In the spring of 1964, Mt. Zion Church, situated on a raised knoll in the rural African American community of Longdale, agreed to host a Freedom School that summer and held preliminary meetings with Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, civil rights activists based in the Meridian COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) office. Surveillance by the State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency, alerted the local Ku Klux Klan to the activity, and on June 16, 1964, Klansmen assaulted Mt. Zion congregants leaving a business meeting and later returned to burn the church. On June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, a Freedom Summer volunteer, visited the church site to document the arson. Beginning their return to Meridian, the three men were ambushed on the highway and later murdered, their bodies hidden in a farm pond dam nearby. While the national press focused on the FBI’s search for the missing men, Mt. Zion members began rebuilding, assisted by the Committee of Concern, a biracial, interdenominational group organized in September 1964 by William Davis of the Mississippi Baptist Convention to aid burned churches. The brick front-gabled church with a prominent stained glass window has hosted annual commemorations of the three slain men, and a granite memorial sits in front of the church. A church cemetery begun in the nineteenth century shares the site.