Mineola resident spent time with Mississippi Burning victims the day they were killed

Bernice Sims was a front-row witness and nearly became a victim herself in the infamous 1964 “Mississippi Burning” case in which three civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

For decades afterward, the Mineola resident could not bring herself to speak publicly about a case that stunned the nation, galvanized the civil rights movement, helped spur President Lyndon Johnson to sign the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and which even today she believes holds lessons for a country riven by racial tensions.

“It will always represent something very painful for me and raw,” Sims told Newsday. But “their story needs to be told.”

Sims grew up in Meridian, Mississippi, next door to James Chaney, 21, an African American who was one of the three victims on the night of June 21, 1964. Chaney, she said, “was like a brother to me.”

Also murdered that night was Michael Schwerner, 24, a New Yorker and Cornell University graduate who had been in Mississippi for six months. He was helping to organize the Freedom Summer black voter registration and education drive. Hundreds of idealistic college students, most of them white and from the north, volunteered for the effort.

Schwerner had already earned the antipathy of the local KKK and was regularly receiving death threats. He had become close to Sims’ family and was often in their house, which served as an unofficial host home for Freedom Summer workers.

Chaney and Schwerner “were almost permanent fixtures in the house,” she said.

The third victim, fellow New Yorker Andrew Goodman, 20, had arrived in Mississippi hours earlier, a new recruit from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who had just finished his junior year at Queens College.

The morning of their deaths, the three men spent a couple of hours in Sims’ home for an unscheduled visit, getting haircuts from her brothers and food from her mother. They joked around and even shot baskets with her family.

“I met Goodman the same day that he was killed,” Sims said. “We were probably one of the very few families that he had met” in Mississippi.

On the first day of Freedom Summer, the trio was going on a mission to inspect the charred remains of a rural black church 40 miles away near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner, a staff member with the Congress on Racial Equality, had planned to use it as a “Freedom School” and community center.

Days earlier, a mob of KKK members, looking for Schwerner, had firebombed the church and beaten several of its parishioners.

The three men wanted one of Sims’ brothers to go with them, but they could not. Sims, then 17 and active in the NAACP, volunteered.

Schwerner dissuaded her, saying she was more needed in the volunteers' office manning the phones. Neshoba County, where the church was located, was also a particularly notorious hotbed of white supremacist activity.

“I wanted to go because I had gone on missions with [Schwerner] and ridden around in that station wagon. I argued with him,” Sims recalled. “But he talked me out of it. I got mad at first.”

As they departed in a Ford station wagon that would later be excavated from the swamps of Mississippi by the FBI and shown on televisions nationwide, Sims chased them down the street with a grease-stained bag of fried chicken and cupcakes she wanted to give them for the trip.

“I’m running down the street with the bag, holding it up, hoping they will see me through the rearview mirror,” she said. “I wanted them to stop and also with the idea that maybe if they had stopped, I would have gotten in the car and gone with them.”

They never saw her and kept going. She may have been the last person in Meridian to see them alive. 

The three left around noon. They were supposed to be back by 4 p.m.

But at around 3:15 p.m., they were arrested near Philadelphia by a local deputy sheriff and KKK member, Cecil Price, for allegedly speeding. He took them to Neshoba County jail, where he held them long enough for a local sawmill operator and part-time preacher, Edgar Ray Killen, to round up a posse, according to extensive testimony at a 1967 federal trial for civil rights violations.

They were released about 10 p.m., though they had not been allowed to telephone anyone. As they left the police station, Price’s cruiser tailed them, followed by two carloads of KKK members. After a frantic high-speed chase on a dark highway, and with the cruiser’s patrol lights flashing, the three were caught, placed in the sheriff’s car and taken to an unmarked dirt road.

There, they were executed in quick succession. The Klansmen buried them beneath a 15-foot earthen dam on a farm. The station wagon was set ablaze.

For 44 days, the men went missing.

Two days after the murders, authorities found the car. Sims, like millions of other Americans, watched on television as the badly charred vehicle was hauled out of the swamps and woods with chains.

“It was almost surreal to me. I thought I was looking at a dream,” she told an interviewer for a 2019 documentary “Defining Moments — the Civil Rights Movement in North Hempstead.”

Despite the discovery of the car, Mississippi officials including the governor dismissed the case for weeks as part of a “hoax” by civil rights workers to gain sympathy.

Sims and other activists were fairly certain of the fate of the three workers, but forged ahead with the Freedom Summer work anyway, trying to block out the trauma.

“We knew they were missing, but we just had to finish the job." Sims said.

About a week later, on July 2, as attention on the case intensified amid a search for the bodies, Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act.

On Aug. 4, acting on a tip from a paid FBI informant, searchers found the bodies.

Sims was numb, now fully recognizing the danger she had been in.

“We didn’t know he [Schwerner] was marked for murder. Wherever he went, we went with him, just as naive as everything,” she said.

As that reality sank in, so did survivor’s guilt for not going with them that day. She thought to herself, “What if I had been there? Maybe I could have stopped it.”

Not long after, she left Mississippi. She went to Oklahoma, where a sister lived, and attended the University of Oklahoma.

Eventually she relocated to New York, moving to Hempstead in 1972 and studying to become a social worker at Hofstra and Adelphi universities. She worked in the Lawrence and Wyandanch public school systems. In 1989, she was appointed as the first African American woman trustee in the Village of Hempstead.

For years she could not talk publicly about the killings or even read accounts of them.

In 1988, the film “Mississippi Burning” starring Gene Hackman came out, elevating the case to even more widespread fame. But Sims could never bring herself to watch it in its entirety.

The case remained unsolved for decades, with no one charged with the murders even though Mississippi authorities knew the identities of the Klansmen from the federal investigation.

Finally, on June 21, 2005, exactly 41 years after the murders, Killen, the KKK mastermind, was convicted of three counts of manslaughter. He had orchestrated the killings though he was not at the scene of the crime, having gone to a wake so he would have an alibi, according to prosecutors. The 17 Klansmen who executed them were never charged with murder, noted David Goodman, Andrew’s brother.

Around the 50th anniversary of the killings, in 2014, Sims began to open up about her role in the case.

“By not talking about it, I was keeping them safe somehow unconsciously,” as if the murders never happened, she said. But she came to realize she could best honor them by telling her story.

“I can’t go into a voting booth today without thinking about those three men and the sacrifices they made.” Sims said.