FBI Photos of missing civil rights workers - Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Henry Schwerner
As the nation mourns for nine black Americans murdered in a Charleston, South Carolina, church, let us never forget that this most recent incident of domestic terrorism is part of a long series of murders, not only of blacks, but of whites who worked in solidarity with black activists. Today is the anniversary of the tragic deaths of
three young civil rights workers, on the night of June 21 and 22 in Neshoba County, Mississippi, whose deaths brought the attention of the nation to the issue of voting rights, and whose murders influenced the enactment of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Our voting rights were paid for in blood, and as we watch voter repression and suppression rulings pass in state legislatures, and the current radical extremists on the Supreme Court gutting voting rights, it is time to fight back even harder to ensure that these young men and so many others did not die in vain.
"The right to vote is precious and almost sacred, and one of the most important blessings of our democracy. Today we must be vigilant in protecting that blessing."
Congressman John Lewis
Join me below the fold for more.
Those of us who lived through the bloody 1960's and 1970's post regular reminders here. If you have never read Meteor Blades' Mississippi Turning, please take the time to do so.
Stanley Nelson, wrote, produced and directed the documentary Freedom Summer, for PBS. (transcript)
Freedom Summer:
In 1964, less than 7% of Mississippi’s African Americans were registered to vote, compared to between 50 and 70% in other southern states. In many rural counties, African Americans made up the majority of the population and the segregationist white establishment was prepared to use any means necessary to keep them away from the polls and out of elected office. As Mississippian William Winter recalls, “A lot of white people thought that African Americans in the South would literally take over and white people would have to move, would have to get out of the state.”
For years, local civil rights workers had tried unsuccessfully to increase voter registration amongst African Americans. Those who wished to vote had to face the local registrar, an all-powerful white functionary who would often publish their names in the paper and pass the word on to their employers and bankers. And if loss of jobs and the threat of violence wasn’t enough to dissuade them, the complex and arcane testing policies were certain to keep them off the rolls.
In 1964, a new plan was hatched by Bob Moses, a local secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). For 10 weeks, white students from the North would join activists on the ground for a massive effort that would do what had been impossible so far: force the media and the country to take notice of the shocking violence and massive injustice taking place in Mississippi. Word of the coming influx spread and Mississippi officials geared up for the newcomers by increasing police forces, passing new ordinances, and purchasing riot gear and weapons. Meanwhile, Mississippi Summer Project (later known as Freedom Summer) students gathered on the campus of Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio to meet with SNCC leaders for training. After the first week, the volunteers learned that three members of their group -- Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney -- had gone missing in Mississippi. As the days passed and the young men were not heard from, people began to fear the worst -- that they had been murdered by the Klan.
A must-see film is
Neshoba: The Price of Freedom.
NESHOBA: The Price of Freedom tells the story of a Mississippi town still divided about the meaning of justice, 40 years after the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, an event dramatized in the Oscar-winning film, Mississippi Burning. Although Klansmen bragged about what they did in 1964, no one was held accountable until 2005, when the State indicted preacher Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old notorious racist and mastermind of the murders. Through exclusive interviews with Killen, intimate interviews with the victims' families, and candid interviews with black and white Neshoba County citizens still struggling with their town's violent past, the film explores whether the prosecution of one unrepentant Klansman constitutes justice and whether healing and reconciliation are possible without telling the unvarnished truth.
Sadly, the film most people are aware of or have seen because it won an Oscar, is
Mississippi Burning, which I hated, because it was from my perspective, a whitewash. Though it got rave reviews from some film critics, there were others who concurred with my reaction.
Just Another Mississippi Whitewash by Jack E. White
Time, January 9, 1989 p. 60.
Here we go again. Exploiting white America's ignorance of historic racial oppression, Hollywood casts a spotlight on the rich but neglected story of the black struggle for equal rights. As has happened with every popular work on the subject, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Roots, Mississippi Burning evokes a gasp of horrified discovery from many whites who act as if they are learning about the viciousness of slavery and segregation for the very first time. Unfortunately, the film does little to deepen the knowledge of its audience. Though its producers say the movie is fictional, they so artfully commingle fact and invention that many viewers, whose ability to discern a whopper when they see one has been obliterated by an age of TV docudramas, are convinced of its veracity. They leave the theater believing a version of history so distorted that it amounts to a cinematic lynching of the truth.
From its opening sequence, Burning convincingly recaptures the racial dread of 1964 Mississippi. But the verisimilitude is soon sacrificed for a bogus conclusion: that to protect the rights of blacks, the Federal Government sank to the same level of lawless terror occupied by the Klu Klux Klan. To the extent they appear at all, blacks are portrayed as ineffectual victims, helplessly waiting for the "Kennedy boys" to set them free. In due course, that is just what happens, as the FBI cracks the case by brutally intimidating a white witness.
Not much of this is within spitting distance of what really occurred. Even the little details in the film -- such as placing James Chaney, a black thoroughly familiar with the terrifying back roads of Neshoba County, in the backseat of the station wagon he was actually driving -- relegate blacks to the background of the drama of which they were the real-life heroes. One gets no sense of their courageous struggle against violent white supremacy and second-class citizenship. Even more twisted is the film's depiction of an FBI so zealous in its defense of black rights that it would resort to vigilantism to promote them. That contention is laughable to civil rights veterans of the early 1960s, who pleaded with the bureau to take a more active role in protecting blacks. Only two weeks before the murders, a delegation of Mississippi activists journeyed to Washington to implore federal officials to protect the civil rights workers who were flocking into the state for the Freedom Summer. Yet despite repeated appeals to the FBI and Justice Department on the night the three civil rights workers disappeared, nearby agents did not arrive in Philadelphia until the next day. By then it was too late.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
wrote:
Mississippi Burning
In this 1988 movie, Alan Parker's taste for simpleminded, sordid fantasy is trained on the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, and the feast for the self-righteous that emerges has little to do with history, sociology, or even common sense. The glorification of the FBI (which conveniently ignores the FBI's hostility toward the civil rights struggle), the obfuscation about jim crow laws, and the absurd melodramatics may all have been well-intentioned, but the understanding about the past and the present of racism that emerges is depressingly thin. (The blacks in the plot, for instance, are depicted exclusively as noble sufferers who sing a lot of spirituals—they aren't even accorded the status of characters.) Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe star as antagonistic FBI agents who disagree about how to proceed with their investigation; Brad Dourif, Frances McDormand, and R. Lee Ermey are among the local yokels, and Chris Gerolmo is responsible for the primitive script.
The murder of Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman was also the subject of songs.
Goodman and Schwerner and Chaney
Words and Music by Tom Paxton
The night air is heavy, no cool breezes blow.
The sounds of the voices are worried and low.
Desperately wondering and desperate to know,
About Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.
Calm desperation and flickering hope,
Reality grapples like a hand on the throat.
For you live in the shadow of ten feet of rope,
If you're Goodman and Schwerner and Chaney.
The Pearl River was dragged and two bodies were found,
But it was a blind alley for both men were brown.
So they all shrugged their shoulders and the search it went on,
For Goodman and Schwerner and Chaney.
Pull out the dead bodies from the ooze of the dam.
Take the bodies to Jackson all accordin' to plan.
With the one broken body do the best that you can,
It's the body of young James Chaney.
The nation was outraged and shocked through and through.
Call J. Edgar Hoover. He'll know what to do.
For they've murdered two white men, and a colored boy too
Goodman and Schwerner and Chaney.
James Chaney your body exploded in pain,
And the beating they gave you is pounding my brain.
And they murdered much more with their dark bloody chains
And the body of pity lies bleeding.
The pot-bellied copper shook hands all around,
And joked with the rednecks who came into town
And they swore that the murderer soon would be found
And they laughed as they spat their tobacco.
Going down to Missisissipi, Phil Ochs
I'm going down to Mississippi
I'm going down a southern road
And if you never see me again
Remember that I had to go
Remember that I had to go
...
In 1964 Nina Simone performed
Mississippi Goddam live at Carnegie Hall, dealing with other Mississippi violence.
The song captures Simone's response to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi; and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black children. On the recording she cynically announces the song as "a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet." The song begins jauntily, with a show tune feel, but demonstrates its political focus early on with its refrain "Alabama's got me so upset, Tennessee's made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi goddam." In the song she says: "Keep on sayin' 'go slow'...to do things gradually would bring more tragedy. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it? I don't know, I don't know. You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality!"
She performed the song in front of 40,000 people at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches when she and other black activists, including Sammy Davis Jr., James Baldwin and Harry Belafonte crossed police lines
Mississippi Goddam lyrics
I never met Mickey Schwerner,, or Andy Goodman in New York, though I knew people who went to Freedom Summer. I did meet Andrew's mom, Carolyn Goodman, when she was the vice chairperson at Pacifica radios' New York City station WBAI.
In 1966, Robert and Carolyn Goodman, founded The Andrew Goodman Foundation to carry on the spirit and purpose of their son’s life. Andy’s commitment to the right of all Americans to vote and his desire to make the world a better and kinder place motivated him to take action.
Andrew Goodman Foundation
One if its major programs is "Vote Everywhere."
Vote Everywhere, a program of The Andrew Goodman Foundation, empowers college students to register and engage new voters on campuses nationwide. The program supports student "Vote Everywhere Ambassadors" in partnership with Campus Champions (civic engagement centers) for a full academic year; Ambasssadors receive a stipend, organizing budget and other resources to produce voter registration and issues-based advocacy events.
Carolyn Goodman died in 2007.
Carolyn Goodman, Rights Champion, Dies at 91
After her marriage to Robert W. Goodman, a civil engineer, in the late 1930s, their apartment became a haven for progressive artists and intellectuals. In the 1950s, the Goodmans were deeply involved in the fight against McCarthyism; Alger Hiss was a guest on occasion. In 1964, Andrew, then a student at Queens College, told his parents he planned to go to Mississippi. “It wasn't easy for us ... But we couldn't talk out of both sides of our mouths. So I had to let him go”, she told The New York Times in 2005. [...]
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.
From her memorial service:
"Carolyn got in the way"
"Carolyn got in the way," Congressman John Lewis said just after coming to the podium with a standing ovation. "She made necessary trouble." He said the three slain civil rights workers (Carolyn's son Andy, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney) "should be called the Founding Fathers of the New America;" and that, despite all, Carolyn "never demonstrated one bit of bitterness," a theme that others echoed. Others being WNBC correspondent Gabe Pressman (after first citing the bad wars, civil rights, he said, was a "good war"); Ben Chaney, the younger brother of James; Sarah Siegel and Allison Marie Nichols, college students whose lives were turned around by meeting Carolyn; NY Times columnist Bob Herbert ("she seemed almost magical"); NY1 reporter Budd Mishkin, who wore the shirt Carolyn always asked him to wear; and his brother, the attorney Doug Mishkin, whom she'd asked to sing "Carry on, my sweet survivor" at her memorial service, which he did; and, here I need to break paragraphs to highlight the powerful speaker...
Dick Molpus, former Secretary of State in Mississippi, who met Carolyn 25 years after the three young men's murders, and the first public official to apologize to their mothers, who also asked two key newsmen to stand: Neshoba (Miss) Democrat editor and publisher, Stanley Dearman, and reporter Jerry Mitchell of The (Jackson, Miss) Clarion-Ledger, "who relentlessly stayed on top of the case," ultimately leading to the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen, who finally went to jail 41 years after masterminding the murders.
And so it went through another dozen speakers: two colleagues from the board of Symphony Space; two from public radio station WBAI (one of whom joked that Carolyn decided that "Heaven clearly needs work" and that "it will be a better place when she's done"; Regina Solano of PACE, a mental health program for mothers of young children that Carolyn founded and ran for many years; Eli Lee, who worked for her at the Andrew Goodman Foundation; Rabbi Bruce Cohen of Interns for Peace, whose board she chaired; her niece, Dr. Cathey Eisner Falvo, and...
The final speaker, Harry Belafonte, who said, "Carolyn Goodman's name will live forever."
In November, 2014 the three young murdered civil rights activists were awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.
On June 21, 1964, three young men - two white, one black - set out to learn more about the burning of a church in Neshoba County, Mississippi: James Earl Chaney, 21 years old; Andrew Goodman, 20 years old; and Michael Henry Schwerner, 24 years old. Young men. And in that Freedom Summer, these three Americans refused to sit on the sidelines. Their brutal murder by a gang of Ku Klux Klan members shook the conscience of our nation. It took 44 days to find their bodies, 41 years to bring the lead perpetrator to justice.
And while they are often remembered for how they died, we honor them today for how they lived -- with the idealism and the courage of youth. James, Andrew, and Michael could not have known the impact they would have on the Civil Rights Movement or on future generations. And here today, inspired by their sacrifice, we continue to fight for the ideals of equality and justice for which they gave their lives. Today we are honored to be joined by James's daughter Angela, Andrew's brother David, and Michael's wife, Rita.
Angela Lewis, receiving on behalf of her father, James Earl Chaney; David Goodman, receiving on behalf of his brother Andrew Goodman; and Rita Schwerner Bender, receiving on behalf of her husband, Michael Henry Schwerner. (Applause.)
00:29:37
In 1964, three young men sought to right one of the many wrongs of the Jim Crow era by joining hundreds of others to register black voters in Mississippi during "Freedom Summer." The work was fraught with danger, yet their commitment to justice was so strong that they were willing to risk their lives for it. Their deaths shocked the nation, and their courage has never been forgotten. James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner still inspire us. Their ideals have been written into the moral fabric of our nation, from the landmark civil rights legislation enacted days after their deaths to our continued pursuit of a more perfect union.
I get really angry when I hear anyone pushing the "voting is futile" or "voting why bother" or "no difference between voting for Democrats or Republicans" memes. In essence they are deflating the vote.
For me, this is dissing the sacrifices of not only those who have died for the ballot, but also the efforts of those who continue to fight for a fundamental right.
Get out and register voters. Join demonstrations and support organizations defending voting rights. Do it in honor of those who died, and for those of us who want to live.