Three Civil Rights Workers Martyred
by: Dr. Clint Wilson
A benchmark event in the history of the Civil Rights Movement took place in Mississippi when three young men, participating in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Freedom Summer project, were killed by a Ku Klux Klan mob.
Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were among a thousand mostly white student volunteers who went South to set up “Freedom Schools.” James Chaney was a black civil rights worker from Meridian, Miss. who joined Schwerner and Goodman in efforts to promote a positive sense of black history and identity among black children and to support nonviolence in the struggle for racial equality.
When the three disappeared near Philadelphia, Miss. many feared the worst because the state was notorious for acts of violence against any that would challenge segregationist principles. Before the bodies were found, the Pittsburgh Courier revealed those fears in its Independence Day issue of 1964.
STUDENT RIGHTS GROUPS FEAR FOR LIVES IN MISS. PHILADELPHIA, Miss. – "The possibility of receiving physical harm and even death is always a real and present one."
This was the warning contained in an information sheet issued to student recruits for the Mississippi Project. With the disappearance of three of these young people last week, fear is beginning to build that this might not have been merely a warning but a prediction.
As of press time, no traces had been found of Mickey Schwerner, 24, James E. Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20. Chaney is a Negro plasterer from nearby Meridian, while the other two are white.
Only a charred station wagon, in which the youths had been riding when last seen, remained as a clue, in spite of an intensive search of the swampy, snake-infested area where it was spotted by FBI agents, working in connection with sailors fulfilling Federal duty.
These three had been among the first of nearly a thousand students to arrive in this racial "No Man’s Land," where they are devoting their summer to a massive voter registration and education campaign being conducted among Mississippi Negroes.
Though whites have reacted to news of the project with the expected resentment, referring to it as an "invasion," the intentions of these young volunteers seems indeed mild.
Objectives of the project, the most ambitious of its kind ever undertaken in Mississippi, are voter registration drives, mock election campaigns and the conducting of "Freedom Schools" where Negro children will be taught to respect themselves and to have faith in their own potential. Demonstrations had not been included in the plans.
But Mississippi whites, and particularly those in "Bloody Neshoba" County, don’t like outsiders, especially when their aim is to do something for Negroes. That is why civil rights workers fear that the fate which befell Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman – whatever it might be – may also befall others.
It was last Sunday when the trio was released from jail here after Chaney had been arrested for speeding, with the other two being held for investigation. They had come here to investigate the bombing of a nearby Negro church, where civil rights meetings had been held.
Chaney was released on $20 bond and they were sent on their way. Now it seems that they never reached their destination, for it was not long after that when FBI agents dispatched to this area at President Johnson’s direction, spotted the station wagon, still burning, in a swampy spot 12 miles northeast of here.
Careful examination of the car, sifting of the ashes and even a "fine-tooth-comb" investigation of the surrounding area failed to turn up the missing men or their remains.
. . . Integration leaders now wonder if they must add the names of these three men to a growing list that includes Emmett Till, Mack Charles Parker and Medgar Evers -- all victims of racial slayings in Mississippi.
Indications are that the missing youths had expected trouble. A worker at the community center which Schwerner had established six months ago in Meridian, said that the young men had received several threatening phone calls and that he had been greatly concerned over a possible attempt on his life.
A key member of the Congress of Racial Equality task force in Mississippi and a former settlement house worker in Brooklyn, Schwerner had been deeply interested in the plight of the Negro even before his college days at Cornell University.
On his application for a job with CORE, he had written "The Negro in the South has an even more bitter fight ahead of him than in the North, and I wish to be a part of that fight. I would feel guilty and almost hypocritical if I did not give full time."
Following through on his desires, Schwerner came to Mississippi and set up the only effective community center in the state. In Meridian, along with his wife, he transformed a run-down doctor’s office into a five-room unit with a 10,000 book library, typewriters, a sewing machine and recreational facilities.
Chaney was one of those working closely with Schwerner at the center. The son of a relatively prosperous construction crew foreman, he had come from a family which had been involved in the civil rights movement for years. His 11-year-old brother already has been jailed twice for participating in rights activities.
Goodman was not only the youngest of the three, but the only newcomer, being a student at Queens College in New York. His friends there had been unaware of his interest in the civil rights movement, but his father, Robert, a general contractor, said his son always had been "deeply conscious of moral right."
When young Goodman expressed a desire to go to Mississippi for the summer project, his father gave his permission because, "we couldn’t turn our backs on the values we had instilled in him at home."
It is known that Schwerner might have had an idea of what lay in store for him last Sunday afternoon, for before the three climbed into that blue1964 Ford station wagon, he had asked that the Federal Bureau of Investigation be contacted if they did not check in by 4 P.M.
Chaney also had seemed unusually worried and remarked, "There’s likely to be trouble."
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