60 years ago - the rights of Black American have improved but are in danger of reverting back
22 June 2024
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This essay is based on the blog of historian Heather Cox Richardson:
Sixty years ago today, on June 21, 1964, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman mailed a postcard to his parents in New York City. He had arrived in Meridian, Mississippi, the day before to work with Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old former New York social worker, and James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black man from Meridian, to register Black voters in what became known as Freedom Summer.
“Dear Mom and Dad,” Goodman wrote. “I have arrived safely in Meridian Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”
Mississippi had become a focal point for voter registration because fewer than 7% of Black Mississippians were registered, but members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, dedicated to preserving segregation and to keeping Black people from voting, intended to stop the people challenging their power. They had come to loathe Schwerner— like Goodman, a Jewish man— who along with his wife, Rita, had taken over the field office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Meridian and had begun grassroots organizing.
At meetings, Ku Klux Klan members routinely talked about killing Schwerner, but without authorization from the Klan’s state leader, Sam Bowers, they held off. Several weeks before Goodman arrived in Mississippi, they got that authorization.
More here
See also:
When the KKK Murdered My Childhood Friend
When the Ku Klux Klan murdered my protector, it made me see the world differently.
* * *
Sixty years after the Freedom Summer murders, America still wrestles with bullies — a rise in hate crimes targeting people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants, Jews, and Muslims — new laws restricting the right to vote, banning books, and stripping Americans of reproductive freedoms — leaders who insult and demean people with disabilities, women, and trans kids. Source.
If you think this election will make no difference in the rights of Black Americans, you are not paying attention.
My related essays:
How this election will affect Black Americans, 20 June 2024
Passing a new voting rights act to deal with our shameful history on African-American voter suppression, 7 March 2024
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