NEW YORK - 24 June 2004 /
www.MaximsNews.com / -- This
past weekend nearly 1,800 Mississippians and other Americans gathered in
Philadelphia, Mississippi at two ceremonies to speak to each other and call
forward, as one said, the tide of justice.
They gathered because forty
years ago, on the night of June 21, 1964, a terrible wrong was done there.
On that night, three young men—one, African-American and a native
Mississippian; the two others, white and Jewish from New York, united by their
belief that all Americans deserved a full measure of citizenship—disappeared
into History.
They were individuals, with their own names and their own pasts—James
Chaney, Michael (Mickey) Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.
But they shared a cruel fate.
They
were stalked, kidnapped and murdered just outside Philadelphia, in rural
Neshoba County by men who thought that if they shed enough blood they could
repel the tide of History.
Their killers are thought to have numbered at least
eighteen and have included town law officials as well as members of the Ku
Klux Klan.
Seven Klan members were later convicted of federal
civil rights violations and sentenced to from three to ten years in prison.
No one has ever been charged
with their murders.
However, recently Jim Hood, the state’s attorney, has sought federal
assistance in re-opening the investigation of the killings, and the United
States Attorney’s Office for Mississippi has said it’s reviewing the
request.
I hope the case is re-opened.
As Rep. John Lewis, Democrat
of Georgia, who himself played a prominent role in the Civil Rights
Movement, pointed out at the ceremonies, pursuing the wrongdoers is not
just a matter of redressing individual crimes.
“It’s important,” he
said, “that justice be done for history’s sake.”
In
Philadelphia a gathering sponsored by the multiracial Philadelphia Coalition
and held at the Neshoba County Coliseum, was the first time the state and the
town have officially marked the sad anniversary.
The
Mount Zion United Methodist Church, whose 1964 burning by the Klan had
prompted Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner’s trip to the county, has held a
ceremony every year since the crime occurred.
As we come closer to our
annual July 4th celebration of America’s long-declared commitment
to equality and justice for all—and do so amid the raging of wars beyond our
shores—it’s vital to remember not only our good fortune.
It’s as important to
remember how great in America’s past were the gaps between its rhetoric and
its practices—and the price some paid to close them.
The price the three civil
rights workers paid was dear.
The news of their
disappearance immediately provoked an almost palpable sense of foreboding
within the Movement, and among many black Americans, who were all too
aware of Mississippi’s reputation as a place of violent racial extremism.
Even as segregationists
jeered that the activists’ disappearance was a hoax to gain publicity for
the Movement—their buried bodies would not be found for 44 days—few
decent people doubted what had happened.
Indeed, all through the
spring of 1964, warnings of an explosion of violence in Mississippi had been
coming from many quarters.
The nationally-syndicated
columnist Joseph Alsop, writing from Washington, warned that “a very great
storm is gathering—and may break very soon indeed—[there] … The southern
half of Mississippi … has been powerfully reinvaded by the Ku Klux Klan
…”
That’s because it was
apparent by early 1964 that the Civil Rights Movement itself was
building to a crescendo.
The shocking assassination of
President John F. Kennedy the previous November had given a powerful impetus
to what became the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Kennedy had endorsed.
President Lyndon Baines
Johnson would sign the Act that July 2, two weeks after Chaney, Schwerner and
Goodman disappeared.
Secondly, Mississippi civil
rights activists had stepped up their challenges to the state’s rigid
adherence to white-supremacist practices and had announced a “Freedom
Summer” voter registration campaign designed to destroy segregationists’
political power, a prospect which infuriated the Klan and its supporters.
Some may want to dismiss the
marking of this sad anniversary as irrelevant to our own time.
Let them speak to the black,
white and Choctaw Mississippians who Sunday spoke of remembering the whole
past in order to build a future of integrity and reconciliation.
And let them recall another
commemoration earlier this month—of the 60th anniversary of the
D-Day invasion during a war which made the world safe for the expansion of
democracy.
The fight to expand freedom
within America’s borders, and the sacrifices its “soldiers” made,
two decades later was no less important—and, like the commemoration
of D-Day, is no less worthy of use as inspiration for the work the freedom
struggle must now do.
To register for the National Urban
League Conference in Detroit, July 21 -25, call toll-free 1-800-263-9926, or
register online at www.nul.org.
And
don’t forget to do your duty in this important Election Year:
register to vote, and vote!
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