He was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964.

[9] On June 21, 1964, Chaney and fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi.

They accused the sheriff's deputy, Cecil Price, of stopping their caravan and forcing the deacons to kneel in the headlights of their own cars, while white men beat them with rifle butts.

On the way back to Meridian, they were stopped by patrol lights and two carloads of Ku Klux Klan members on Highway 19, then taken in Price's car to another remote rural road.

The FBI was brought into the case by John Doar, the Department of Justice representative in Mississippi monitoring the situation during Freedom Summer.

Schwerner's widow Rita, who also worked for CORE in Meridian, expressed indignation that the press had ignored previous murders and disappearances of blacks in the area, but had highlighted this case because two white men from New York had gone missing.

[13][14] Helped by the Goodman and Schwerner families, and other supporters, they moved to New York City, where Chaney's younger brother Ben attended a private, majority-white high school.

The journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, had discovered new evidence and written extensively about the case for six years.

In 2004, Barry Bradford, an Illinois high school teacher, and his three students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel, joined Mitchell's efforts in a special project.

Their documentary, produced for the National History Day contest, presented important new evidence and compelling reasons for reopening the case.

[1] The murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, being pivotal to the events of the Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement as a whole, is referred to in Alice Walker’s Meridian, which was published in 1976.

Alice Walker’s Meridian, while following fictional characters, refers to key moments of the Civil Rights protests such as this for context and clarity.