One of the iconic events of the civil rights era was the murder of three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman 
and Michael Schwerner — in Philadelphia, Mississippi on June 21, 1964. They even made a major motion picture about it — Mississippi Burning (1988).
“In 1989,” according to a March 29th, 1999 article in The Washington Post, Trent Lott, “refused to co-sponsor a congressional resolution designating June 21 as Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner Day after the three civil rights workers murdered 25 years earlier in Mississippi.”
This little snippet gets at what is really almost the bigger scandal of this whole Trent Lott affair. I didn’t dig this fact up in some dusty vault. I didn’t get put onto it by some secret source. It’s in a Washington Post article from three years ago.
The truth is that everyone who’s sentient and even remotely keeps up on politics has known about this stuff for years — at least since the last Trent Lott-segregation scandal broke back in late 1998. Sad to say, everyone just agreed not to pay attention, not to care.
P.S. Special thanks to TPM reader NP for bringing this particular three year old article to my attention.
