On August 4, fifty years ago today, the bodies of James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and my friend Mickey Schwerner were uncovered at a dam site in Mississippi. J.E. was 21, Andy was 20, and Mickey was 25. Their murders had been sanctioned by racist officials who hoped to protect their power in Mississippi by stopping the movement of African Americans to win the right to vote. The best way — and I would argue the only way for us as Jews — to honor J.E., Mickey and Andy is to continue their work for voting rights for all. Bend the Arc is doing just that.
Between 1961 and 65, I was a voting rights organizer in the Deep South, first in SW Georgia and then in Mississippi. James Chaney, an African American born and raised in Mississippi, had been a Freedom Rider at age 15 and in 1963-4, worked with Mickey and Rita Schwerner to set up a successful community center in Philadelphia, MS. It provided day care for children, Freedom School classes and was the center of the voting rights movement in Neshoba County. Andy Goodman was a Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteer. He was killed on his first day in the state.
From day one of their disappearance, we who had been organizing in Mississippi knew the three men had been killed. There was no other explanation for why they did not check in as scheduled by 4pm on June 21. And we knew that those searching for their bodies were being misled by Mississippi police and officials who had been part of the murder conspiracy in the first place. Several of us conducted our own searches for the bodies, and for almost a month and a half we pleaded with the U.S. Justice Department to intervene. The breakthrough came when one summer volunteer, the son of a Congressman from California, convinced his father to pressure the FBI to use information they knew to be true and to finally go to where they knew the bodies were buried.
To us, the uncovering of the bodies was anti-climactic. We who had come to support the efforts of African Americans in Mississippi to win the equality due to them had no choice but to continue our work. I was brought up to believe that no matter what, being a mensch meant fighting for justice.
Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were not the first to be killed in the fight for voting rights in Mississippi and they were not the last. Between 1961 and '66 alone, at least five others were murdered: Rev. Herbert Lee, Medgar Evers, Louis Allen, Wayne Yancey and Vernon Dahmer. Indeed, for decades African Americans in Mississippi had lost their jobs, been beaten, burned out, put off their land and killed for fighting for the civil rights due to them as American citizens.
But there was something different about the lynching of the three civil rights workers. It brought into the open the Anti-Semitism that had always been part of the racist, segregationist "Southern Way of Life." Mickey and J.E. had been targeted because the murderers wanted to show that "Jewish Communists" were behind the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Before the bodies were uncovered, White Mississippi leaders went around the state saying that the three men "had disappeared voluntarily and were probably laughing it up on Moscow gold in a New York hotel room." (In Southern-speak "New York" was code for "Jewish".)
During this time, Senator Eastland gave a speech in the Senate citing me and several other Jewish Civil Rights workers as "Communists" and implying that this was, somehow, evidence that the disappearance of the three Civil Rights workers was a hoax.
If I and people like me had left Mississippi then, the racist anti-Semites would have gained a victory. And if we don't continue the fight for voting rights today, we will allow the political descendants of Senator Eastland to continue their growing stranglehold on many states.
From the time the Supreme Court struck down provisions of the Voting Rights Act, reactionaries in state after state have rammed through measures to make voting more difficult for the poor, immigrants, minorities, the young and the elderly. Like the racists of old, they believe widespread voting rights is a threat to their power.
But Bend the Arc is taking a stand. On June 24, Bend the Arc activists lit 3,000 candles in front of the Lincoln Memorial — one for every name on a petition urging Congress to pass the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014, which would protect the right to vote of citizens around the nation.
The fight is not over. You can help. Watch the video of the June 24 press conference and demonstration by clicking here and share the video with your friends through Facebook and all the social media at your disposal.
Let's send this video across the nation so that the public has the opportunity to learn what will be lost if the Voting Rights Act Amendment is not passed.
Let's make clear that our Jewish heritage leads us to fight for justice. Let's continue the work of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman.
Shalom,
Larry Rubin
Copyright © Larry Rubin, 2014
Copyright ©
Copyright to this web page, as a web page, belongs to this web site.
Copyright to the article above belongs to the author.
Webspinner:
webmaster@crmvet.org
(Labor donated)
