Freedom Summer 107Schwerner, Michael
(1939–64): White CORE
worker murdered by Mis-
sissippi klansmen at the
start of Freedom Summer.stockpiled new shotguns and gas masks; purchased paddy wagons, search-
light trucks, and a 6-ton armored personnel carrier with bulletproof wind-
shields; and turned the fairgrounds into a makeshift prison. The civil rights
workers ‘won’t have a chance,’ the mayor predicted.
COFO went ahead anyway. The National Council of Churches set up a
training center for voter registration and nonviolence tactics at Western
College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. For two weeks in June, the volunteers
learned how to survive in Mississippi while registering fearful local blacks
and teaching in Freedom Schools. Don’t travel openly in interracial groups,
the volunteers were warned. Don’t stand in a lighted window; don’t drive
down unfamiliar roads; don’t take blows to the head. Although white civil
rights workers had never been lynched, the volunteers might well be killed
because segregationists saw them as traitors. ‘Our goals are limited,’ Bob
Moses explained. ‘If we can go and come back alive, then that is something.’
The group grew more somber after a Justice department official admitted that
he could do nothing to protect them.
The expected violence came on the first day of Freedom Summer. The
White Knights – the Klan’s most violent branch – targeted three CORE
workers: Michael ‘Mickey’ Schwerner, a 24-year-old New York social worker
who ran the Meridian office in Neshoba county; James Chaney, a 21-year-
old black plasterer from Meridian; and Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old
Queens College sophomore. Once the imperial wizard gave the order, Edgar
Ray Killen, a Baptist preacher and Klan recruiter, laid a death trap for the
bearded Schwerner, explaining that the movement would wither without its
leader: ‘Goatee is like the queen bee in the beehive. You eliminate the queen
bee and all the workers go away.’ Killen put the plan in motion when the
Klan torched Longdale’s Mount Zion Methodist Church, future host of a free-
dom school. Schwerner and his companions went to investigate the ruins
on Sunday, 21 June, only to be arrested by deputy sheriff Cecil Price for
allegedly fire-bombing the church they had just inspected. Price alerted his
fellow klansmen about his prized prisoners.
When the activists were released at 10.30 p.m., three carloads of klans-
men who had been drinking heavily intercepted the ‘heretics’ and took
them to a deserted dirt road. Wayne Roberts, a 26-year-old salesman and ex-
Marine, jerked Schwerner out of the car. ‘Are you the nigger lover?’ Roberts
demanded to know and then shot him him point-blank in the heart. Roberts
shot Goodman dead too. Hearing gunshots, Jim Jordan jumped out of his
car, shouting, ‘Save one for me!’ After firing at Chaney’s abdomen, Jordan
exclaimed, ‘Y’all didn’t leave me nothing but a nigger, but at least I killed me
a nigger.’ The victims were then buried beneath thirty feet of Mississippi mud
next to a cattle pond. Before dawn, the murderers returned to Philadelphia,
where a state official praised them: ‘Well, boys, you’ve done a good job.
Chaney, James(1943–
64): CORE worker mur-
dered by Mississippi
klansmen at the start of
Freedom Summer.