Schwerner says questions remain unanswered in slaying of brother

quote of note:
The case received national media attention, largely because two of the three victims were white, Schwerner believes. In fact, he said, in the six weeks that FBI agents searched for the bodies, they uncovered the remains of 10 to 12 African-Americans, many of whom had been active in civil rights, and none of whom received national media coverage. . . .

“When we talk about the heroes of the civil rights movement, most of the real heroes are people whose names we’ll never know,” he said. “They were people indigenous to the area, most of them black, most of them women, who were just doing what they had to do. A movement isn’t dependent on one person. It’s masses of people getting together and saying, ‘we’re not going to tolerate these conditions,’ and then doing something about it.”

January 13, 2005
Yellow Springs News
Yellow Springs, Ohio
By Diane Chiddister

In June 1964 Steve and Nancy Schwerner were vacationing in Providence, R.I., when they turned on the television news and saw that three civil rights workers were missing in Mississippi.

When Steve Schwerner called home and discovered that his little brother, Mickey, was one of the missing, he immediately knew Mickey was dead, although it took six weeks for the bodies to be discovered.

Last week a Mississippi preacher and alleged Ku Klux Klan member was arrested for killing Michael Schwerner and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. In Neshoba County, Miss., Edgar Ray Killen, 79, was charged with three counts of murder after a grand jury ruled that sufficient evidence still exists to convict him. Killen is the first person charged with the killings, which galvanized the civil rights movement.

After 40 years with little movement in the case, Schwerner, a retired Antioch College dean of students, feels some gratification that Mickey’s alleged killer may be brought to justice, he said in an interview this week. But Schwerner also believes that Killen’s arrest in no way completely answers the larger and more complex question of why his brother was killed.

“There is a certain justice and reasonableness in having Killen indicted,” -Schwerner said. “But if that’s where it stops, the reasonableness dissipates. He didn’t act alone. And more importantly, what were the forces which allowed this to happen?”

Those forces, Schwerner believes, include the complacency of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in a racist society, along with the possible complacency of the state and federal governments. And 40 years later, Schwerner feels troubled by the bigotry he still sees around him.

“The civil rights movement had an effect. We’ve made progress, but we have a long way to go,” he said. “This country is still terribly racist and sexist and the last election was grossly homophobic. We have a lot we haven’t finished.”

Mickey Schwerner paid the ultimate price for his passion for racial equality, a passion he learned as a child, Steve Schwerner said.

“We grew up in a family that believed in social justice. That’s what we were taught as little kids,” he said.

Steve, two and a half years the elder, and Michael, or Mickey, were the children of parents who worked as union organizers in New York City. The Schwerners taught their children to value all people and to respect all races, Steve Schwerner said, and their father made sure that, in addition to taking his sons to see Yankee games, he took them to watch the Negro Baseball Leagues as well.

When the civil rights movement emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, both Schwerner brothers participated, although Mickey always went one step further, Schwerner said. For instance, when demonstrators sought to stop construction at a Lower East Side housing project, Mickey lay down in front of bulldozers to stop them. A social worker, he was also arrested several times for his civil rights activities.

“He was much more courageous than I was,” Schwerner said.

After the 1963 burning of a church in Birmingham, Ala., Mickey and his wife, Rita, joined the frontlines of the movement. In January 1964, they went to Mississippi to work for the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. They moved to Meridian, where they headed CORE activities in one of the state’s five congressional districts, including organizing a voting rights drive and a freedom school.

Mickey and Rita understood that the work was dangerous, said Schwerner, noting that CORE staff members told new volunteers that they couldn’t rely on local law enforcement personnel to protect them.

“The volunteers were told that ‘you -middle-class kids are used to having the law on your side, but forget it, there’s no law here,’ ” he said.

And while the civil rights organizations continually appealed to federal justice agencies for protection for their workers, they were turned down, Schwerner said.

From Jerry Mitchell, a reporter who has followed the civil rights workers’ murders for decades, Schwerner said, he learned that his brother appeared to have been targeted by the state Ku Klux Klan, and the Klan’s state leader apparently gave Killen permission to kill Schwerner as early as April or May 1964. Schwerner was also followed by other white separatist organizations, including the Sovereignty Council, a subgroup of the White Citizen’s Council, a state-organized association of middle-class whites.

In June, Schwerner traveled to Philadelphia, Miss., to inspect a church as a possible site for a freedom school. He was accompanied by Andy Goodman, another CORE volunteer, and Jim Chaney, a young local black man who hung out at the Meridian freedom school and “was so valuable that he ended up being hired by CORE” as an organizer, Steve Schwerner said.

Apparently, late in the afternoon the three men were arrested by the local sheriff and taken to the jail in Philadelphia, where they were released around 10 p.m. While driving back to Meridian, the men were overtaken by the group of men that killed them. Seven Ku Klux Klansmen were later convicted on federal conspiracy charges, but none was held accountable for the murders.

The three men were missing for six weeks before their bodies were found. Schwerner said he knew his brother had died because Mickey, given the danger of his work, always phoned to alert others as to his whereabouts, and this time he never called.

The case received national media attention, largely because two of the three victims were white, Schwerner believes. In fact, he said, in the six weeks that FBI agents searched for the bodies, they uncovered the remains of 10 to 12 African-Americans, many of whom had been active in civil rights, and none of whom received national media coverage.

Over the past four decades, the Schwerner family has guarded its privacy, and Steve Schwerner declined to discuss family members’ personal responses to Mickey’s death. He did say, however, that following his brother’s murder, their father attempted to turn his grief into action by fundraising for civil rights groups, as did Steve Schwerner himself.

While Schwerner accepts the media attention given to the murder of his brother, Chaney and Goodman, he feels cautious about the idolization of any individual civil rights workers, especially those who are white.

“When we talk about the heroes of the civil rights movement, most of the real heroes are people whose names we’ll never know,” he said. “They were people indigenous to the area, most of them black, most of them women, who were just doing what they had to do. A movement isn’t dependent on one person. It’s masses of people getting together and saying, ‘we’re not going to tolerate these conditions,’ and then doing something about it.”