An important anniversary...
Meteor Blades reminds us that sometime in the next few hours falls the 43rd anniversary of the murder of three young civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. As I posted in comments,
I was born early in the morning...June 22, 1964. My parents were strong supporters of civil rights, and my mom, when I followed in her shoes as a teenage radical (filed a Title IX suit at 14 and was arrested for the first time protesting nukes at 19) always asserted that one of the souls of the Neshoba Three passed through my little baby body that night.
Michael Schwerner, a 24-year old from Brooklyn, New York, James Chaney, a 21-year old voting rights acivist from Meridian, Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old anthropology student from New York all were shot in the head and their bodies buried with a backhoe sometime after 11pm, June 21, 1964. Both Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish; Chaney was African-American.
Frankly, I'm not all that sure so much has changed in 43 years, any more than it had the nearly 80 years from when my gr-gr-uncle was lynched by an anti-Indian mob in Norridgewock, Maine, for just, well, breathing while Indian. We have a long way to go. Hopefully by the time I reach 86, things will have improved dramatically.
Comments
well, then, happy birthday, at least. Heck, happy solstice, too.
I sure do hope we get to that dramatic improvement.
Not terribly optimistic either.
But hanging on to the real stories is really important. So thanks for that.
Neshoba presente!
Posted by: pi | June 22, 2007 01:56 AM
The fact that fear of lynching is now non-existent, that colored drinking fountains for blacks, Mexicans, and Cherokees are gone, and that so many minorities have higher educations is cause for celebration. While white supremacy has yet to be eradicated, we are in a much stronger position to fight it than forty or eighty years ago. Acknowledging that achievement and shouldering our responsibilities now is probably a good way of honoring both the Freedom Riders and the Mississippi Freedom Summer organizers.
Posted by: Spartacus O'Neal | June 22, 2007 12:36 PM