Andrew goodman

Michael schwerner
Edgar ray killen
I am 22 years old and the wife of Michael H. Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers who have been missing in or near Philadelphia, Mississippi, since.

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Rita Schwerner Bender

When her husband was murdered during Freedom Summer in 1964 in Mississippi, Rita Levant Schwerner Bender used the ensuing media attention to focus the public’s awareness on the importance of civil rights. Bender and her first husband, Michael Schwerner, shared a passion for the civil rights movement and moved to Mississippi in 1964 to register Black voters. During training for Freedom Summer, Michael Schwerner and two other volunteers, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were murdered by the KKK. In a statement, Bender, widowed at 22, pointed out that the media attention was due entirely to the fact that her husband and Andrew Goodman were white, calling out the fact that murders of African Americans regularly went unremarked on throughout the South. Just months later, she participated in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention, protesting the lack of representation for Black voters. Bender graduated from Rutgers School of Law in 1968 and worked with the ACLU for several years before opening a family law practice speci

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Rita Schwerner Bender

Civil rights activist and lawyer (born 1942)

Rita Schwerner Bender (née Levant; born 1942) is an American civil rights activist and lawyer. She and her first husband, Michael Schwerner, participated in the Freedom Summer of 1964, where Michael was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. As his young widow, she drew national attention for her commentary on racial prejudice in the United States, delivered at a press conference after her husband went missing. After the Civil Rights Movement, Schwerner became an attorney,^[1] practicing family law in Washington state. She continues to advocate for civil rights through her law practice and public presentations.

Early life

Rita Levant and Michael Schwerner both grew up in New York City.^[2] They married when she was 20 and he was 22.^[3]

Activism

The Schwerners became active in the civil rights movement first in the north; she and Michael were both arrested at a civil rights protest in Baltimore in July 1963.^[4]

Freedom Summer and death of Michael Schwerner

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Testimony of Rita L. Schwerner

1964

During the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 over a thousand white college students from the North traveled South to challenge racial segregation and the dis-enfranchisement of black voters. On June 21, 1964, at the start of the Freedom Summer, a young black Mississippian, James Chaney, and two whites from the North, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, drove to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to look into the bombing of a black church. They never returned, and pleas to the Justice Department to take immediate action were met with coldness. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been arrested by local police, then released. In a plan participated in by the sheriff and deputy sheriff of the county, they were then followed by a group of white men who blockaded their car, took them to a deserted farm, beat them with chains, shot them to death, and buried their bodies. Not until forty-four days after their arrest were the bodies of the three young men found. Schwerner's wife, Rita, made this statement¹ before the discovery of the three bodies.