Freedom Summer, 1964
On the night of 21 June 1964, three young civil rights workers disappeared on a country road in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Forty-four days later their bodies were dug out of an earthen dam. James Chaney was a Black Mississippian of twenty-one; Andrew Goodman, twenty, was a student from New York on his first day in the state. The third, Michael Schwerner, was twenty-four. He had been working in Mississippi for six months, and members of the Ku Klux Klan had singled him out by name.
Their murders became one of the defining events of the American civil rights movement. They exposed the violence that kept Black Mississippians from voting, drew the federal government into the state, and helped build the public pressure that produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Schwerner, a Jewish social worker from New York, is remembered as one of the most committed of the white volunteers who went south, and as one of the clearest examples of the alliance between Black and Jewish Americans in the struggle for civil rights.
Mickey from New York
Michael Henry Schwerner was born on 6 November 1939 into a Jewish family. The Famous Trials biography published by the University of Missouri–Kansas City says he lived in New York City until he was eight, when the family moved to Westchester County; Wikipedia gives his birthplace as Pelham, New York, where he went to Pelham Memorial High School. His father, Nathan, ran a wig-manufacturing business; his mother, Anne, taught high-school biology. Everyone called him Mickey.
Family and friends described him as friendly, good-natured, gentle, mischievous and ‘full of life and ideas’. He believed that all people were essentially good. He loved sports, animals, poker, W. C. Fields and rock music, and named his cocker spaniel Gandhi. The future U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who was bullied as a small boy, later recalled that the older Mickey Schwerner had been one of the boys who protected him, and cited that memory as an inspiration for his own life’s work.
From Cornell to the Lower East Side
Schwerner first enrolled at Michigan State University, intending to become a veterinarian, then transferred to Cornell University, where he switched to rural sociology. At Cornell he campaigned successfully for his fraternity to accept a Black pledge. After graduating he began graduate work at Columbia University but left to work as a social worker in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where colleagues remembered his special rapport with teenagers.
He married Rita Levant, then an education student at Queens College, in 1962. Both were drawn into the civil rights movement. Schwerner led a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) on the Lower East Side, known as Downtown CORE, and in 1963 joined protests to desegregate the Gwynn Oak amusement park in Maryland. Watching the violence against demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, that year deepened his commitment, and he applied to national CORE to be posted to the South, writing that he hoped to spend the rest of his life working for an integrated society.
Meridian
On 15 January 1964 Michael and Rita Schwerner set off from New York for Mississippi in their Volkswagen Beetle. After meeting the civil rights leader Bob Moses in Jackson, they were sent to Meridian, the largest city in eastern Mississippi, to run a community centre and organise local programmes under CORE’s state director, Dave Dennis. They were the first white civil rights workers to be based permanently outside the state capital. Michael was paid $9.80 a week.
In Meridian he worked closely with James Chaney, a young Black local man who became his constant companion in the field. Schwerner organised a boycott of a variety store that sold mainly to Black customers until it hired its first Black employee, went door to door trying to talk with white working-class residents, and pressed hard to register Black voters, in a state where most Black citizens had been effectively shut out of voting since 1890. The work brought hate mail, threatening phone calls and police harassment. Mississippi, he said, was ‘the decisive battleground for America’.
Marked by the Klan
White resistance was organised at every level. The state-funded Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission spied on civil rights workers; records opened by court order in 1998 showed that one of its investigators had passed on information about the Meridian activists, including their car’s license number. The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Samuel Bowers, viewed the coming Freedom Summer as an invasion. Klansmen called Schwerner ‘Goatee’ for his beard, and according to the Famous Trials account Bowers ordered his ‘elimination’ in May 1964.
On Memorial Day, Schwerner and Chaney visited the Black congregation of Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Neshoba County, and asked to use the church for a Freedom School. On 16 June, while Schwerner was in Oxford, Ohio, helping to train Freedom Summer volunteers, Klansmen beat members of the congregation and burned the church to the ground. Schwerner drove back to Mississippi with Chaney and a new volunteer, Andrew Goodman, determined to visit the people who had suffered for helping him.
21 June 1964
After visiting Longdale on 21 June, the three were stopped near the town of Philadelphia by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Chaney was arrested for speeding and Goodman and Schwerner held ‘for investigation’; they were kept in the county jail for hours without being allowed to telephone anyone, then released after 10 p.m. Price and a carload of Klansmen followed them, stopped them again on the highway and drove them to a remote road. There Schwerner and Goodman were each shot once in the heart; Chaney was savagely beaten and shot three times. Their bodies were buried with a bulldozer in an earthen dam under construction on a nearby farm, and their burned station wagon was found in a swamp three days later.
The disappearance became national news. President Lyndon Johnson met the Goodman and Schwerner parents at the White House and pressed the FBI to investigate; hundreds of federal agents and Navy sailors joined the search. Rita Schwerner pointed out publicly that the case drew attention because two of the missing men were white, while the murders of Black Mississippians had often gone unnoticed. An informant’s tip, prompted by an FBI reward, finally led agents to the dam on 4 August 1964.
Justice delayed
Mississippi refused to bring murder charges. Instead the federal government prosecuted eighteen men for conspiring to deprive the three of their civil rights. In October 1967 an all-white jury in Meridian convicted seven of them, including Deputy Sheriff Price, the Klan leader Samuel Bowers and the gunman Alton Wayne Roberts, the first convictions in Mississippi for the killing of a civil rights worker. Sentences ranged from three to ten years, and none served more than six. Others, including the sheriff, Lawrence Rainey, were acquitted, and the jury deadlocked on the part-time preacher Edgar Ray Killen.
Four decades later, investigative reporting by Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, research by an Illinois teacher and his students, and a call for justice from citizens of Philadelphia, Mississippi, led the state to reopen the case. On 21 June 2005, exactly forty-one years after the killings, a Neshoba County jury convicted Killen of three counts of manslaughter after hearing testimony from Rita Schwerner Bender. He was sentenced to sixty years and died in prison in 2018. In 2016 state and federal authorities announced that the investigation was closed.
A Jewish volunteer in the movement
Schwerner and Goodman were both Jewish, part of a generation in which young Jews made up a strikingly large share of the white northern volunteers who went south in the 1960s. Their deaths beside James Chaney became, for many American Jews, a lasting symbol of shared sacrifice with Black Americans in the fight for equality. The Klan that killed them hated Jews as well as Black people: Bowers’s White Knights were linked to the bombing of synagogues in Jackson and Meridian in 1967 and 1968.
Schwerner’s own motives, as he described them, were moral and personal rather than religious: an ‘emotional need’ to serve, and a conviction that Mississippi was where the battle for American democracy would be decided. Rita Schwerner Bender entered Rutgers law school in 1965, graduated in 1968 and practised family law for decades in Washington state; she remained a determined voice for remembering all three men together.
Legacy
The murders in Neshoba County helped shift national opinion and strengthened support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed on 6 August 1965. The case inspired books, documentaries and films, including Mississippi Burning (1988), and the long fight for a state prosecution became a landmark in the reopening of civil rights–era crimes. A state historical marker now stands near the site of the killings.
In 2008 Pelham, New York, renamed a section of Harmon Avenue Michael Schwerner Way. In 2014, fifty years after Freedom Summer, President Barack Obama awarded Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman the Presidential Medal of Freedom, honouring them as civil rights activists and participants in the historic voter registration drive in which they lost their lives.
Sources & further reading
Michael Schwerner, Wikipedia · Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, Wikipedia · Biography of Michael Schwerner, Famous Trials, University of Missouri–Kansas City (archived) · President Obama Names Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2014), The White House archives · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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