FREEDOM SUMMER
The Right To Vote cannot be taken for granted. Even today there are attacks being made on the most basic of rights. Do not forget the sacrifice these and other people made to help preserve this right. Register and vote!
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Mississippi, 1964:
Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney had only just begun working on the Freedom Summer campaign to register black Mississippians to vote when they suddenly disappeared.
Schwerner and Goodman were two Jewish men from New York—they had been there less than a week—and Chaney was a local black activist. They had just finished investigating the bombing of a nearby church when they were taken into custody under false pretenses, and never again seen by their fellow volunteers.
The disappearance of these three men sparked national outrage, and the FBI converged on Mississippi to investigate. They discovered that on June 21, 1964, immediately upon being released from custody, the young activists had been brutally beaten and murdered by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob. The FBI's investigation led to the first successful federal prosecution of a civil rights case in Mississippi. |
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Unfortunately our Supreme Court and politicians are beginning to dismantle or otherwise impede voting rights. The KKK and blatant racism may be a shadow of the past, but voting rights discrimination is alive and well today.
ReplyDeleteThe hoods of the Klan have been exchanged for the robes of the courts but the people behind them are the same.
DeleteIt was a very shameful time in the long, sordid history of racial hatred in America for sure.
ReplyDeleteI think that those in the GOP today who are working desperately to restrict voting rights in states they govern are every bit as bad as the Klukkers. Like the Klukkers, they seem to lack a conscience.
Was it only 50 years ago? It seems much longer than that.
ReplyDeleteI was seven years old. I'm sure I've told this story before but my dad worked at the federal building downtown Kansas City. We went one Saturday to pick something up and when we entered the lobby of the building I ran towards the water fountain and my dad said, "no, don't use that one, use the one on the other side". I didn't understand then, but I do know.
ReplyDelete