On the night of July 11, 1964, three African-American World War II veterans returning home after training at Ft. Benning, Georgia, were noticed in Athens by local members of the Ku Klux Klan. The officers were followed to nearby Broad River Bridge, where their pursuers fired into the vehicle and killed Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn. After a local jury failed to convict the suspects of murder, the federal government successfully prosecuted the men for violations under the new Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed just nine days before Penn's murder. The case was instrumental in the creation of a Justice Department task force whose work culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1968.