By Lisa Cornwell
The Associated Press

OXFORD - The slaying of three civil rights workers in Mississippi 40 years ago was a distant moment in history for 16-year-old Cincinnati resident Carri Burgjohann. Then she got the chance to retrace some of their experiences here at Miami University, where they and hundreds of others trained for what became known as Freedom Summer.

"It really hit home for me in the quiet times as I walked and reflected on the same campus and sat here in the same building where all those young people were preparing to risk their lives," said Burgjohann, who is white.

Burgjohann was one of 14 high school and university students, black and white, who gathered on the Miami campus earlier this month for a joint Miami University-University of Mississippi course on Freedom Summer.

The 1964 project brought 800 mostly white college students to the former Western College for Women - now part of the Miami campus - to learn nonviolent resistance. It was training they would need when they arrived in racially segregated Mississippi later that summer to organize black voter education and registration campaigns opposed by the Ku Klux Klan.

James Chaney, 21, a black man from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, both white men from New York, left the Western campus for Mississippi on June 20, 1964. They disappeared within 24 hours of their arrival, and their bodies were found a few weeks later in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss.

Last Sunday, the college students in the course left Ohio to finish the Ole Miss portion of their class and attend today's memorial service.

Michael Huggins, 15, a black high school student from suburban Cincinnati, summed up the admiration many of the students had for the 1964 volunteers, who didn't let the deaths deter them.

"It must have taken a lot of courage to still go down there," he said.