Chaney was cultivated in the Meridian Public School District and traveled the south with his father, working as a plasterer to support his family.

In 1964, the 21-year-old devoted himself to the civil rights movement. He was known as a quiet man, hard working and rail thin. Acquaintances said he could go for days on little or no sleep, helping to register black voters and pushing for racial reform.

It was a time in Mississippi when segregation was the battlefield and southern whites viewed the civil rights movement as their Civil War, an effort to undo their preferred lifestyle of keeping white and black people socially separate.

The division line of downtown Meridian was 23rd Avenue. Blacks were allowed to shop at white-owned stores such as Kress's, Woolworth's and Newberry's — just a block or two from the black-owned businesses. But they weren't allowed to eat at the lunch counters or work there.

Chaney, who was black, and Michael Schwerner, a white civil rights worker from New York, traveled the dusty clay roads of backwoods Mississippi in a blue Ford station wagon day after day, urging blacks to register to vote and helping them overcome the obstacles to do so.

It took great courage. Their safety was always at risk from extremists who used violence to combat the civil rights movement.

Chaney and Schwerner, who was known as "Mickey" by his friends and "Goatee" by the Ku Klux Klan because of his facial hair, and Schwerner’s wife, Rita, toiled for months with local civil rights workers to teach classes at the community center, educate black people about their rights as citizens and register them to vote.