MICHAEL HENRY SCHWERNER

NOVEMBER 6, 1939 – JUNE 21, 1964

CORNELL CLASS OF 1961

 

Sixty years ago, in the summer and fall of 1963, our classmate Michael Schwerner – Mickey – together with his wife Rita took the steps that led to their move to Mississippi for what became known as Freedom Summer, 1964.  For Mickey, and two voting rights coworkers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, the first day of that summer, June 21, 1964, was their last.  The Class of 1961 has been committed to honoring their memory, including by, in Mickey’s name, providing scholarship support for Cornell students interested in civil rights.

 

Born in New York City, Mickey grew up in Pelham, New York.  After a freshman year at Michigan State University, Mickey transferred to Cornell’s Agriculture College.  An indicator of his developing thoughts was his decision, after several semesters, to major in rural sociology.  A 2005 Cornell Daily Sun remembrance recalled that “Schwerner’s commitment to civil justice showed during his Cornell days when he successfully fought to have an African-American student pledge Alpha Epsilon Pi, his fraternity.”[1]

 

After graduating in 1961, Mickey spent a year (during which Rita and he married) at Columbia’s Graduate School of Social Work, leaving there for employment at the Hamilton-Madison House, a settlement house on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  Step-by-step, Mickey’s commitment to civil rights activism increased.  He joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).  He was arrested while demonstrating at the segregated Gwyn Oaks Amusement Park in Maryland.  In mid-1963, Mickey and Rita took their next step, applying to CORE for assignment to a field office in Mississippi, which in January 1964 brought them to Meridian, Mississippi where they would have responsibilities not only in Meridian but also five surrounding counties, including, fatefully, Neshoba County.

 

The Mississippi Project – what became known as Freedom Summer – was a joint effort of CORE, the NAACP, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), under the umbrella of the Council of Federated Organizations.  COFO had three objectives.  One was to increase Black political participation through voting, beginning with voter registration in the face of intimidation and arcane, biased literacy tests.  Second, closely related to that, was organization and support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge seating of Mississippi’s all-White delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.  Third, an educational component for which the participation of Black churches, especially in rural Mississippi, in housing Freedom Schools was key.

           

Mickey and Rita set to work in Meridian where they were given the assignment of opening for CORE a Community Center, for which they drew upon their skills and training, Mickey’s in operating a settlement house and Rita as an educator.  The center was to be the organizing headquarters for the voter registration drive in Meridian and surrounding counties.  By early Spring, Mickey, with James Chaney – a young Black volunteer from the Meridian community – had begun exploring nearby counties for Freedom School sites.  James’s first trips into Neshoba County, accompanied several times by Mickey, were in April.  The county seat of Neshoba County is Philadelphia.  In his book, Three Lives for Mississippi, William Bradford Huie wrote “[t]hey knew that Neshoba was a maximum-danger county.”

 

In late May, the congregation of Mount Zion Methodist Church, in Neshoba County’s Black Longdale community, agreed to take the grave risk of allowing Mickey to speak there about opening a Freedom School, and on May 31 parishioners voted for the school.  Investigations showed that Mickey had already drawn the deadly attention of area Klan.  In a summary of evidence developed over decades of investigation, the Department of Justice confirmed in a 2016 report that “Schwerner was particularly reviled by the Klan for his work.  Indeed, the killing of Schwerner was a routine topic discussed at Klan meetings attended by both Meridian and Philadelphia Klansmen, but Klan orthodoxy prevented such action unless authorized by the state Klan leader.  Several weeks before the murders, state Klan leader Sam Bowers gave that authority.”[2]

 

The Justice Department report continues: “On the evening of June 16,1964, a large group of Meridian and Philadelphia Klansmen, including Klansmen later involved in the June 21 murders, attended a Klan meeting.  The Klansmen discussed a reported gathering, thought to include civil rights workers, at the African-American Mount Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County just outside of Philadelphia.  Schwerner and Chaney had visited that church and worked with its parishioners.  Several armed Klansmen left the Klan meeting and drove to the church looking for white civil rights workers.  Although no civil rights volunteers were present at the church, the Klansmen beat the African-American parishioners whom they encountered and returned later to burn down the church.  Afterwards, it was speculated by some Klansmen that the attack on the church might lure Schwerner back to Neshoba County.”[3]

 

If the Klan objective was to lure Mickey back to Neshoba County, it worked.  News of the beating of parishioners and burning of the church reached Mickey in Oxford, Ohio where he and James Chaney were taking part in a program at the Western College for Women (now part of Miami University, Ohio) to train Freedom Summer volunteers.  Joined by a new volunteer, Andrew Goodman (also of New York), they drove to Mississippi on June 20.  The following day, June 21, they continued to Longdale to view the burned church and visit the beating victims of the Klan’s June 16 attack.  That afternoon, as they began their drive back to Meridian, they were arrested by a Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff and Klan member, Cecil Price, who held them in the Philadelphia jail for several hours while notifying a local Klan leader.  When night fell, Price released the three who started to drive to Meridian, only to be intercepted by Price who had followed, and then turned over to a Klan mob who murdered them.  It took until August 4, finally with the aid of a Klan informant, to find their bodies buried in an earthen dam.[4]

 

Arson, bombings, and beatings continued through that summer in Mississippi.  Between June and September at least 20 Black churches were bombed or burned.  Safety was continually threatened.  But the Freedom Schools continued and few of the 800 or so Freedom Summer volunteers reconsidered.  By one count, 175 taught over 2000 students in more than 40 Freedom Schools across the state.  Volunteers working on voter registration walked countless miles on country roads, knocking on doors, encouraging voting registration.  Perhaps of greatest importance, volunteers lived with Black families and worked under Black leadership, returning to northern homes and schools to be witnesses to what they had learned.[5]

Numerically, actual registration gains in Mississippi that summer were modest.  Even that helped to make a point.  Safeguarding the right to vote with effective remedies required federal legislation.  In July 1964, while the search for Mickey, James, and Andrew was still underway, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  That Act made enormous gains in addressing discrimination in public accommodations, federally financed programs, and employment, but in Title I of the Act only modest gains concerning voting.  But by the following year, the 1964 images of Mississippi burning and bloodshed, joined in March 1965 by Selma’s bloody images, led to enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.[6]  Black voting registration in Mississippi and elsewhere soon soared, a legacy of Freedom Summer.

 

In the months following the summer of 1964 there was a memorial gathering in Bailey Hall and other initial campus efforts to recognize and carry on the commitment of our classmate Mickey and colleagues.  As time went on, the Class of 1961 undertook the willing task of honoring their legacy.  In 1988, the class established the Michael Schwerner Memorial Scholarship Fund which has awarded annually a scholarship to a Cornell student interested in civil rights.  Class members replenish resources in the fund in association with annual class dues.

 

For our 30th Reunion in 1991, the Class of 1961 commissioned a stained- glass window, for the University’s Sage Chapel, by New York artist Albinus Elskus, who was known for creation of stained-glass windows.  The window has portraits of Michael, James and Andrew drawn from the FBI’s 1964 missing persons flyer.  On top is a representation of the flames of a burning church.  Underneath the portraits is a row with the state flag of Mississippi at the time, the date of their deaths (June 21, 1964), and the U.S. flag.  Viewers may surmise the message intended by the two flags: perhaps it was the conflict they represented.  At the time the state flag had a field with a Confederate battle flag.  In 2021, the Mississippi legislature replaced that flag with one whose central image is the state flower, a white magnolia blossom, surrounded by stars.

 

Below the Sage Chapel window, the Class of 1961 placed this plaque:

 

IN MEMORY OF

JAMES CHANEY, ANDREW GOODMAN

and our classmate MICHAEL SCHWERNER

WHO WERE SLAIN DURING THE 1964

VOTER REGISTRATION DRIVE IN MISSISSIPPI

AND ALL OTHERS WHO DIED FOR

THE ADVANCEMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND

RACIAL EQUALITY IN OUR COUNTRY.

                                       From the Class of 1961

 

 

In 2014, President Barack Obama presented Presidential Medals of Freedom, the Nation’s highest civilian honor, posthumously to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.  At the White House ceremony on November 24, the medals were received by James’ daughter Angela, Andrew’s brother David, and Michael’s wife Rita.  The formal citation accompanying the medals stated:

 

In 1964, three young men sought to right one of the many wrongs of the Jim Crow era by joining hundreds of others to register black voters in Mississippi during “Freedom Summer.” The work was fraught with danger, yet their commitment to justice was so strong that they were willing to risk their lives for it. Their deaths shocked the nation, and their courage has never been forgotten. James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner still inspire us. Their ideals have been written into the moral fabric of our nation, from the landmark civil rights legislation enacted days after their deaths to our continued pursuit of a more perfect union.

 

Michael Davidson

Class of 1961

 


[1] That student was likely Harry T. Edwards, now a Senior Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

[2] U.S. Department of Justice Report to the Attorney General of the State of Mississippi, Investigation of the 1964 Murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman (2016) at p. 5.

[3] Justice Department Report, at p. 6.

[4] The Justice Department Report sets forth the history of the federal and state criminal investigations and prosecutions which culminated in eight federal convictions in 1967 for violation of the federal criminal civil rights conspiracy statute.  The federal prosecutions were brought by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights John Doar. Nearly 40 years later, in 2005, a manslaughter conviction of a Klan leader in a state prosecution constituted the ninth conviction for the 1964 murders.  See pp. 3-4.  The federal prison sentences in 1967 (the three longest were for 10 years) were limited by the constraints of the penalty provision of the federal statute then in effect, which has since been amended.  The 2005 state conviction of Edgar Ray Killen, leader of the Neshoba Klan, resulted in three consecutive 20-year sentences, for a total of 60 years.  Killen died in prison in 2018.  The Killen prosecution was brought by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan, manifesting a major change from the 1960s in the administration of justice in Mississippi. 

[5] While our focus here is on Mississippi and Freedom Summer there, Cornell support for voter registration extended beyond.  See Glenn C. Altschuler & Isaac Kramnick, Cornell, A History, 1940-2015 (2014), at p.156 (“aiding black voter registration and poll watching in Fayette County, Tennessee”); Step By Step, by members of the Fayette County Project, edited by Cornell Economics Professor Douglas Dowd and Mary Nichols (1965) (describing the Cornell-Tompkins Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Fayette County project, in which 45 volunteers, mostly Cornell students, lived and worked in Fayette County in southwestern Tennessee, on the Mississippi border, during the summer of 1964.)  The Fayette County Project continued for several years after.

[6] The National Archives posts this historical note about the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “In 1964, numerous peaceful demonstrations were organized by Civil Rights leaders, and the considerable violence they were met with brought renewed attention to the issue of voting rights. The murder of voting-rights activists in Mississippi and the attack by white state troopers on peaceful marchers in Selma, Alabama, gained national attention and persuaded President Johnson and Congress to initiate meaningful and effective national voting rights legislation. The combination of public revulsion to the violence and Johnson's political skills stimulated Congress to pass the voting rights bill on August 5, 1965.”