Remembering the Murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

Today is actually for me a hard day to write about. I’ve been thinking about it for more than a week because I knew it was coming. Fifty years ago today James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. went missing in Philadelphia, Miss.. All members of COFO ( Council of Federated Organizations) a coalition of national and regional organizations engaged in civil rights activities in Mississippi. Established in 1962 with the goal of maximizing the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After visiting Longdale Miss. the three workers went missing. I already knew of the movement in Miss. that summer, Centered around the need to register Black people to vote, but also revealing the serious need for local people themselves to step forward and take over the struggle. Outsiders were easy to spot and often targets. Also mostly they were students and would be gone after a while. This struggle really belonged to the local people. I was in high school and spent most of that summer being a busboy at an Atlanta nightclub ..but I already had friends in SNCC and CORE who went down to set up “Freedom Schools” …to train local people to set up voter registration drives and provide an atmosphere of solidarity that would last beyond the “Freedom Summers”. I got to go down for a couple of weekends but was not allowed to stay long…they even then knew there was danger and I was one of the youngest people in SNCC.. James Chaney I had met several times..a young brother with powerful vision..The bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were found after 44 days in what has been called an “earthen dam” . They had been killed by a “lynch mob” of at the very least 10 Klansmen and “wannabes” after a pursuit on Highway 19..Miss State officials refused to   prosecute the killers for murder,a state crime..the Federal Government tried the “mob” for conspiracy to deprive the civil rights workers of their civil rights.They indicted Sheriff Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Price and 16 other men. Only Seven were found guilty most received a sentence 0f  3 to 10 years…This would become a “watershed” moment for many people ..and for myself pretty much mark the end of my childhood. I had been watching the civil rights movement in the newspapers and on TV since the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955….and in recent years ’62—’65 we had seen the Miss. Riots ( white people who literally went mad..over James Meredith,the first Black student accepted,   trying to enter the University of Miss)…the Freedom Riders: groups of Black and White students who broke the rules riding segregated inter state buses …and the Bombings one after another in Birmingham. I was still a kid …living in the biggest city in the deep south and all these people , mostly just three or four years older than I was were literally risking there lives to change a way of life that was so intrenched in the culture we almost thought of it as “normal”. The “whites only” and “colored area ” and “no colored served here” signs  were as common in our lives as “STOP” signs are today…I can remember how most of our parents and grand parents didn’t even dream of things changing any time soon…. And those who did  did not want their child to be among the people who tried …Almost every family had a story of some relative or neighbor who defied “Jim  Crow” ….always with a tragic ending …But this generation ..literally took a deadly “Tiger by the Tail”..I was the first and for a long time the only kid in my school or my neighborhood who took an interest in the movement…. I went from Science nerd and “that brainy kid” to the “movement guy” during the course of the summer of 1964 and as the 1960s went on I began to disappoint  and even anger many of the adults in my world. “Timothy you had so much potential..and you are just throwing it away”..But life simply could not be the same after that summer. Those brave students just a little older than I was became real heroes ..Lonnie King, John Lewis . Willie Ricks, Bob Moses, Julian Bond..Diane Nash….many more…I would try to sneak into meetings …run errands ..anything just to be around those people   In the year to come I would have my “baptism in blood” ..1965 would mark the first time I actively participated in a march…. As this website  grows and develops  I will talk about a lot of what happened in later years but today …..let’s remember the lives of  James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.