown Philadelphia is a National Register historic district, listed in 2005, and the jail is part of it. On June 21, 1966, a voter registration march led by Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr. stopped at the jail before going on to the Neshoba County Courthouse. The county's African American driving tour links this stop to Mount Zion Methodist Church. The visit here is the marker and the street.
The closest stops worth working into your route