Mississippi Burned

It took 44 days after their murders for FBI agents to find the bodies of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney buried 15 feet beneath an earthen dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were spending the summer of 1964 registering black voters. It took 41 years for the man who orchestrated and carried out the killings, Ku Klux Klan organizer Edgar Ray Killen, to be prosecuted on murder charges.

A half-century after their disappearance, Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were posthumously awarded on Monday the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest honor that can be bestowed on civilians — for their contributions to civil rights.

  alJazeer

An award they did indeed deserve, but one which has been besmirched by having been given to the likes of Alan Greenspan, George Tenet, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Strom Thurmond, Henry Kissinger, George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan.

It is an overbroad award.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is awarded by the President of the United States "for especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors"

  Wikipedia

It is also a conflicted award, numbers (1) and (2) being mutually exclusive.

Schwerner was a 24-year-old white New Yorker and Freedom Summer volunteer who had earned the ire of Klansmen because of his role in organizing a boycott of a store in Meridian, Mississippi, that had a large black clientele but employed no black workers. Chaney, 21, was an African-American Meridian native affiliated with the Congress for Racial Equality who was Schwerner’s friend and associate. The two recruited Goodman, a 20-year-old white student from Queens College in Manhattan, to accompany them to investigate the burning of a black church in Neshoba County.

As the three men left the church on June 21, 1964, police stopped their car and, citing them for speeding, took Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner to jail. Officers were then believed to have tipped off Klansmen about their whereabouts so that when they were released late at night, they were ambushed, chased to an isolated country road and shot. Chaney’s body was badly beaten and mutilated beyond recognition.

[...]

In 1967, seven men were convicted on federal civil rights charges in the conspiracy to murder Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman by an all-white jury, but none served prison sentences more than six years. In 2005, largely thanks to the unearthing of new evidence by investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell, the state re-opened the investigation, ultimately trying and convicting [Ku Klux Klan organizer Edgar Ray] Killen as the lead perpetrator. The former Baptist preacher is serving three consecutive 20-year prison terms.