MURDER IN MISSISSIPPI AND PENNSYLVANIA

Chaney

Schwerner

Goodman

More in the continuing saga of the civil rights movement in the United States. Forty seven years ago on this day, in 1964, three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippt by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The killing of the three men occurred shortly after midnight on June 21, 1964, when they went to investigate the burning of a church that supported civil rights activity. James Chaney was a local Freedom Movement activist in Meridian, Michael Schwerner was a CORE organizer from New York, and Andrew Goodman, also from New York, was a Freedom Summer volunteer. The three men had just finished week-long training on the campus of Western College for Women (now part of Miami University), in Oxford, Ohio, regarding strategies on how to register blacks to vote.

The following You Tube entry is well worth a look. (follow on from part 1)

How does a country, founded on the concept of liberty of the subject, breed such monstrous bigotry? How long must it take to deal with the perpetrators of such malevolence? It is not good enough to blame the justice system. It seems clear that it is the responsibility of the people who are meant to enforce the law and who should abide by the rule of law. Is it the democratically elected individuals, who seek to bury the truth and shield themselves from exposure, who are the persons responsible? Or is it the people who elected them, knowing they would bury the truth and attempt to shield them all from exposure?

The spectre of that malevolence seems once again to be rearing its head in Northern Ireland. Why did we think those 'troubles' were at an end? It was also on this day 21st June 1877 that another sad chapter in America's history of misguided abuse of power took place. Ten Irish immigrants, labeled The Molly Maguires, were hanged at the Schuylkill County and Carbon County, Pennsylvania prisons.

After one of the trials, a Carbon County judge, John P. Lavelle, stated: The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.

Was it all just about unions or is there something deeper going on? State Sovereignty, if the state values the rule of law, should never be surrendered, but then, if it does not value the rule of law, what does sovereignty matter? In the case of Mississippi in 1964 and Pennsylvania in 1877 it amounted to precious little.