Three Young Men

It was Freedom Summer, a time of civil activism in the South. 1964, 3 men came together because they thought the black people of Mississippi should be afforded basic human rights. The right to be free in their own country, to move about without the threat of violence or death, the right to be able to participate in the democratic process of their own country. On June 21, 1964, the three young men vanished in the night.

James Chaney, Michael (Mickey) Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman believed in the kind of freedom promised in our founding documents, and Mickey and Andrew came to the South to help those who weren't allowed to help themselves. Chaney was a native, a Black man who knew better than anyone knew what might await him, Schwerner was from New York and had been part of peaceful activism before, Goodman was a college kid from Ohio, and had only been there a few days. For their belief in fairness, and inequality, they were beaten and murdered, buried in an earthen dam never to be seen again. Some of the killers were the very law enforcement officers charged with protecting the community, with protecting them.

Their bodies were found due to a couple of brave people stepping forward and informing on the KKK but the killers were never charged by the state of Mississippi, finally being found guilty later of the federal charges of violating the men's civil rights, by the act of killing them. I call them men, but they were students, nearly boys. They were murdered in Philadelphia Mississippi, the same place, by the way, Ronald Reagan announced and began his campaign for the presidency in 1980. This was not a coincidence. Those sorts of things are never a coincidence but a call out to those who would hear and agree.

That was 1964. How much has changed today?

We have people in the streets, demanding the sort of justice the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner died for on the dirt backroads of Mississippi. Demanding the centuries-delayed justice kept from the thousands of dead Black people.

Eric Garner

Michelle Cusseaux

Tanisha Anderson

.Natasha McKenna

Walter Scott

Bettie Jones

Philando Castile

Atatiana Jefferson

Eric Reason

Dominique Clayton

Breonna Taylor

George Floyd

Rayshard Brooks

Three young men in 1964 were part of a chain, a chain that drags, weighs, that holds us in the dirt, all of us. The chains crush us, but it only kills the Black among us.

I have been fascinated by this case since I was a little boy, memorizing the names of the three because I thought it was important and I didn't want them to be forgotten.

Three young men, and thousands more.