GoodmanSchwernerChaney: 40 Years Ago Today

Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. To a young boy growing up in Queens, New York, during the Civil Rights Era, the three names usually blended into one: GoodmanSchwernerChaney. Forty years ago, in a dark Mississippi swamp, the three were murdered. But to me – and my friends – living in one of New York City’s unsung boroughs, these three were not victims, they were heroes; and not just any kind of heroes, but local everyday heroes, the kind we all have the potential – and responsibility -- to be.

Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. Two whites and a black; two Jews and a Christian; three young idealists killed in a miasma of bigotry. Their murder was iconic, galvanizing, inspiring, terrifying, clarifying. Sometime during the evening of June 21, 1964, the three disappeared just outside misnamed town of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the city of brotherly love; its Mississippi sister throbbed with hate. The victims’ burned-out car was found two days later. It would take six weeks, and the intervention of President Lyndon Johnson, the FBI, and hundreds of sailors posted nearby to find the three buried bodies. Andrew Goodman, aged 20, and Michael Schwerner, aged 24, were shot in the heart. James Earl Chaney, a 21-year-old black activist whose high school once suspended him for sporting a yellow paper NAACP button, had been beaten to “a pulp.” In The Movement and the Sixties, Terry Anderson quotes a local physician’s report: “In my twenty-five years as a pathologist and medical examiner, I have never seen bones so severely shattered, except in tremendously high speed accidents or plane crashes.”

Goodman had arrived in Mississippi that day, from a three-day session training idealistic college students how to be Mississippi Summer Project activists fighting the South’s Jim Crow segregation. Schwerner had been working in Mississippi with his wife Rita for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, since January, 1964. Some speculate that Schwerner was the Ku Klux Klan’s prized “catch” that night – for the Klan’s Imperial Wizard enraged by Schwerner’s effectiveness in registering blacks to vote had called for his “elimination.” Others, noting Chaney’s beating, guess that Chaney incurred the greatest wrath for riding – and organizing – with Northern whites.

Furthering the injustice, a sheriff’s deputy probably pulled over the workers and called in the Klan. Despite much evidence and a confession, state murder charges never materialized. Three years after the murder, the federal government charged 15 locals with conspiracy. Three mistrials later, local juries acquitted 8, and convicted seven. The maximum any man served was six years. “Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of,” Phil Ochs sang. “Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of.”

Indeed, for me, growing up, the story was black and white. The Mississippi rednecks were the bad guys. The good guys were the civil rights workers, working together, regardless of race or religion, their broad coalition and high ideals demonstrating their righteousness.

This story had national significance, universal resonance, but local roots. Both Goodman and Schwerner were New Yorkers. Goodman had gone to Queens College, my neighborhood school, and had befriended two other local boys made good, the folk singers Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. In my young world of limited means but unlimited horizons, both the troubadours and the troublemakers emboldened us. My buddies and I laughed about the story, perhaps apocryphal, that once while Mrs. Simon had been getting her hair done at the beauty parlor, she stood up, decked out in smock and curlers, stretched out her hands when “Sounds of Silence” came on the radio, and shrieked: “Sha, it’s the boys.” More soberly, we mourned the three young lives destroyed while nevertheless delighting in the fact that people like us helped change history and did the right thing.

It is easy to dismiss the three martyrs’ efforts as a waste. On the micro scale, these twenty-somethings should have been sixty-somethings today, expanding their pocketbooks, their wastelines, and their families. Instead, their three lines on their respective family trees were severed. The three remain frozen in time, forever young, forever wronged.

And yet, Michael Schwerner had told CORE recruiters, “I have an emotional need to offer my services in the South.” Months later, defying death threats, he declared Mississippi “the decisive battleground for America.”

Fortunately, he, they, we, won. Only weeks after their murders, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; a little more than a year later, the Voting Rights Act passed. Forty years later, Jim Crow segregation is over and repudiated; more than 10,000 African-Americans hold political offices ranging from Alderman to secretary of state; and tens of millions of blacks enjoy equal access to housing, education, the professions.

True, it has not been easy or smooth. True, the black-Jewish alliance frayed, the movement in the North ran into subtle, unanticipated resistance, white backlash against black crime and liberal promises slowed momentum, and too much racism still clouds too many African-American lives. Nevertheless, the examples of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney stand tall, testifying to miraculous progress achieved, the transformative potential of politics, and the power of good people to do good. Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney teach that injustice is cancerous and cannot be compartmentalized; especially in a democratic community, your pain is my pain – and my responsibility.

“He was my brother, tears can't bring him back to me,” Simon and Garfunkel sang. “He, he was my brother, and he died so his brothers could be free.” We need more than fraternal feeling to right the wrongs in this world. But it is a great place to start – and a moral challenge to us all.