James Snowden was an American truck driver and white supremacist. He was arrested as a co-conspirator in the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, for transporting the kidnapped activists to a remote location to be killed. He was a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He was sentenced in 1967 by federal district judge William Cox to three years for depriving the murdered men of their civil rights.

The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, also known as the Freedom Summer murders, the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders, or the Mississippi Burning murders, were the abduction and murder of three activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964, during the Civil Rights Movement. The victims were James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign by attempting to register African Americans in Mississippi to vote. Since 1890 and through the turn of the century, Southern states had systematically disenfranchised most black voters by discrimination in voter registration and voting.