Rights Workers Slain in 1964 Honored

Forty-one years ago this week, three civil rights workers who were in Mississippi to register black voters were slain by a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen and buried deep in the red earth outside this rural lumber town.

On Sunday, while the trial of the man accused of orchestrating the killings was in recess, two memorial services were held to honor the slain men. The three -- James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael H. Schwerner -- were remembered as young activists willing to put their lives on the line for a principle and for “folks they didn’t even know.”

“The Klan thought if they killed those young men, they could stop the movement. But they underestimated us; we’re still here,” said James Young, former head of the Neshoba County Board of Commissioners, at an annual memorial service at the Mt. Zion United Methodist Church. Their slayings galvanized the civil rights movement by showing how “ugly and diabolical racism can be,” he said.

The three men had been investigating a fire that destroyed the original Mt. Zion church when they were arrested for speeding on June 21, 1964. When they were released from jail, their station wagon was followed by Klansmen, who beat and shot the men on a deserted country road.

The 80-year-old man accused of directing the ambush, former Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, is on trial here on three counts of murder. Two final defense witnesses and closing arguments are expected today.

“Many people have waited for this day for a long time,” said Leroy Clemons, president of the Philadelphia NAACP. “Tomorrow, justice is going to speak loud and clear: Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.”

Rita Bender, Schwerner’s widow, told churchgoers that whatever happened in court the next few days, it was important that “we seek to understand how a government became complicit in terror, and how good people looked aside and let it happen. If we don’t understand that, we don’t do our duty to democracy, because governments can run amok again.”

Outside the church, Bender and Barbara Dailey -- Chaney’s sister -- laid a wreath on a monument dedicated to the slain civil rights workers. Afterward, Dailey, who lives in New Jersey, spotted an elderly man she had worked with during her civil rights days in the 1960s.

“Do you remember me?” she asked him.

“Where did you go?” he replied, his eyes lighting up.

“Mama’s house got bombed a couple times and we had to get out of here,” she told him flatly, as if she were ordering a hamburger at the drive-through.

The old man nodded. “That’s how it was,” he said.

At the second memorial service, a few miles away down a country road, about 40 people stood in a circle under a grove of trees and prayed silently. They called out the names of people who had died working in the civil rights movement. Behind them, the hull of a community center, set ablaze two decades ago, stood as a reminder of a past that still resonates -- though much more subtly, resident David Sims said. “It’s not as open as it was, but you can still feel it. People hide it better,” he said.

Bernice Sims, David’s sister, who worked with the Schwerners to register black voters in 1964, sat under a shade tree and reminisced about Father’s Day 1964. It was a Sunday and her mother was making fried chicken. Her neighbor, Chaney, who was black, poked his head into the kitchen. With him were Schwerner and Goodman, white men from New York. The three had just returned to Mississippi from a voter registration workshop in Ohio, and they were heading out to survey the charred remains of the Mt. Zion church. The Simses’ mother insisted that they eat first, telling them she’d have a meal on the table before long.

Goodman, somewhat reserved on his first day in Mississippi, wandered onto the front stoop and played with the Simses’ 9-year-old brother. He told the family his own brother was about the same age. Schwerner, a Jew who had befriended the Sims family months earlier, called, “Amen!” to the pastor who preached on the kitchen radio, knowing it would make the Simses’ religious mother smile.

The men ate, then piled into their station wagon and waved goodbye. Hours later, they were dead.

When she saw Rita Bender at the memorial service, Bernice Sims’ eyes welled with tears. “Don’t cry,” Bender said softly. Sims held tight to her friend, whom she hadn’t seen in decades. “It was important to touch her,” Sims said later, “to make sure she was there. We’re all here and we made it through.”