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MISSISSIPPI GODDAMN: YOU WERE DEFINITELY INVOLVED IN THIS  
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Abby Zimet
June 23, 2024
Common Dreams
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_ Amidst right-wing assaults on our rights and history, many deem it
vital we remember those who confronted America's brutal racist legacy
and declared, "We are not afraid." _

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holds a picture of Michael Schwerner,
James Chaney and Andrew Goodman at press conference, Getty
Image/Bettmann

 

Honoring "a story of absolute moral and physical courage," we mark the
60th anniversary of the murder of young civil rights workers James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner by white supremacists for
the crime of working to register black voters, end apartheid in the
Jim Crow South, and make a better, fairer world. Amidst right-wing
assaults on our rights and history, many deem it vital we remember
those who confronted America's brutal racist legacy and declared, "We
are not afraid."

The killing by some of the Ku Klux Klan's "very fine people" of three
young men - one black native of Mississippi, two white Jews from New
York - during 1964's "Freedom Summer" became
[[link removed]...] a seminal
moment in the Civil Rights movement. It was a fraught time in a still
defiantly-segregationist South. The previous August, Martin Luther
King Jr [[link removed]].
delivered his “I have a dream” speech to an impassioned crowd of
250,000 in D.C. Three weeks later, white supremacy responded by
bombing Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church during Sunday
school, killing four young black girls and injuring over 20; that
night, several black youths were also beaten to death. In a racist war
of rights
[[link removed]...]viciously
withheld and ardently sought, voting was viewed as key in a state
where Blacks made up about 40% of the population but - subdued by poll
taxes, literacy tests, threats of violence - less than 7% of voters'
ranks. "We had the old raggedy buses, we got the raggedy books with
somebody else's name in them," recalls Jewel Rush McDonald, 78. "My
mother (thought) there was a better way somewhere, but it wasn’t
here in Mississippi."

Since 1961, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had been sending organizers to
Mississippi to get out the vote: "They trudged up and down dirt roads,
sat on porches, went to church, walked into cotton fields and helped
with daily chores." As their numbers swelled, segregationists intent
on protecting
[[link removed]...]their power
"went to the whip hand." The mayor of Jackson added 100 new cops to
their 200-strong police force along with 200 shotguns, tear gas, three
military troop carriers, two horses and two dogs, and the governor
called a special session to double highway patrols and stockpile guns.
The Imperial Wizard of the KKK announced they needed "a secondary,
extremely swift, extremely violent, hit-and-run group as J. Edgar
Hoover's complicit FBI worked to undermine and infiltrate civil rights
groups. And all of this was before 1964's Freedom Summer campaign in
which organizers mobilized white college students, faith activists and
other Freedom Riders from the North to travel to Mississippi to
bolster voting rights efforts.

Moved to action by the 16th Street Church bombing, Michael 'Mickey'
Schwerner, 24, was a Jewish social worker in Manhattan before he began
running CORE's Meridian office with his wife Rita; in her CORE
application, she wrote she hoped to "someday pass on to the children
we may have a world containing more respect for the dignity and worth
of all men than that world which was willed to us." Michael was close
with Black Meridian native James Earl Chaney, 21, involved with civil
rights efforts since he was 16. Soon after the two convinced members
of nearby Philadelphia's Mt. Zion Methodist Church to train for voting
rights work and host a Freedom School, the Klan went to the church and
beat congregants; they later returned to set the church ablaze.
Schwerner and Chaney spent several days comforting church members. On
June 20, they drove back to Meridian with a CORE newcomer: Andrew
Goodman, 20, a Jewish student at Queens College. The day before, he
sent a postcard to his parents saying he'd arrived safely: "Dear Mom
and Dad, The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was
very good. All my love, Andy.”

The sultry morning of June 21, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman left
Meridian in an old station wagon for Philadelphia for a meeting on the
church fire. Schwerner told a volunteer he'd be back by 4; if he
wasn't, they should launch emergency protocols. With Freedom Riders
arriving daily, tensions ran high. The Klan's Edgar Ray 'Preacher'
Killen told a crew of new recruits to be ready for "the occasional
elimination." The KKK already kept close watch on CORE; thanks to his
friendship with Chaney, they'd come to especially hate Schwerner, and
routinely talked about killing him. Around 3 p.m., Sheriff's deputy
and KKKer Cecil Price pulled the three men over for "speeding," put
them in jail, and alerted Killen to assemble a lynch mob. The men paid
a fine; Price let them go around 10 p.m., chased them down a dirt road
and turned them over to a carload of KKK who began beating them.
Schwerner was dragged out first - "Are you that n***er lover?” He
tried to reason - "Sir, I know how you feel" - and was shot point
black in the chest. Goodman was shot next. Before Chaney was shot, he
was beaten with chains; he may or may not have been castrated.

Word of their disappearance quickly spread, in large part because
Schwerner and Goodman were white. Lyndon Johnson strong-armed Hoover
to send over 100 agents to Mississippi, where they uncovered the
Klan's reign of terror - and eight previously murdered black men and
boys - but not the three missing CORE workers. On July 2, the House
passed the Civil Rights Act into law. On July 16, Barry Goldwater, who
voted against the Act, accepted the GOP nomination for president; he
told delegates, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." On
Aug. 4, an FBI informant led agents to a dirt dam that held the bodies
of three men killed in the defense of what white supremacists deemed
"liberty." Goodman may have been alive when buried - he had red clay
clutched in his hands - and all Chaney's bones were broken. In
November, 18 Klan members, including Price, were arraigned on federal
charges of violating the three men's civil rights; an all-white jury
found seven guilty, but none served more than six years. Preacher
Killen went free on a hung jury. The State of Mississippi declined to
charge any of the 18 (or anyone else) with murder.

In 1988, an acclaimed book
[[link removed]..]about the
murders, and the sacrifices of so many others, was published; its
title: "We Are Not Afraid." That year also saw the release of the
award-winning movie _Mississippi Burning__;_ many whites in
Mississippi said they'd known
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almost nothing about the murders until they saw the movie. "People had
this voluntary amnesia," says Dawn Lea Mars Chalmers, 54. "There was a
whole generation that grew up and didn't know - it was a deep, dark,
secret stain...We all had these feelings of disgust and shame, like we
should have known how it was." In 2004, on the 40th anniversary of the
murders, Chalmers was one of a group of locals who started a coalition
to prosecute Edgar Ray Killen, then 80. Heeding their call, the next
year the state convicted him of manslaughter and sentenced him to 60
years. Killen died in the State Penitentiary in 2018 at 92;
perversely, his gravestone bears the title "Rev." Still, says
Chalmers, "It was some sort of reckoning that we felt led to
do...That's what (we) owe the generation that went through it - to
make sure people know what those boys were fighting for."

Many others join them
[[link removed]...] in tribute.
Every June, Mount Zion holds a service that for years Jewel McDonald
planned; she felt it was her responsibility. "They came here to help
us. I feel we owe it to them," she says, teary. “If they could die,
lose their lives - their lives were taken, I should say - that’s the
least I could do." In 2014, Obama presented
[[link removed]...]Presidential
Medals of Freedom posthumously to Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner "for
how they lived - with the idealism and the courage of youth." In May,
at Queens College commencement [[link removed]], medals
were awarded to Goodman's brother David for his Andrew Goodman
Foundation [[link removed]]'s social justice initiatives;
to the Rev. Julia Chaney-Moss, James's sister and an activist
minister; and Stephen Schwerner, Mickey's brother, for his lifelong
anti-war and civil rights advocacy. Last week, Robert Reich described,
[[link removed]...]as a child
bullied for being short, how he was protected by the same Mickey, "a
kind and gentle teenager (who) made me feel safe." Today, in an
America beset by bullies - of black, poor, gay, trans, female,
exploited - "It is incumbent on all of us to stand up to bullies, and
be each other’s protectors."

This, photographer Danny Lyon argues
[[link removed]...], "is what the
Southern civil rights movement was about" - these three men and their
"absolute moral and physical courage, literally ready to die for the
kind of ideas that this country has always claimed it stood for, and
almost never in its history actually practiced." He summons other
"unsung heroes" of the movement: Diane Nash, Bob Mosses, Fannie Lou
Hamer, the "sheer terror" faced by Freedom Riders, "John Lewis punched
in the face as he came first off the bus, mobs of over a thousand that
greeted the riders, smashing cameras, faces, and heads," black
hospitals packed with riders "with broken noses, bones, lacerations
from police clubs used against demonstrators who were actually praying
at the moment," over 14,000 people arrested during a ten-week period
in 1963 known as "Firestorm," the "action in the streets that created
the pressure for social and legal change." The lesson: "That it is
possible to make history, and that individual Americans have some
control over their destiny. It happened once - and not so long ago."

Today, Blacks make up just over half the population of about 7,000 in
a Bible-Belt Philadelphia where the Popeye's sign flashes, "Jesus is
the answer." Lynch mobs are gone, there are historic Freedom Trail
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markers - albeit "widely scattered, easily missed" - and a somewhat
incongruous Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner Memorial Highway. But a
Confederate monument still stands, the state ranks at or near the
bottom in poverty, health care, education and jobs, with Blacks
suffering disproportionately, and a local museum features exhibits on
farming, bluegrass and the beloved Neshoba County Fair but, says an
elderly docent, "We don't stress the civil rights here." In the
cemetery at Mount Zion Church, three weathered gravestones bear the
names and cameo images of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman; the dates of
death are all June 21, 1964. When their bodies were finally found,
part of the grisly mystery was solved. But a "clearly shaken" Martin
Luther King Jr. posed a "deeper question: It’s not so much who
killed those young men, but what killed them."

Key to the answer, argues Tim Moore, is accountability for systemic
racism. To white people in Philadelphia and across the South, he
asserts, "You were definitely involved in this."' Still, for black
people, says Eddie Hinton, 64, who serves as pastor for four small
congregations, including Mount Zion, "Even after all those years,
they’re still hurting....A message of healing is what I search for
most of the time." As to the better world the three men died for,
suggests James Young, 68, patience is required. As a young boy, Young
remembers watching his father lie on the living room floor, rifle
ready, after the community got word "the Klan is riding tonight."
Today, as four-term mayor and the town's first African-American
leader, he says, "We have made strides to be better..I'm gonna put it
just like that." Mirroring the city's brutal past, he says, "I have
seen the power of the vote." He won his first race for mayor by 45
votes. "We went after every live body that was registered," he says,
pleading with them to go vote. "We found out some weren't going
because they couldn't read, or because they didn't want to tell folks
they couldn't read. And this was 2009."

Still, while Philadelphia has changed, Leroy Clemons, 62, wonders
[[link removed]]if
it's possible to truly move forward into the future without grappling
with the past. A sort of ambassador for his city, Clemons works with
youth and leads civil rights tours - though usually from out of state,
not within a GOP-controlled state that created a new Constitution
specifically for the purpose of disenfranchising African American
voters. On his tours, he takes students to Mount Nebo Missionary
Church, the McClelland Cafe, the town's only black-owned business that
survived the civil rights era, and the wooded area where Schwerner,
Chaney and Goodman were murdered. "I always say to young people, 'I'm
going to tell you what happened. But I want y'all, more importantly,
to understand why those things were happening.'" In that spot, he
kneels and feels terror: "It immediately takes me back to that night -
as a Black man, a Black person... I can see the faces of those young
boys standing out there with these men, not knowing what to expect.
When I’m down on my knees, and I’m telling the story, it’s like
I can feel Michael there, holding his friend James, in his arms."

===

Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime,
award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early
70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and
writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during
the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor,
anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email:
[email protected]

* James Chaney
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* Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner; Freedom Summer; Systemic
Racism;
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