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A CORE organizer working to register Black voters in Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign, Schwerner was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in Neshoba County alongside fellow activists James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. The killing, aimed at stopping a campaign to reverse decades of Black disenfranchisement in the state, became one of the civil rights movement's defining atrocities and a catalyst for federal action.