June 21 · This Day in America
On a Sunday night in Neshoba County, three civil rights workers — James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, white volunteers from New York — are stopped, jailed on a pretext, released into the dark, and followed. They had come to register Black voters during Freedom Summer, and to investigate a church the Klan had burned. They do not arrive anywhere. For 44 days the country watches a search of swamps and earthen dams while the FBI combs the county. The bodies are found in an earthen dam in August. It took the disappearance of two white students for the nation to look hard at what Black Mississippians had long known. The killings helped force the Civil Rights Act through that summer and the Voting Rights Act the next. The price of the franchise, paid in a Mississippi night, was three lives.
Source: www.fbi.gov
Also on this day · 1788
By a vote of 57 to 47, New Hampshire becomes the ninth state to ratify the Constitution — the exact number Article VII required to bring the new government into being. Quietly, without a battle or a bell, the United States as we know it begins. Virginia and New York were still arguing. They did not yet know a small state's narrow vote had already settled it: the experiment would proceed.
Source: www.archives.gov