“Before this victory’s won, some will have to get thrown in jail some more. But we shall overcome. Don’t worry about us. Before the victory’s won, some of us will lose jobs. But we shall overcome. Before the victory’s won, even some will have to face physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent psychological death, then nothing shall be more redemptive. We shall overcome.” – Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act 60 years ago, it represented a triumph of hope for Black Americans in the South. The aim of the legislation was equal justice and equal rights for those who had been denied them in a segregated America under Jim Crow.
Hundreds of Americans of many backgrounds had gone to work in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer Project of 1964 to help Black Mississippians win their voting rights and assert their human rights. Aligning themselves with people who were being denied legal protection, economic justice and equality, they brought hope, courage and audacity to their mission.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were three of those civil-rights workers who believed they could help Black Mississippians overcome an intractable political and social reality meant to deny them full citizenship. At the heart of their commitment had to be a deep belief that their country had the potential for, and was worthy of, redemption. They were standing against anti-Black racism and white supremacy, fully aware that the possible consequences of their actions included death.
Schwerner, who was 24 at the time, and Chaney, then 21, worked for the Congress of Racial Equality in Meridian, Miss. Goodman, then a 20-year-old Queens College student, traveled to the state to join the Freedom Summer voter-registration campaign, as did college students from across the country who also volunteered to work on educational and civil-rights projects.
A couple decades after this country’s soldiers returned from fighting fascism abroad, young people from many places in America traveled to the South to stand up against fascism in their own country. For nearly a century, Black Americans in the South and elsewhere were subjected to one of the most complete systems of fascism ever devised. The denial of rights and liberty was a matter of law and observed in custom.
Law enforcement functioned to uphold the system, as did acts of racial terror.
I wonder how that history will be understood and interpreted in education and in the public discourse in Mississippi and across the country now and in the future. Dozens of states are moving to enact laws that place restrictions on how racism’s effects on American life and history is taught and explained.
An Erasure of Racial-Discrimination History
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed a law in March banning “critical-race theory” and limiting education on race in schools. The law, Senate Bill 2113, which is described as a critical-race theory prohibitive bill, does not mention or define critical-race theory by name.
Critical-race theory is a discipline taught in higher education that analyzes how racism has shaped U.S. laws and institutions, as well as how the lives of non-white people are then affected.
In a video announcing the signing of the bill, Reeves said schools were teaching students progressive ideals that are against “the principles of America’s founding.”
Opponents say the new law’s language is too vague and could censor important lessons on the history of racial oppression. In January 2022, all the state’s Black Democratic state senators refused to vote on the bill and walked out in protest following debate.
Republican lawmakers’ efforts to ban certain lessons on race have spread nationwide, with bills using very similar, nearly identical, language being introduced in at least 41 states.
Reeves and Republican leaders in Alabama, Florida, Texas and elsewhere say some students are made to feel guilty or victimized about their race through lessons to which these leaders apply the “critical-race theory” label. They talk about the teaching of “divisive concepts” used to explain how the government and other institutions were responsible for racial discrimination and social and economic injustice.
In Mississippi in 1964, Americans such as Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were working to help Black people vote and assert their citizenship rights. They were working to improve access to education for Black children.
With the U.S. Supreme Court stripping away a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last year, the fight for equal access to the ballot box continues. The court also has prohibited efforts that seek to expand higher education opportunities for Black students. The causes that civil-rights workers went to Mississippi to address in the summer of 1964 aren’t just part of history.
By any measure, the goals of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other landmark legislation have not been fully achieved. This decade has been marked so far by calls for this country to reckon with its history of slavery and anti-Black racism.
Thousands of people took to the streets in U.S. cities and around the world in 2020 to protest police brutality directed at Black people, including incidents resulting in deaths. Demands for government action on economic, social-justice and racial-justice issues are ongoing. Calls for reparations have heightened, with proposals under discussion at state and local levels.
These demands are coming from Americans who believe that our country hasn’t lived up to its stated principles—the ones Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner believed it could uphold. The American redemption that the Freedom Summer participants pursued hasn’t been realized.
Silencing Voices of Progress
When Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner went to work in Mississippi in 1964, they knew how entrenched the system of racial oppression was in the South. Chaney, who was Black, lived in Meridian. Schwerner and Goodman were both Jewish and grew up in New York. With Ku Klux Klan membership in Mississippi soaring in 1964 and reaching more than 10,000 people, they understood the danger around them. The Klan had every intention to use violence against civil-rights workers. On April 24 that year, Klan organizations staged 61 simultaneous cross burnings throughout the state.
During the summer of 1964, Klan members burned 20 Black churches in Mississippi. On June 16, the target was Mt. Zion Baptist Church near Philadelphia, Miss., in Neshoba County, where Schwerner had spent time working. Before burning the church, the Klan severely beat several people who had been attending a meeting there.
On June 21, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner visited the charred remains of Mt. Zion. On the drive back to Meridian, their station wagon, known to law enforcement as a vehicle the Congress on Racial Equality used, was stopped, and police arrested all three. Chaney, who had been driving, was charged with speeding, while Goodman and Schwerner were also detained. Neshoba County sheriff’s deputy Cecil Price escorted them to the Philadelphia jail that afternoon.
They were released from jail that night, and police collaborated with Klansmen to hunt them down, abduct them and fatally shoot them. The killers used a bulldozer to bury the bodies in an earthen dam.
The civil-rights workers’ burned-out blue station wagon was found two days later near Philadelphia, Miss. But the bodies of the three men would not be found until 44 days later on Aug. 4, 1964.
While Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were missing, the nation turned its attention to Mississippi, and many Americans were awakened to the racial terrorism that was a fact of life there. At the same time, local, state and some federal officials suggested that their disappearance could be a publicity stunt that the three or others involved in the Civil Rights Movement had concocted.
The FBI-led search combed the woods, fields, swamps and rivers of Mississippi, uncovering the remains of eight other African American men in the process. Two were identified as Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who had been kidnapped, beaten and murdered in May 1964. Another corpse was wearing a CORE T-shirt. Even less information was recorded about the five other bodies discovered.
Schwerner’s wife Rita, who was also a CORE worker, remarked on the level of attention the case was receiving and contrasted it with how Klan and police violence against Black people in Mississippi was so frequently overlooked.
“The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded,” she told reporters during the search.
Prosecutors brought charges in the case before a federal grand jury, which indicted 18 men in January 1965. Following various dismissals and prosecutions, a jury found Price and six other defendants guilty, including Samuel Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of Mississippi’s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. None would serve more than six years behind bars.
In January 2005, a grand jury charged Klansman Edgar Ray Killen with murder. Ultimately, the jury found insufficient evidence for a murder conviction, but it did find Killen guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. A judge sentenced him to 60 years in prison, and he died in 2018.
In 1980, several years after some of those convicted in the case were released from prison, Ronald Reagan launched his general election campaign with a speech lauding “states’ rights” outside Philadelphia, Miss. He delivered the speech within walking distance of the earthen dam where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had been buried.
Reagan sent a clear signal that he was appealing to Americans who opposed, or weren’t ready for, the vision that Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had for their country, a vision for which they gave their lives. Political leaders across America are sending that same signal today.
If our society is going to advance, we must continue to call out the voices that stand against progress and equality. Perseverance, even in the face of discouragement, is the only way this country can honor the ideals that these three young people believed so completely.
Mark Allan Williams is an opinion editor and essayist who lives and works in Baltimore.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.