Author Brad Herzog looks back at 1964 Freedom Summer

'My Mantelpiece'
'My Mantelpiece' by Carolyn Goodman with Brad Herzog
Book cover courtesy of publisher

It's the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the campaign launched in June 1964 to register African-American voters in Mississippi.

Civil Rights workers, many of them college students, headed in knowing they were likely to face intimidation and even violence. But on June 21, three civil rights workers -- James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman -- disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Chaney was black. Schwermer, and Goodman were white.

Goodman had just arrived in Mississippi. His mother Carolyn Goodman's memoir of those days has just been published. She died in 2007, but writer Brad Herzog completed the book, "My Mantelpiece," based on interviews they conducted over several years.

Carolyn Goodman suspected her son was a victim of the Ku Klux Klan, but it was weeks before they knew anything for sure.

Video: Carolyn Goodman's testimony at the 2005 trial of the ringleader of the Ku Klux Klan members who murdered her son