Mississippi And The Rest of The Country's Still Burning
57 years after the murders of three civil rights workers, America is still mired in racial prejudice.
Warning: This essay includes disturbing content.
It’s sad to say, but it wasn’t surprising that three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
The three young men knew the risks they were taking in attempting to register Black voters in the Deep South. Anyone trying to establish equal rights for People of Color were seen as outside agitators who didn’t understand that God had created non-Whites to be subservient to their Caucasian betters. Anyone who disrupted the “natural order of things” was seen as a threat to be cowed into silence and inaction, or neutralized.
Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were arrested for speeding outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, jailed, and held for several hours. When they were released, they may have momentarily breathed a sigh of relief. Being followed out of town by the police probably seemed a normal precaution.
But when the police were joined by other, non-police cars, they surely knew that they were in trouble. And when their car was stopped again by police, they had to fear that this stop would end with more than a short stint in jail.
And so it did.
The three disappeared. Their car was found three days later in a swamp.
Their bodies were not discovered until two months later, when an anonymous phone tip led the FBI and other authorities to an earthen dam where the three men’s bodies had been buried.
In this days when some try to make a martyr of an insurrectionist who was killed after invading and desecrating the US Capitol, it is important to remember this country’s death toll for freedom and equal opportunity contains the names of many legitimate martyrs. People who took the risk to ensure that everyone in America would have the equal right to vote.
Many have died so that Black people would not be subjected to poll taxes, counting jellybeans in a jar, reading the Declaration of Independence, and other insidious methods used to disenfranchise would-be Black voters, not to mention general terror and intimidation.
57 years later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been gutted, and states all across America are trying to make it harder for Black and poor people to vote because they don’t vote with a minority party. That minority party has adopted totalitarian methods to stifle equal voting opportunities, and if they are allowed to continue, they will overturn every election that does not favor their party.
There must be action. Whether it’s the dismantling of the Senate filibuster, an Executive Order, a Supreme Court decision, or a combination of these and other steps, something must be done and with extreme speed.
Otherwise, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, Dr. King, Viola Liuzzo, Medgar Evers, James Reeb, and thousands of other died in vain.
I don’t want their blood on my hands or conscience.
Do you?