Fifty years after their murder in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan, activists Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were among 19 people awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom today by President Obama.
The three men were slain while participating in the CORE-organized “Freedom Summer” voting registration campaign, though all three had actively participated in civil rights organizing prior to the summer of 1964. Over the course of that summer, thousands of workers and locals were arrested, beaten, and in some cases even killed for their participation in the campaign. Monitoring, threats, beatings, murders, bombings, etc., were not carried out independently by the KKK but by an insidious network of local governments, state agencies, citizen organizations, police departments, and the KKK, of which there was considerable overlap: the county police officer who arrested the three men the night they were ambushed and murdered was at the time both deputy sheriff and active klansman. Those deeply-embedded inequities at the root of the highest structures of state-level authority allowed for this activity to flourish more or less with impunity. In this case, which became known as the “Mississippi Burning” case, seven men were sentenced to at the very most 10 years in prison, and none served longer than six until the case was reopened in 2004.
In light of recent events and ongoing situations (including the killing of Michael Brown and continuing demonstration in Ferguson) living relatives of the men have expressed doubt about the commendations - they worry that the award “distorts history” by creating a neat bookend to a continuing struggle. Rita Schwerner, widow of Michael Schwerner and herself a CORE worker, told the Associated Press:
There were not just three men who were part of a struggle. There were not just three men who were killed…You know, the struggle in this country probably started with the first revolt on a slave ship, and it continues now.
It would be more significant if I could look at these fifty years and say, Boy, we are in a much better place today… I think it’s terribly important to understand that this struggle is not over.
Chaney’s sister said that the award is "really about all of those families," (referring to families of other civil rights activists killed in those years), and that "It’s really about the history of the pain of the African-American experience in Mississippi."
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