Word: schwerner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Among the staff for that indoctrination course were Michael Schwerner, 24, and James Chancy, 21. "Mickey" Schwerner, son of a Pelham, N.Y., wig manufacturer, was a Cornell graduate in 1961, a social worker on New York's Lower East Side before joining the Congress of Racial Equality two years ago. Last January, Schwerner and his wife Rita, 22, went South, opened a Negro community center in Meridian, Miss. It included a 10,000-book library donated by Northern students. Rita taught reading and citizenship, instructed Negro women in how to work sewing machines, while Mickey worked on Negro vote...
Chancy was one of Schwerner's most helpful aides. He was a slender Meridian Negro lad who had dropped out of high school as a sophomore, became a plasterer, eventually joined CORE. When COFO called for volunteer instructors for the Ohio training course, Chancy went with Schwerner...
...Saturday, June 20, their week-long Oxford orientation course completed, Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman and five other young civil rights workers got into a CORE-owned blue station wagon to drive to Meridian. They had scheduled their trip so as to avoid driving through Deep Dixie after dark, always a perilous proposition for integration workers in such states as Alabama and Mississippi. As they passed through Birmingham, Ala., a car loaded with white teenagers pulled alongside, screamed "Nigger lover!" at a white girl student sitting next to Chaney in the station wagon...
Before leaving town, they dropped by the COFO office. Schwerner told an aide to call the FBI if he was not back by 4:30 that afternoon. Threats had become a commonplace in his life, but in recent weeks they had seemed even more ominous. Besides, he knew that the license number of the station wagon had been circulated by the area's Citizens Council. Chaney had the car's tank filled with gasoline before leaving Meridian; the three workers did not want to make any unnecessary stops in dangerous territory...
...drove a mile down the road to the farmhouse of Junior Roosevelt Cole, 58, a Negro and lay leader of the church, who told them that on the night of the fire he was dragged from his car in the churchyard and clubbed unconscious by a mob of whites. Schwerner asked Cole to come to Meridian Tuesday. "We want to get this fire business straightened out," Schwerner told him. "We want to stop all this...