Jeanne Seagle and Bernice Sims made their way to Voices of Civil Rights events in Memphis this weekend on different days, at different locations. Each woman, moved by a longing to tell what she knew and, perhaps, relieve a personal burden, shared her own story about one of the most harrowing incidents in civil rights history: the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner.

In a steady voice that cracked now and then, Bernice Sims said she was 13 or 14 in 1964 when she waved goodbye to the three young men who were working on voter registration in Mississippi with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). "JC" Chaney was her next-door neighbor and lifelong family friend. A fixture at her family's home, "Mickey" Schwerner was a young white Northerner whom Sims's mother affectionately called her "adopted Jewish son." Sims did not know Andrew Goodman well, but apparently he agreed with his companions that day when they told her she couldn't go with them because she was a girl.

Two months later, after the FBI and federal troops scoured Mississippi's byways and back roads in an unprecedented search, the burned-out silver station wagon that Sims watched her friends leave her house in was discovered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their bodies were soon recovered.

Sims, a trained social worker, told me this story this morning as we walked in front of the balcony of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. The site where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lay shot and dying, it's a memorial now and part of the National Civil Rights Museum.

Yesterday, in a multipurpose room at Memphis's Lewis Senior Center, Jeanne Seagle talked about the murders, too. Her voice was cool and unwavering as she picked up the story of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner from a perspective that couldn't be more different from Sims's. Yet I sensed that the women shared the same unhealed hurt.

A girlfriend's father, Seagle said, was one of the Ku Klux Klansmen involved in the murders. How does she know that? Her girlfriend joked and boasted about it. The Klansman himself eagerly shared the details of the kidnapping and killings with other whites in the community. Now an artist, Seagle went on to live a "double life" among her white friends and neighbors, hiding the fact that she was contributing to civil rights by teaching black preschoolers.

Two strangers followed the same path this weekend, a path they unknowingly shared. Each was compelled by history and, I think, by the instinct of survivors desperate to shed light on the evil they've seen.