Searching for Restorative Justice: The Trial of Edgar Ray Killen

Abstract

The brutal assassination of Medgar Evers, the Field Secretary of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963, revealed to the entire nation the great difficulty of bringing multicultural democracy to the brutal Deep South. Several months after Evers's death, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi Delta, Charles Cobb, came up with an idea that might concentrate media and political attention on the state's mistreatment of Blacks. Cobb proposed that SNCC create a mass mobilization, “Mississippi Summer,” that would recruit about one thousand mostly white college students and volunteers into the state to assist in desegregation and voter registration organizing. A central task for these volunteers would be the construction and operation of “Freedom Schools,” that teach African–American history of the Black Freedom Movement, as well as mathematics, English, and other academic disciplines. Bob Moses, the director of SNCC's Mississippi Project, liked the proposal and when Northern students began to volunteer to do organizing in Mississippi during the spring 1964, many were informed that they should be prepared to teach. Others were to work on the ongoing voter registration efforts. Staughton Lynd, a young white historian who had taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, was hired to train college volunteers in Oxford, Ohio, at Miami University. Lynd personally traveled by automobile to nearly every “Freedom School,” to check on their development. From the beginning of June, 1964, SNCC organizers and the student volunteers learned that their efforts would come under severe attack by local white racists. In McComb, Mississippi, for example, a Freedom School that had been open for just two days was firebombed in the middle of the night. Yet despite the bombing, over one hundred Black children and young adults walked to the bombed-out school to attend Freedom School classes. Among the first group of summer volunteers who had come to Mississippi was Andrew Goodman. He joined Mickey Schwerner who had been in Mississippi since January 1964, working with his wife Rita, and local people including an African–American youth activist from Meridian, James Chaney on voter registration and community organizing out of a community center established in Meridian by COFO. When the three men disappeared on the night of June 21, 1964 in Neshoba County, civil rights activists feared the worst. Their fears were confirmed weeks later, when the FBI discovered their buried bodies after offering a $30,000 reward. Eventually, eight of the individuals connected with the Ku Klux Klan who were responsible for the murder of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were convicted of civil rights charges. By the end of Mississippi summer, 80 civil rights volunteers had been severely beaten, hundreds had been harassed and arrested, and thirty-seven African–American churches had been firebombed. But the summer mobilization set into motion the subsequent passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that extended the electoral franchise to millions of African Americans for the first time in nearly a century. Rita L. Bender, currently a partner in the legal firm of Skellenger Bender, based in Washington state, is the widow of Mickey Schwerner. In these remarks, presented at the “National Conference: Crimes of the Civil Rights Era,” at Northeastern University, Boston, on April 28, 2007, she relates an insider's perspective on the courage and sacrifices that were necessary in the modern Black Freedom Struggle. —Manning Marable