Michael Schwerner

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Michael Schwerner

Michael Schwerner (November 6, 1939 – June 21, 1964), called Mickey by friends and colleagues, was a CORE field worker killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by the Ku Klux Klan in response to the civil-rights work he coordinated, which included promoting registration to vote among Mississippi African Americans.

Born and raised in New York, he attended Michigan State University, originally intending to become a veterinarian. He transferred to Cornell University, however, and switched his major to sociology, going on after graduation to the School of Social Work at Columbia University. While an undergraduate at Cornell, he integrated the school's chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity.

His passionate dedication to civil rights made him a marked man in Mississippi, and he had been a long-sought target of the Klan.

Schwerner's murder occurred near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he and fellow workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were undertaking field work for the Congress for Racial Equality.

The three (Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman) were initially arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for an alleged traffic violation and taken to the jail in Neshoba County. They were released that evening and on the way back to Meridian were stopped by two carloads of KKK members on a remote rural road. The men approached their car and then shot and killed Schwerner, then Goodman, and finally Chaney.

Their bodies remained undiscovered for nearly two months; in the meantime, the case of the missing civil-rights workers became a major national story. However, Schwerner's widow, Rita, who was herself involved in CORE, publicly expressed indignation at the way the story was handled, saying that she believed if only Chaney (who was black) were missing and not two white men along with him, the case would not have received nearly as much attention.

The film Mississippi Burning is loosely based on the murders and ensuing FBI investigation (as is the TV-movie Attack on Terror), and the events leading up to the deaths of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were dramatised in Murder in Mississippi.

Journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger had written extensively about the case for many years. Mitchell, who had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in several other high profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham Church Bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer, developed new evidence, found new witnesses, and pressured the State to take action. Barry Bradford, an Illinois high school teacher, later famous for helping clear the name of Civil Rights martyr Clyde Kennard, and three students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel joined Mutchell's efforts. Their documentary, produced for the National History Day contest presented important new evidence and compelling reasons for reopening the case. They also obtained an interview with Edgar Ray Killen which helped convince the State to reinvestigate. Mitchell was able to determine the identity of "Mr. X" the mystery informer who had helped the FBI discover the bodies and smash the conspiracy of the Klan in 1964, in part using evidence developed by Bradford and the students.

On January 7, 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, an outspoken white supremacist nicknamed "Preacher," pleaded "Not Guilty" to Schwerner's murder, but was found guilty of manslaughter on June 21, 2005.