For the JFK assassination witness, see James M. Chaney.

James Earl Chaney was a civil rights worker who was murdered (along with Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman) by members of the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. Chaney's murder occurred near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Chaney was undertaking field work for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Cheney was born on May 30, 1943, in the town of Meridian, Mississippi. He had joined the Congress of Racial Equality in 1963, and was aged twenty-one when he was killed.

The circumstances surrounding the death of the three activists were the subject of the film Mississippi Burning.

On January 7, 2005 Edgar Ray Killen, once an outspoken white supremacist nicknamed the "Preacher," pleaded "Not Guilty" to Chaney's murder.

External links

• Biography
• James Earl Chaney Foundation
• CNN article on Killen plea