GUEST ROOM | Unfinished Campus Business: Memorializing Three Young People Who Gave Their Lives for the Right to Vote |
Bill Schechter ’68 is the author of Bringing History Home: A Teachers Quest To Make The Past Matter and was a high school teacher for over three decades. He can be contacted at schech@rcn.com.
“We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” (Magnolia)
61 years ago, in 1964, Cornell alum Michael Schwerner ’61, along with two fellow civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman (son of two Cornell alums) and James Chaney, a native son of the south, travelled from Meridian, Mississippi to the town of Philadelphia to investigate the burning of a Black church. They were participants in the Freedom Summer organizing campaign. On their night-time return to Meridian, they were stopped by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who had been tipped off by the local sheriff, severely beaten and shot to death. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a nationwide search to find their bodies. Sadly, it took their brutal murders to enable Congressional........