Two Jews and a Black
LESTER, JULIUS
Two Jews and a Black We Are Not Afraid by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray Macmillan, 198a 500 pp, $2Z50 Reviewed by Julius Lester Time heals all wounds, the cliche says. That is not so. Nor should...
...An inextricable part of that story is the story of the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney...
...For most white students, it was a major revelation that black Americans did not have the civil rights they, as whites, took for granted...
...Chaney did not finish high school and became a plasterer like his father...
...We Are Mot Afraid does not seek to explain...
...Three young men...
...As Rita Schwerner said to the press on June 24, 1964, "I suggest that if Mr...
...It was the summer when white and black youth went into the state of Mississippi with all the faith of Joshua outside the walls of Jericho...
...Chaney was suspended from school for wearing a T-shirt with the letters N-A-A-C-P on it...
...Finally, we need to make a part of ourselves the stark brutality and senselessness of the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, Nowhere is that more apparent than in the final paragraph of We Are Mot Afraid...
...I was a mere child of 25 as I prepared to go to Mississippi that summer to fight for freedom and justice and the American way...
...Their heroism is evident, but the authors do not dehumanize them by making them into heroes...
...But the paradox is that nothing less than such a conviction about the goodness and Tightness of the cause, as well as one's own goodness and feelings of invulnerability would be sufficient for the task at hand...
...Their car was intercepted by local Klansmen and the deputy sheriff...
...Michael Schwerner was a 24-year-old organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who, with his wife, Rita, had been organizing in Meridian, Mississippi since January, 1964...
...The achievement represented by We Are Mot Afraid is that it is a first-rate account of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi...
...That is the wound that will never heal, that must not heal because if we, as individuals and a nation, permit the wound called Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney to heal, then, someone else will be murdered because of the insane need of others to feel superior...
...Chaney, a native Negro Missis-sippian, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, this case, like many before it, would have gone unnoticed...
...Andrew Goodman was 20, one of the almost 1,000 summer volunteers who responded to the siren call of Freedom Summer...
...How many Jews remember that during the forty-four days the federal government searched for the bodies of the three civil rights workers, the bodies of three murdered black men were found in Mississippi rivers, one of them a black teenager whose remains have never been identified...
...It is glorious because it offers you the opportunity to be more than flesh and blood...
...The word spread throughout northern college campuses and students responded...
...It merely tells the story, and more than any book I know, We Are Mot Afraid presents a narrative history of the civil rights movement that comes as close to putting the reality of that time on paper as is perhaps possible...
...The second of five children, he grew up poor in Meridian, Mississippi...
...Many of these white college students responded with shock, shame and outrage and the desire to do something...
...But before we can be healed, we must recognize and acknowledge that we are in pain...
...Two were Jews and one, black...
...James Earl Chaney was a local black man who had just turned 21 on May 30, 1964, and had been working for CORE in Meridian since mid-1963...
...It was the late Allard Lowenstein, activist and later congressman (D-NY) who conceived the idea of a Mississippi Summer Project...
...The book does so by telling the story in as much detail as the authors were able to uncover...
...The left fist of Andrew Goodman was clenched tightly around a hard ball of clay...
...In fact, it is quite painful and that is why it must be read...
...Yet, honesty requires that the question be asked: How many Jews remember Herbert Lee, Lewis Allen or Jimmy Lee Jackson...
...Constitution referred to them...
...The story is told of the very earnest woman who approached folk singer Woody Guthrie and asked him if he would sing at a benefit for her particular organization...
...June 21, 1964...
...The words are those of Lawrence Rainey, sheriff of Neshoba County that June of 1964, who was tried and acquitted as a conspirator in the murders: "If nobody had paid those boys any mind, they'd have come and gone and they wouldn't have meant a thing, nothing, nothing at all...
...Summer, 1964...
...It offers you the chance to belong to a cause and be bigger than life...
...They were merely three young men who cared enough that their humanity demanded that they commit themselves to the ideal of freedom and justice for all...
...Having arrived in Meridian from the training session in Oxford, Ohio the night before, Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney drove 35 miles to the all-black community of Longdale where a church had been burned the week before and Ku Klux Klan members had assaulted church members...
...Goodman was the middle of three sons from a financially secure, politically progressive Jewish milieu in New York City...
...we need to be taken deep within the pain of the murder of those three young men, and maybe, just maybe it will enable us to understand that the Mississippi of 1964 was not an aberration of American history and that the attitudes which created the Mississippi of 1964 remain a part of our society...
...All of us who were knowledgeable about the South knew that somebody was going to die that summer...
...The number of black voters had not increased...
...It is difficult to be involved in a movement that is doing good— ending segregation, fighting for the black right to vote—without believing that you yourself are good...
...The three civil rights workers could not have known that the fire had been set as a way to bait Schwerner away from Meridian and into Klan-dominated Neshoba County...
...The murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney are just such a wound, a wound with the power to heal...
...It's a good cause," she added...
...Driving away from the site of the burned church, the three civil rights workers were arrested and taken to jail in the town of Philadelphia...
...And it is this belief in the goodness and Tightness of the cause as well as one's own goodness that leads you to risk your life while never really believing you might lose that life...
...But there are events we must refuse to understand because, sometimes, to understand means the acceptance of evil...
...Michael Schwerner was the younger of two sons and grew up in suburban Westchester County...
...The authors do not romanticize If it had been "inevitable" that white summer volunteers would meet with violence in Mississippi—that Goodman and Schwerner, or some other northern whites, had to suffer so that Mississippi blacks could be free—it was equally preordained that their privileged and articulate parents would carry the cause to the American public Like the student volunteers who in the aftermath of the disappearance found it difficult to extricate themselves from going to Mississippi, the parents of the missing men had little freedom over how they would react to their loss...
...At the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that August, the MFDP would challenge the credentials of the regular Democratic Party organization in the state and demand to be seated in its stead as being more representative of the people of Mississippi...
...His mother worked as a domestic, earning $1.50 a day until she took a job as a lunchroom helper at a white school, which paid 86.00 a week, but was closer to home...
...Forty-four days later, FBI agents using a bulldozer and excavating equipment found the bodies of the three...
...We Are Not Afraid can help us to do that, if we take the risk...
...Three young men...
...It is one of the few books that belongs in that category of "must reading...
...Perhaps that is because we try to understand, and sometimes to understand something is to make it acceptable...
...They, too, found themselves captive to events beyond their control...
...Chaney's cousin had been murdered by whites for complaining about not being paid for a job he'd done...
...There are some wounds from which we never wholly recover...
...There are wounds from which a trickle of blood always flows...
...At the last moment, he changed his mind as Mickey Schwerner persuaded him to spend the summer organizing in and around Meridian...
...Through contacts with local black leaders throughout the state, Moses learned that change could come to Mississippi only when blacks could vote...
...Shortly after midnight, they were shot and killed and their bodies buried 14 feet deep in a 20-foot earthen dam...
...We simply did not know who it would be, or when, or where, but we knew and we were afraid...
...It is not an easy book to read...
...While the focus of the book is the murder of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, the book is really the story of the civil rights movement from 1960 through the 1964 Democratic convention...
...This is true for individuals...
...There's the danger...
...Two went to college, where Goodman developed an interest in theater and Schwerner in social work...
...FROM WE ARE NOT AFRAID Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, or sensationalize their story...
...While his family environment might not have been as intensely political as Goodman's, his parents, too, were active in liberal politics...
...The seed of our salvation can be watered only by tears of mourning...
...Formally registering blacks of voting age in such a party would demonstrate the willingness of blacks to register and vote if given the opportunity, and would dramatize their systematic and deliberate exclusion from the regular Democratic Party of the state...
...On the chance that their sons were alive, the parents were compelled to plead for their rescue, and allowing for the possibility that they were dead, the parents were obliged to uphold the values they died for...
...Sunday...
...It should also be true for nations, though nations seldom recognize that they even have wounds...
...Their cruel murders are even more cruel in retrospect...
...Originally he was to have spent that summer organizing a leatherworking cooperative in Canton, Mississippi...
...There are experiences of such horror that afterwards, we do not know how to believe they have happened, do not want to believe that they could have happened, and finally, something in us will not admit to ourselves the full horror and absurdity of it...
...A movement for social and political change is simultaneously dangerous and glorious...
...By early 1964, civil rights workers had been beaten and jailed, shot at, shot and two local Mississippians had been killed...
...Guthrie responded, "Lady, I don't know of any bad ones...
...Nor should it be...
...The environment in which Chaney grew was as politically repressive as that of Goodman and Schwerner was progressive...
...Freedom Summer...
...We need to experience the pain of that time...
...In these days when black anti-Semitism is threatening to become fashionable, many Jews hold up the martyrdom of Goodman and Schwerner as the ultimate and irrefutable proof of Jewish goodness...
...There was little place in this scenario for private grief...
...Between 10 and 11 that night, they were released and drove away toward Meridian and safety...
...It does not endeavor to understand murderers or murder...
...What is remarkable about Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney is how ordinary and representative they were for their ages and their time...
...Seth Cagin and Philip Dray tell that part of the story by fitting together the stories of the murderers, the FBI men and the Justice Department officials who did the investigating, and the civil rights workers such as Bob Moses who felt responsible for acts they had not committed...
...In the autumn of 1960, a quiet young black man named Robert Parrish Moses went to Mississippi to investigate how the nascent civil rights movement could effect change there...
...Chaney's step-grandfather had been murdered for refusing to sell his dairy farm to a white man...
...James Chaney was typical of his milieu, too...
...The idea was that hundreds, maybe thousands of northern college students would be brought into the state to organize blacks into a separate political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party...
...Julius Lester teaches in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachu-setts/Amherst He is the author of Lovesong Becoming a Jew...
...One can certainly understand Jewish hurt and anger at the unwillingness of all too many blacks to honor the memories of Goodman and Schwerner, the outrage one feels as a Jew when all too many blacks seem to segregate their feelings of sorrow and mark them "Only Blacks Allowed...
...Mississippi was legendary for its brutality, its willingness and readiness to lynch blacks who even looked like they were thinking that anything in the U.S...
Vol. 13 • November 1988 • No. 8
