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8 The Dawn Broke Hot and Somber City—were reported missing in Neshoba County. They had gone on June 21 to look into the burning of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, where Schwerner had been urging congregants to register to vote and to set up a Freedom School. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) went in to investigate and two days after the men’s disappearance found their hidden and still smoking station wagon, which had been set on fire. Throughout July, the FBI had no luck in finding the three workers themselves but—sickeningly—did discover the corpses of eight African American men, one of whom wore a CORE shirt, as they looked through the area’s swamps, rivers, and woods.14 Agents finally found the men’s bodies on August 4 buried under an earthen dam near Phil- adelphia, Mississippi.15 Again, the organizers and volunteers in Mississippi had mixed success during their march for equal rights. While relatively few African Americans actually registered to vote during the Freedom Summer initiative, the media focus on the deaths and violence in the state revealed to the rest of the coun- try that something had to be done to address these atrocities. African Ameri- can leaders also used their voices to continue the push for action. Martin Luther King Jr., under the protection of the FBI, visited Mississippi for five days in July 1964, urging the federal government to do more to protect Afri- can Americans, particularly in their right to vote—even if it took U.S. mar- shals to do so. Sadly, that same morning, authorities announced that another church had been burned, this time in McComb, bringing the total to 10 Afri- can American churches over the last two months.16 Other black leaders began to adopt a more strident tone in the call for African American rights. Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad had already come to the conclusion that viable options for the future did not include integration and nonviolence. Stokely Carmichael, who participated in the Freedom Rides in 1961 and Freedom Summer in 1964, and who would eventually ascend to the leader- ship of SNCC, grew frustrated at the slow pace of progress the movement seemed to be making and became skeptical of integration. He soon adopted the mantra of “Black Power” and helped sow the seeds for the Black Panthers created in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in 1966. Still other leaders sought to change the system from within the government. Organizers of Freedom Summer also created the Mississippi Freedom Demo- cratic Party (MFDP), open to all voters, to encourage African Americans to cast their ballots in the upcoming elections since they remained shut out of the state’s all-white Democratic Party. They sent 68 delegates to the Demo- cratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in August 1964, whom Democratic Party organizers effectively blocked from participating (in a “compromise” brokered by Democratic Party operatives that the MFDP had no say in, they gave the MFDP delegates two at-large seats at the convention, which they refused on principle). They did, however, successfully gain the country’s attention through their televised testimony before the Democratic