Michael Schwerner

[chuckles] Um, civil rights workers, both Black and white, went to Mississippi to register Black voters.

Three of those workers, man- uh, Chancey, Goodman, and Schwerner, were murdered by Klan members working with local law enforcement.

Remember, many of your local sheriffs and sheriff's deputies were members of the Klan because the Klan was the Democrat, you know...

They w- elected sheriffs would've been Democrats, and the Klan was Democrat.

It was, it was very symbolic.

Schwerner, G- uh, Goodman and Chaney.

Absolutely.

That's right, yeah.

They came down here.

Schwerner and Goodman, go look them up.

Or the two white preachers there in Selma.

Why didn't white folks murder them? [laughs]

The civil rights movement was challenging America's institutional racist beliefs and policies.

Then the murders of civil and voting rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Mississippi on June 20th, 1964 demanded the attention of the federal government.

A gang of over 20 KKK members killed the boys with the aid of a local deputy sheriff because of the young men's local efforts to enable equal access to voting and education.

In 1967, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, seven of the 18 defendants would be found guilty, including Deputy Sheriff Price, but none on murder charges.

Yeah, I mean, when I say this is an old tactic, again, economic reprisals, being, uh, debanked, all of these things were tactics used in the past.

In fact, in, in August of 1964, when the bodies of, uh, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman murdered by the Klan were found in Mississippi, the head of SNCC called Harry Belafonte and said, "We are...

It...

These are the last weeks of Freedom Summer.

Three young people were killed.

The three young men, their names were Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.

News of this went around the world, and my parents went to Mississippi then.

They weren't particularly political, but it was against their faith to treat people like this.

You know, so much in American history, when it comes to race, this nation takes two steps forward and then a step back.

It has taken a lot of bloodshed, Emmett Till, a lot of jailings, you know, Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney, the three people who went from Oxford, who went down to Mississippi in 1964 and were murdered.

Race is the albatross around this country's neck.

And when you have race mongers in high positions who fan the flames of racial hatred, it sets the nation back.

Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted in two thousand one and two thousand two for the nineteen sixty-three bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the bombing that killed four young girls and became one of the defining atrocities of the Civil Rights Era.

And in two thousand five, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter for orchestrating the nineteen sixty-four murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers whose disappearance in Neshoba County, Mississippi, became known as the Mississippi Burning case.

Mitchell would later receive a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant, with a five hundred thousand dollar award in recognition of his decades of investigative work.

Every single one of those convictions traced a line back to the Evers case, back to Jerry Mitchell's first story about the Sovereignty Commission, back to Myrlie Evers calling for the case to be reopened the next day, the first domino.

My wife and I spent the summer of 64 in Mississippi, Freedom Summer, where people came from all over the country to work on the right to vote for black people and set up freedom schools for kids and did all sorts of things.

And that was the summer in which that infamous incident took place with the murder of three civil rights workers, one black, two whites, Cheney, Schwerner, Goodman.

That took place in June.

At least they disappeared in June.