Aug. 9, 1964 - Thousands of Negro and white mourners of varied faiths attended separate services in New York today for two white civil rights workers slain last June in Mississippi. (Pictured below are the mothers of the three young men leaving the service for Andrew Goodman.)
Eulogists described Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, as “proud and self-accepting” and looked on them as “martyrs to the cause of civil rights.”
The bodies of the two New Yorkers were flown home from near Philadelphia, Miss., where they were found last Tuesday, buried deep in a dam along with the body of a Negro companion — James Chaney, 21, of Meridian, Miss.
They were shot to death shortly after their arrival last June 21 in Mississippi to work on a Negro voter registration drive.
One eulogist said of them:
“They had pledged themselves to a way of nonviolence. They learned how to receive blows, not how to inflict them.”
The two building in which the services were held — a hall operated by the Ethical Culture Society for Goodman and the Interfaith Community Church for Schwerner — were filled to capacity, and hundreds of persons stood outside chanting the civil rights motto, “We shall overcome.”
Ralph Engelman, a close friend of Goodman’s at Queens College, told the mourners: “Andy taught us an old truth: none is free until all are free — a part of me died with Andy.”
At the Schwerner service, James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, said Schwerner possessed an air of “gentleness, compassion, and quality.”
To John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “the question is not who killed, Mickey, Andy, and James, but what killed” the three.
“Apathy,” he said.
After the first service, the casket bearing Goodman’s body was taken from the hall for private burial at Mount Judah Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Schwerner was honored at a service several hours later at the Community Church as his body lay in a hospital awaiting an autopsy tomorrow.
Support this project at patreon.com/realtime1960s
Comments