James Chaney Quotes

No one," Ben noted, "would have known about James Chaney if he had been by himself.

Some years ago, after the disappearance of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwirner in Mississippi, some friends of mine were dragging the rivers for their bodies. This one wasn’t Schwirner. This one wasn’t Goodman. This one wasn’t Chaney. Then, as Dave Dennis tells it, “It suddenly struck us—what difference did it make that it wasn’t them? What are these bodies doing in the river?” That was nineteen years ago. The questions has not been answered, and I dare you to go digging in the bayou. —James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985

Hollywood High School was flipping from the storied institute of legend to the high school of the barrio. Or, as CNN put it in a series of rave reviews for the “predominantly Latino” school: “Hollywood High Now a Diverse High School.” Hollywood High alumni include Cher, Carol Burnett, Lon Chaney, James Garner, Linda Evans, John Huston, Judy Garland, Ricky Nelson, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Ritter, Mickey Rooney, Lana Turner, and Fay Wray, among many others. By the mid-2000s, Hollywood High was more than 70 percent Hispanic,5 and students were less likely to be getting publicity shots than mug shots. Today the school is mostly famous for its stabbings, shootings, child molestations, thefts, and graffiti.6 Around 1990, a California TV producer trying to enroll a German exchange student in a Los Angeles high school asked the principal at Fairfax High if a foreign exchange student would be better served by Fairfax or Hollywood High. Without looking up, the principal replied, “Well, 90% of my students can speak English, and we haven’t had a shooting here in 5 years.

I am one of seven women—three of us white—in the office of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality); at a joint meeting with SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commit- tee). More than twenty men, black and white, are present, run- ning the meeting. Three civil-rights workers—one black man and two white men—have disappeared in Mississippi, and the groups have met over this crisis. (The lynched bodies of the three men—James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—are later found, tortured to death.) Meanwhile, the FBI, local police, and the National Guard have been dredging lakes and rivers in search of the bodies. During the search, the mutilated parts of an estimated seventeen different human bodies are found. All of us in the New York office are in a state of shock. As word filters in about the. difficulty of identifying mutilated bodies long decomposed, we also learn that all but one of the unidentified bodies are female. A male CORE leader mutters, in a state of fury, ““There’s been a whole goddamned lynching we never even knew about. There’s been some brother disappeared who never even got reported.” My brain goes spinning. Have I heard correctly? Did he mean what I think he meant? If so, is it my racism showing itself in that I am appalled? Finally, I hazard a tentative question. Why one lynching? What about the sixteen unidentified female bodies? What about - Absolute silence. The men in the room, black and white, stare at me. The women in the room, black and white, stare at the floor. Then the answer comes, in a tone of impatience, as if I were politically retarded. "Those were obviously sex murders. Those weren't political." I fall silent.

stole. Reagan launched his presidential candidacy at Philadelphia, Mississippi, sixteen years and three miles from where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been found murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. “I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan said, and the Republican platform promised to protect the private segregation academies organized to prevent desegregation.[

While they were in training for the perilous mission, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were brutally murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Recognizing the doubts and fears that were tearing at the young people, Moses called them together and told them that anyone who decided not to go on would not be considered a coward. To those who chose to continue, all he could promise was that he would be at their side. No one withdrew. Mississippi Freedom Summer was the culmination of the civil rights struggle in the South, forcing the U.S. Congress to write into law the rights that grassroots activists had already won on the ground.