That's just what they did. Why? Because they could. Why? Because the two Jewish young men were from New York and they were registering black people to vote. Why? Because black people had no right to vote. (still don't in many parts of the country)
Why do I write about these events that happened so long ago and far away now? Why here?
I wrote a diary earlier today, yesterday now, about the Supreme Court deciding to meddle with the Voting Rights Act.
Barack's election did NOT end need for Civil Rights The diary was written to call attention to an earlier diary by ProgressiveSouth:BREAKING: Supremes hear BIG challenge to Voting Rights Act
An act that was passed into law due to the howl of outrage that shook this country over the brutal lynching deaths of Micheal Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Cheney.
Where is the howl of outrage from Daily Kos? BREAKING obviously broke nothing. A small ripple as it slid quickly off the list, replaced by important discussions of Arlen Spectre.
So what if I write about "Gays lose right to vote" or "Women denied suffrage". Will you hear me then? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
But I digress.
This is a story about 3 young men who died. Died horribly. Died alone. Died being mocked. Died because of a vote. How many of you would risk your lives to vote? How many of you would risk your lives so that others could vote too?
Lotta diaries here about torture. Ohhhhhhhhhh the outrage. Well this is a diary about torture. Homegrown. Neighborly like. Good ole boy torture. The kind some folks would love to see happen again. Perhaps if Texas secedes they'll legalize it. Hold public lynchings. Who knows?
Anything is possible in a world where the left remains silent.
I came here to DailyKos because I believed that this was a blog full of folk who would howl with outrage if our rights were threatened. But I've come to notice that the outrage is selective.
Where is the rage Kossacks? Where are the multiple diaries flooding the list so fast you can't keep up with them?
It ain't happening. Perhaps, as was mentioned to me in the earlier diary there are silent readers. So I will continue to post diaries about this till the howl of a few becomes the fury of many.
So let me tell you a story. I met a woman named Carolyn Goodman when I worked at Pacifica Radio many years ago. She was the mother of Andrew - one of those young men. And she never stayed silent.
I want to be like Carolyn Goodman. May I keep howling till I die.
She did.
The NY Times obituary for her read:
Carolyn Goodman, Rights Champion, Dies at 91
Politically active until she was 90, Dr. Goodman came to wide public attention again two years ago. Traveling to Philadelphia, Miss., she testified at the murder trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klan leader recently indicted in the case. On June 21, 2005, the 41st anniversary of the killings, a jury acquitted Mr. Killen of murder but found him guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.
...
A slender, elegant woman with sleek short hair, Dr. Goodman remained for decades a highly visible political presence. As she repeatedly made plain, she was not seeking revenge. (To the end of her life, she publicly opposed capital punishment.) She was, rather, agitating to see justice done — not only for her son and his colleagues, but on a wide range of issues.
In 1966, Dr. Goodman and her husband, Robert Goodman, started the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which supports a variety of social causes. Over the years, she took a prominent part in antiwar demonstrations, lectured often to student and religious groups and marched in civil rights rallies of all kinds.
In a telephone interview yesterday, her son David recounted a characteristic incident, which happened in 1999, during the public protest over the death of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant shot and killed by New York police officers. A colleague came into Mr. Goodman’s office to tell him that his mother had just been seen on television, being taken off to jail.
"I said, ‘Well, that happens from time to time,’ " Mr. Goodman recalled.
Go visit her legacy, and learn about Freedom Summer The Andrew Goodman Foundation, History:
Freedom Summer
On June 21, 1964, Andrew Goodman arrived in Neshoba County, Mississippi one of a small army of young people who had volunteered for Freedom Summer, a voter registration campaign organized by the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Within hours of arriving in Mississippi, Andy traveled with two other SNCC workers, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, to investigate the burning of a rural church that had hosted organizing meetings for voter registration work – a typical example of white supremacist intimidation. That afternoon, after leaving the arson site, the three were arrested and held in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, jail until nightfall. After their release, as they drove toward the relative safety of Meridien, they were waylaid, taken to a remote area, and murdered by a band of Ku Klux Klansmen, assisted by local police.
Similar acts of violent intimidation and murder were not at all uncommon at that time, but the murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner marked a change. The federal government was mobilized, all the way to President Lyndon Johnson, and national attention was focused on the southern racial situation in a way never seen before. The deaths of these three young men led directly to meaningful changes, as mainstream America was forced to acknowledge the realities of life in the South, and affirm civil rights as a universally held value for all Americans. Although their deaths make them nationally famous and among the best known civil rights martyrs, they were among hundreds - overwhelmingly African American - who had been killed during the civil rights struggle. But their murder, while idealistically fighting for social justice, woke up the sleeping conscience of a nation.
Eleven days after their murder, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed into law.
Pete Seeger sang their story:
THOSE THREE ARE ON MY MIND
I think of Andy in the cold wet clay
Those three are on my mind
With his comrades down beside him
On that brutal day
Those three are on my mind
There lays young James in his mortal pain
Those three are on my mind
So I ask the killers can you see those three again
Those three are on my mind
I see dark eyed Michael
With his dark eyed bride
Those three are on my mind
And three proud mothers
Weeping side by side
Those three are on my mind
But I'm grieving yet
And for some the sky is bright
I cannot give up hoping
For a morning light
So I ask the killers do you sleep at night
Those three are on my mind
I see tin roof shanties
Where my brothers live
Those three are on my mind
And the little burnt out churches
Where they sing we forgive
Those three are on my mind
I know of Tom Paine's Water Tree
I know the price of liberty
Now I ask the question that is deep inside of me
Did they also burn the courthouse
When they killed those three
Those three are on my mind
Those three are on my mind
Those three are on my mind
Words and Music by Frances Taylor and Pete Seeger
© 1966 Fall River Music, Inc.
Meteor Blades wrote a moving piece here entitled Mississippi Turning
featured was the FBI poster I still have on my wall.
I don't and won't forget.
Lotsa black folk still can't vote. A whole lotta Latinos are being disenfranchised. Inmates in the Criminal Injustice system are denied a vote but the counties they are housed in count them towards their electoral demographics. Interesting that most are housed in white rural counties who are still trying to get around Reynolds vs Sims
"Undoubtedly, the right of suffrage is a fundamental matter in a free and democratic society. Especially since the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights, any alleged infringement of the rights of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized."
It took 40 years to finally convict the murderers of those 3 young men.
Aftermath
For much of the next four decades, no legal action was taken on the murders. Several films dramatized the events of that summer. In 1974, a CBS made-for-television movie aired, Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan, co-starring Wayne Rogers and Ned Beatty. This was followed in 1988 by Mississippi Burning, with Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman; and in 1990 by Murder in Mississippi, starring Tom Hulce, Blair Underwood and Josh Charles. The sympathetic portrayal of FBI agents in the first two movies angered civil rights activists, who believed the Bureau received too much credit for solving the case and too little condemnation for their long history of inaction and dereliction in regards to civil rights abuses. Journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, wrote extensively about the case for many years. Mitchell had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in several other high-profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham Church Bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer.
In the case of the civil rights workers, Mitchell developed new evidence, found new witnesses, and pressured the state to take action. Barry Bradford, a high school teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, and three of his students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel, joined Mitchell's efforts. Bradford later achieved recognition for helping clear the name of Civil Rights martyr Clyde Kennard.
Together the team produced a documentary for the National History Day contest. It presented important new evidence and compelling reasons to reopen the case. The team also obtained an interview with Edgar Ray Killen, which helped convince the State to reinvestigate. Partially by using evidence developed by Bradford and the students, Mitchell was able to determine the identity of "Mr. X", the mystery informer who had helped the FBI discover the bodies and smash the conspiracy of the Klan in 1964. Mitchell's investigation and the high school students' work in creating Congressional pressure, national media attention and a taped conversation with Killen prompted action. In 2004, on the 40th anniversary of the murders, a multi-ethnic group of citizens in Philadelphia, Mississippi, issued a call for justice. More than 1500 people, including civil rights leaders and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, joined them to voice their desire to revisit the case.
Suspects:
* Lawrence A. Rainey died 2002
* Cecil Price found guilty and served 6 years-died 2001
And now 44 years after the enactment of the Voting Rights act, efforts are underway to undo what those men, and others died for. Republicans in Congress began the first assault:
The Act is widely considered a landmark in civil-rights legislation, though some of its provisions have sparked political controversy. During the debate over the 2006 extension, some Republican members of Congress objected to renewing the preclearance requirement (the Act's primary enforcement provision), arguing that it represents an overreach of federal power and places unwarranted bureaucratic demands on Southern states that have long since abandoned the discriminatory practices the Act was meant to eradicate.[4] Conservative legislators also opposed requiring states with large Spanish-speaking populations to provide bilingual ballots.[5] Congress nonetheless voted to extend the Act for twenty-five years with its original enforcement provisions left intact.
Stymied, their lackeys on the Supreme Court will now try another tactic.
They can only win if we remain silent.