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Michael Schwerner

1939–1964 · 25 years Specialist

A Queens social worker who chose the most dangerous county in Mississippi

Portrait of Michael Schwerner — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Schwerner, known to friends as Mickey, grew up in Pelham, New York, the son of a businessman and a high school science teacher. He studied rural sociology at Cornell after abandoning plans for veterinary medicine, then entered Columbia's School of Social Work and took a job running a settlement house on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he led the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. In 1963 he helped organize a desegregation campaign at a segregated amusement park in Maryland. He and his wife, Rita, a fellow activist he had married in 1962, volunteered to move to Mississippi in January 1964, requesting the most dangerous posting CORE had: Meridian, in the heart of Klan-dominated Neshoba County.

In Meridian, Schwerner and Rita ran a community center and helped build the largest Freedom School in the state. James Chaney, a local Black CORE organizer, became his closest partner and the bridge to Neshoba County's Black churches. On May 25, 1964, the two visited Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale about hosting a Freedom School there, and on June 16 the Klan burned the church to draw them back. They returned on June 21 with Andrew Goodman, a volunteer on his first full day in the state, to investigate the fire. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price arrested them outside Philadelphia, held them for hours, then released them after dark into a Klan ambush. All three were shot on a rural road and buried in an earthen dam, found 44 days later after a search that used 400 Navy sailors.

No one was ever convicted of murdering Michael Schwerner. Mississippi refused to prosecute the killings as murder, so the federal government charged the case in 1967 under an 1870 Reconstruction-era conspiracy statute, the only law that reached it. Seven men were convicted, including Deputy Price and Klan leader Sam Bowers, on sentences that ran three to ten years, and none served more than six. Edgar Ray Killen, identified by witnesses as the man who organized the ambush, went free on a hung jury. It also mattered, uncomfortably, that two of the three victims were white New Yorkers: the disappearance drew hundreds of FBI agents and four hundred Navy sailors within days, in a state where Black Mississippians had been killed without that response for years before Schwerner arrived.

Rita Schwerner became a civil rights lawyer and spent decades demanding a state prosecution, testifying at the 2005 trial that finally convicted Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter, forty-one years to the day after the murders. Killen died in prison in January 2018. In November 2014, President Obama posthumously awarded Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman the Presidential Medal of Freedom together. Pelham renamed a stretch of road Michael Schwerner Way in 2008. Historians and journalists routinely place the three names side by side, and the murders are cited alongside that Freedom Summer's other violence as part of what pushed Congress toward the Voting Rights Act the following year.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Michael Schwerner's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Meridian community center mission
Built with Rita Schwerner as a hub for Black residents 1964
Meridian Freedom School mission
Grew into the largest Freedom School in the state 1964
United States v. Price case
Supreme Court case, arising from the murder investigation, that upheld federal jurisdiction over the killings 1966

Life in brief

with age at each point

November 6, 1939 aged 0 Born in Pelham, New York
1961 aged ~22 Enrolls at Columbia University School of Social Work
1962 aged ~23 Marries Rita Levant
1963 aged ~24 Leads Downtown CORE and helps organize the Gwynn Oak desegregation campaign
January 21, 1964 aged 24 Moves to Meridian, Mississippi, to organize for CORE
June 21, 1964 aged 24 Murdered with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman near Philadelphia, Mississippi
August 4, 1964 aged 24 Bodies found in an earthen dam after a 44-day search
1967 aged ~28 Federal trial convicts seven men under an 1870 civil rights statute
June 21, 2005 aged 65 Edgar Ray Killen convicted of manslaughter, 41 years to the day