As Clifton DeBerry, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president in 1964, pointed out in a statement issued immediately after the murders, the white-supremacist system known as Jim Crow included not only the Klan and White Citizens Council but state and local officials at every level too.

A local cop set up the murders by arresting the three men—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—and holding them in jail until the KKK death squad could get in place. After he released them, the same cop led two carloads of Klansmen in chasing down the civil rights workers and killing them on a dark Mississippi road.

The FBI in the state had been told of the arrest of the three men by organizers of the Freedom Summer campaign, who expressed concern for their safety and asked for government intervention. The federal cops did nothing.

As DeBerry stated in 1964, the defenders of racist segregation could not be moved by moral arguments. He called on the Johnson administration to use government force in “sufficient magnitude” to protect Blacks and civil rights workers in Mississippi.

Johnson, often portrayed as a liberal icon, had no intention of rocking the boat with his fellow Dixiecrats, as most southern Democrats then called themselves. The Democratic Party was the majority party in the country and administered the racist segregation regime in the south. As Malcolm X often counseled young civil rights fighters, “A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.”

The murder of the three civil rights workers was the latest in a long list of crimes against Blacks in Mississippi to which the federal government turned a blind eye. When dredging crews combed the waters around Philadelphia, Mississippi, looking for Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, they found several corpses of Black men.

For decades these murderers carried on with their lives into old age right in the communities where they committed their crimes. Their impunity rested on naked terror and federal government complicity. They often publicly boasted of their heinous acts, as did Byron de la Beckwith, convicted some 30 years after killing in 1963 NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers.

The killers of 14-year-old Emett Till sold the story of their crime to a major magazine. They were acquitted by an all-white jury. When Till’s mother wrote President Dwight Eisenhower asking for the federal government to intervene, the Republican president didn’t even bother to acknowledge receipt of her letter.

Prosecutors claim that a 3,000-page transcript of the 1967 trial of some of the Klansmen involved in the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner on the lesser charge of violation of their civil rights is critical evidence in the decision to finally bring murder charges. But there is no new evidence! Federal authorities have known all along who the perpetrators were. Save for the persistent quest for justice by family members and protests by civil right groups demanding the reopening of the case, Killen would still be a free man.

The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner and the inaction of the Johnson administration as the civil rights movement was blooming served as catalysts for a broader mass radicalization of students and other youth in the United States and deeply effected others around the world. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner became household names to millions. Their courageous actions won thousands of youth, Black and white, to back the fight for Black rights—a decades-long mobilization led by Black workers and farmers.

The movement that overthrew Jim Crow had elements of a social revolution. It smashed the system that, through lynch mob terror, had enforced near peonage conditions on Blacks in large sections of the former southern slavocracy in the decades after the Civil War. Through the same brutal methods, Jim Crow enforced legal segregation and second-class status for Blacks for nearly a century.

The civil rights movement resulted in profound changes in the conditions and consciousness of the working class in the United States. It laid the basis for a broader unity of all working people in their fight against exploitation. It was under the pressure of this powerful social movement that Social Security was strengthened for all. The federal government’s moves to establish disability insurance, index Social Security for inflation, and establish Medicare and Medicaid, were all byproducts of this mass proletarian movement in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s.

It takes such a movement, with revolutionary potential, to wrest long-lasting gains from the ruling class. But under capitalism, any reforms are eroded over time. While legal segregation is buried for good, racism remains necessary for the profit system. It can only be eliminated through a social revolution, wresting power from the hands of the exploiters, and building a society based not on profit and dog-eat-dog divisions, but on human solidarity—a socialist society.

Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman are working-class heroes. Their efforts, along with those of thousands of others who fought and died in the struggle against Jim Crow, helped bring one step closer prospects for such a social revolution. We point clearly to the injustice of the state of Mississippi moving 40 years after the crime to indict the Klansman who orchestrated their murders. At the same time, we join with R.C. Howard and others in demanding that Killen be swiftly convicted and that all of his accomplices be brought to justice—“buried in prison” for their heinous crimes.
 
 
Related articles:
40 years later: Mississippi Klansman charged for civil rights workers’ murder
SWP in 1964: ‘Federal troops to Mississippi!’
U.S. gov’t inaction encouraged lynchings in Mississippi  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home