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1988 SPECIAL REPORT: "MISSISSIPPI BURNING"

The postcard looks ordinary enough. It's a message written from a 20-year-old to his parents, informing them that he'd arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi for a summer job. "This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here," Andrew Goodman wrote to his mom and dad back in New York City. "The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy." The card was postmarked June 21, 1964. That was the day Andy Goodman was murdered. Fifty Five years have passed since Goodman and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were ambushed and shot dead by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen damn in rural Neshoba County - 44 days after they went missing. The three young men had been volunteering for a "Freedom Summer" campaign to register African-American voters. Their efforts helped pave the way for the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 1965 and their murders were dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning." Andy Goodman's fateful journey to Mississippi began in Manhattan, where he grew up in an upper-middle class family on the Upper West Side. His younger brother, David, says Andy was focused on fairness from an early age - whether it was protecting a little sibling from bullies or protesting social injustices around the country. As a teenager, Andy would take his younger brother to Woolworths, where people demonstrated against school segregation in the south. "He just said ... it's unfair that because of the color of your skin, you should go to a lousy school," David Goodman said. "It was an issue of fairness to him." That sense of social justice led Andy Goodman to Ohio in June 1964. It was there, at a training session for the Congress of Racial Equality, that the Queens College student would meet James Chaney, a black 21-year-old from Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner, a white 24-year-old from New York. They were training hundreds of other volunteers on how to handle the racial turmoil and potential harassment awaiting them in Mississippi. While in Ohio, Schwerner got word that one of the freedom schools he had set up in a church had been burned down. He and Chaney needed a volunteer to help them investigate the fire and they were quickly impressed by the level-headed Goodman. The three men drove down to Mississippi on June 20. The next day, they were stopped by the police and accused of speeding. After being released from jail that night, they disappeared - and a nation was riveted. President Lyndon Johnson ordered the FBI to assist local law enforcement officers in the search for the missing men. Johnson's aide Lee White told the president that there was no trace of the men and they had "disappeared from the face of the earth." Civil rights colleagues worried they had been nabbed by the KKK. Some locals dismissed their disappearance as a publicity stunt. Finally, on August 4, 1964, their bodies were found buried on the secluded property of a Klansman. All three men had been shot at point blank range and Chaney had been badly beaten. During the six-week search, the bodies of nine black men had been dredged out of local swamps. Though numerous African-Americans had been missing and presumed dead with little media attention in Mississippi during that time, the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney rocked the nation. Said David Goodman, who was 17 years old when his brother was killed: "It took two white kids to legitimize the tragedy of being murdered if you wanted to vote." It took four decades - and a determined reporter - to achieve a measure of justice in the case. In 1964, the Justice Department, then led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, knew they were up against segregationist authorities who would never charge the alleged attackers as well as all-white juries who would refuse to convict the suspects of murder. So the feds prosecuted the case under an 1870 post-reconstruction civil rights law. Seven of the 18 men arrested - including the Neshoba County deputy sheriff who tipped off the KKK to the men's whereabouts - were convicted of civil rights violations, but not murder. None served more than six years in prison. Three Klansmen, including Edgar Ray Killen, were acquitted because of jury deadlock. But Killen's name would surface decades later, in large part thanks to Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter at the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson. Mitchell's interest in the case had piqued after watching a press screening of "Mississippi Burning" in 1988. A pair of FBI agents at the screening dissected the film for Mitchell and told the reporter what really happened.