Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman: No justice after 40 years

By Chris Gray

It was the summer of ’64. Rick Momeyer had just graduated from Allegheny College and, for the first summer since he started college, he didn’t have to work.

Two years before, Momeyer had spent a semester at Fisk University, where he took part in sit-ins in Nashville, Tenn., with civil rights activist John Lewis. Now Lewis was asking him to take part in the next big event of the civil rights movement, something called the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.

Two waves of volunteers, mostly Northern white college students, would descend upon Mississippi to register blacks to vote and set up “Freedom Schools” where they would try to teach black Mississippians to read, write and demand their constitutional rights.

Momeyer had already decided he would spend that summer as a paid field secretary for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, registering black voters in Georgia on behalf of black congressional candidate C.B. King.

But before going down to Georgia, Momeyer agreed to join Lewis at the former Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, to train volunteers in the tactics of nonviolence.

Momeyer, now a philosophy professor at Miami University, arrived in Oxford for the first time on Sunday, June 21, 1964, as a part of the second wave of the project.

The day before, the first wave had left Ohio for Mississippi, among them Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney and their new recruit, Andy Goodman. Schwerner and Chaney had not expected to leave Ohio so early, but a bombed-out church in Longdale, Miss., the site of a proposed Freedom School, demanded their attention. Schwerner and Goodman were white New Yorkers, Chaney, a black man from Meridian, Miss.

On Monday morning, program director Bob Moses was addressing the students at Western College when he was taken aside and told that Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney had been missing for 14 hours.

“Moses told us that in Mississippi civil rights workers didn’t just go missing and reappear days later,” recalls Momeyer. “Our brothers were murdered, probably by the Ku Klux Klan, and we should deal with it.”

The three were indeed murdered, outside Philadelphia, Miss. After a 44-day manhunt, their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam. Several members of the KKK were later brought to trial in federal courts and convicted of violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. But the state of Mississippi refused to try the Klansmen for murder, and to this day, no one has ever been brought to trial for the murders of these three civil rights workers.

Forty years later, Momeyer and others affected by the events of 1964 are still waiting for justice. As 2004 draws to a close, their wait could soon be coming to an end.

* * * * *

At Western College in 1964, the tenor of the training sessions changed abruptly after Moses’ announcement. “Any romantic notions about helping Negroes were disabused. Any idea that their privilege would protect them was erased,” says Momeyer.

Most of the volunteers had come from upper-middle-class, liberal homes in the Northeast, far removed from the Jim Crow South. Many were the sons and daughters of lawyers, judges and corporate executives.

“Few had any real understanding of how life was like for blacks in Mississippi,” says Momeyer. “This was their first inkling of how their life would be like as civil rights workers.”

Steve Schwerner, the brother of Mickey Schwerner, says a large faction of the country still believed the civil rights movement was a radical cause. “They couldn’t possibly believe these students were for real. They thought that they had been duped by others.”

Mickey Schwerner was not a volunteer at Western College, but a paid field secretary for CORE—the Congress of Racial Equality—stationed in Meridian, Miss. He had devoted his life to social justice a few years before, and had the full support of his family in Pelham, N.Y., just north of New York City.

Now 67 years old and retired as a professor from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Steve Schwerner says he joined Mickey in his early demonstrations in New York, protesting the construction of public housing projects built mostly for blacks and Puerto Ricans, but built by only whites.

“He was much more courageous than I was,” says Schwerner. “In Manhattan, he’d lie in front of bulldozers.”

Steve Schwerner did not follow his brother as he took his mission south, first to Maryland, where in 1963 Mickey was arrested for his part in sit-ins, then to Mississippi, where in January 1964 he and his wife, Rita, became full-time workers for CORE.

Twenty-year-old Andy Goodman was one of those who came to Oxford in June of ’64 as a volunteer. His mother, Carolyn, recalls how Andy felt called to go down South, that they needed people. She says she and her husband didn’t try to stop their son or talk him out of it. They had brought him up in a household that stood up against the baseless attacks of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and it was only natural for him to wish to pursue civil rights.

“His father told him, ‘You know what this world’s about, but you have to take your own path,’” she says, from her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Andy grew up. “It was with a heavy heart, but that’s what he did.”

Carolyn Goodman says Andy felt he was going down to Mississippi to uphold the Constitution.

And yet, “They were taught at Oxford to forget the Constitution,” according to Schwerner. “They were told they were going to a place with no laws.”

At Western College that June, volunteers learned how to resist the violence of a mob. “We showed them how to protect themselves, to fold up, cover their head, neck and genitals. And we showed them the importance of non-violence, both tactically and philosophically,” recalls Momeyer.

No matter how bad the violence got, volunteers were to meet it with non-violence, taking away any justification for the mob or the cops to strike them.

Arthur Miller, the retired president of the Oxford chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was not surprised when he heard something had happened to Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. Miller and other local NAACP members had put up money for volunteers to go to Mississippi.

“I was stationed in Biloxi, Miss., during World War II, so I knew exactly what they were going into,” says Miller.

One time, during the war, Miller was sitting in the white waiting room of the Greyhound station in Columbus, Ga., when police were called. Another black man had taken a seat at the front of a bus and refused to move. A policeman shot the man right there, in the head, Miller says.

Another time, after a football game between two black colleges, a black soldier began directing traffic, trying to clear out cars faster. Despite the nearly all-black crowd, white cops were assigned to direct the traffic. “They said, ‘He’s trying to do our job; we’d better stop him.’ And they opened up their guns at him, shot boom-boom-boom,” says Miller. “They shot him dead.”

Miller says there was no way he was going down South in 1964, but he came to the training sessions in Oxford every day to observe and lend his support. “Mississippi was the worst offender of African-American rights. If they (civil rights workers) broke the hold there, it would enhance the whole country,” Miller says. “That’s the reason the Council of Churches provided the opportunity. And kids from all over the nation came here to train.”

If all had went well that summer, Miller says, the world would never have known about Freedom Summer. “But when two white kids were murdered, the whole world paid attention, and the FBI got involved.”

But even with the FBI in the picture, no one would be convicted of the three murders, and no one would spend long behind bars for crimes against the men.

In 1967, the federal government, led by special prosecutor John Doar, convicted seven men of violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, handing them sentences that ranged from three to 10 years in federal prison. The group included Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price and Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. None of the seven served out his full sentence.

In 1999, following mounting pressure and the convictions of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers and Bowers on another civil rights-era murder charge, Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore reopened the case of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.

In May 2001, Deputy Price died, having fallen from a tractor.

Moore noted at the time, “If he had been a defendant, he would have been a principal defendant. If he had been a witness, he would have been our best witness. Either way, his death is a tragic blow to our case.”

In 2004, Mississippi got a new attorney general, Jim Hood, but the state still has not brought any charges forward.

But the case remains open and an active and full investigation is underway, according to special assistant Attorney General Jacob Ray. His office is trying to gather as much evidence as it can.

“We only get one shot at it, and to do this prematurely would ruin it,” says Ray. “We don’t want to jump off a cliff without a parachute.”

At one point, Hood declared he would make an indictment within a month’s time, only to let a month go by with no action, Ray notes. More evidence is always coming forward, Ray says, and the attorney general hesitates to set any date for charges to come down.

Reactions to the possibility of new murder charges vary among those most affected by the deaths of Freedom Summer.

Schwerner cares less about prosecuting the individuals responsible than shedding some serious light on the situation in which his brother, Chaney and Goodman found themselves in 1964 Mississippi.

“I’m interested in what the role of the Justice Department and the FBI was in not only letting the Mississippi police do nothing but also be on the side of the Klan,” Schwerner says. “The problem for me is that it was not a handful of people who were responsible for this. It was state-sanctioned terrorism; in fact, it was supported.”

Goodman says she’s not looking for revenge. “I’m looking for justice, and I want that to be absolutely clear.” And she does believe she’ll see justice. “It’ll be in your lifetime, for sure, and I hope in mine.

“I’m a bit of an optimist, but I do think it’s going to happen,” she says. “The attorney general, he’s a good person, actually, and the state is a changed place.”

Momeyer is more pessimistic the case will ever be brought to trial. “I don’t think they’re going to do anything,” he says. “You don’t win white votes by focusing on your shameful history.”

For Miller, changes in the Deep South were felt as early as 1969. That year, he attended an NAACP gathering in Jackson, Miss., with his wife, Alice, who is white. This was only two years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Mississippi law that said miscegenation—the intermarriage of different races—was a crime.

“I ate in a restaurant no Negro had ever eaten in,” he says. “I stayed in a Holiday Inn no Negro had ever stayed in.”

Now 82 years old, Miller doesn’t think most of the white people in Mississippi are bad. He just thinks they wanted to follow the law, which was bad, and they went along with ringleaders, who were bad.

“When laws said this shouldn’t happen, they didn’t have to go along with bad people, and things changed,” he says.

In 1989, Steve Schwerner and Mickey’s widow, Rita, returned to Mississippi for the 25th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Steve Schwerner says the most shocking thing for Rita was to see black state troopers.

“Politically, the state has changed dramatically. Mississippi has the largest number of black state legislators in the country,” says Schwerner. “Socially, the state has changed significantly. But, economically, it has changed little. Everything is controlled by the same small group of white men as before. And it is still the poorest state in the nation.”

Schwerner compares the situation to what civil rights leader Malcolm X once said about New York, “In Harlem, blacks had always had the right to vote, and segregation was illegal. But it still exists; the right to vote doesn’t do a damn bit of difference.”

Schwerner says gaining suffrage and eliminating Jim Crow laws were necessary for progress, but that the next step is how to really integrate the economy.

* * * * *

In Oxford this September, many of the veterans of Freedom Summer, who had gathered that June at Western College for Women in 1964, returned to the campus of Western, which is now part of Miami University. They commemorated 40 years with the reunion, plus lectures and presentations given by those involved. Bob Moses was on hand, as were Momeyer and Ben Chaney, brother of James Chaney. John Lewis, now a U.S. representative from Georgia’s 5th district, gave the keynote speech.

This summer the murder case of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney also drew national headlines when white supremacist and leader of the Nationalist organization, Richard Barrett, said he would set up a booth at the Mississippi State Fair, hand out fliers with an “X” drawn through photographs of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman and have alleged mastermind of the murder conspiracy, Edgar Ray Killen, sign autographs. Barrett was also going to ask patrons to sign a petition denouncing any attorney-general-led investigation of Killen.

Ray, from the attorney general’s office in Jackson, says Barrett was only trying to draw attention to himself and his racist causes. Barrett never got a booth and never even contacted Killen with his plans before the story broke.

“Barrett—he doesn’t understand that times have changed, and his time has gone,” says Ray.

In response to Barrett’s ploy, the sheriff of Hinds County set up a counter-petition, supporting the murder investigation of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. And 500 students from Jackson State University, an historically black college, marched on Jackson soon afterward to protest Barrett’s plans.

Momeyer doesn’t believe Freedom Summer altered his life dramatically. He was already involved in the movement; he had already been jailed and beaten several times. He says the way the murders affected him is harder to tell.

“It shapes your sensibility about your country, about how people live, about what’s worth fighting for.”

Schwerner, as well, was already an adherent to the civil rights movement, though he does say his brother’s death gave him entrée into exclusive circles, allowing him to speak to people he otherwise would not have and help him raise money for SNCC and CORE.

For Goodman, the change was much more profound. Trained professionally as a psychologist, she coped with the loss of her son with what are called mutual support systems. She leaned on her friends and family, and they leaned on her.

“Andy’s death was a great blow to us. But we all feel without being mystical about it, that he is still with us, because he changed our lives for the better. He made us more aware of others less fortunate than ourselves and how to help them,” she says.

Today, at 89, Goodman is the head of a foundation in Andy’s name and says she contributes however she can when she sees an injustice.

In 1999, she marched in the protest that ensued when Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Haitian immigrant, was shot by New York City police 41 times as he reached for his wallet. She was arrested at the protest.

“It was an issue of ‘Move on,’ when we didn’t want to move on,” she says, concerning the arrest. Fortunately, the policemen were kind. One of them told her and her fellow protestors he was getting engaged and showed them pictures of his (hopefully) bride-to-be. “It turned out to be a bit of a joke, but it could’ve been nasty under other circumstances,” she says.

Momeyer and Schwerner both say Freedom Summer was a success, not because it registered that many people to vote, because it didn’t, but because it pushed President Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the Freedom Schools helped reach out to a lot of black Mississippians and let them in on what went on outside Mississippi.

Momeyer looks to the example of John Lewis as an inspiration. “He’s the living saint of the movement—proof that you can survive worse than what I survived and still believe in democracy.”

Goodman says her son’s sacrifice helps her carry on. “I feel strong. It was my son who did this out of choice,” she says. “There are so many good people who are not acknowledged by the powers that be. I don’t believe in violence, neither did Andy. Sometimes change comes slowly, but I’m doing my little part to make this country work. I’m not giving anything away. I’m just working to make it what we hope the founding fathers had in mind for this country to be, and I work at it every day, one way or another.”

Despite all the people who are remembered—from Martin Luther King to John Lewis to Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman—“most of the people in the civil rights movement, nobody’s going to know: people who risked everything,” says Steve Schwerner. “Really, the bulk of the movement was in the South; it was black; it was done by women. It’s this unknown mass that are the true heroes of the movement: anonymous people who get together and want change.”